Hay Season, Take 1
One of the ways we decided to make money was to sell hay from the farm. We had bought some pieces of equipment from the previous owner, which Tyler spent time learning how to work. With all our energies focused on the reception party we held in May, the grass was a bit overgrown and in sore need of its first cut. We checked our weather apps like addicts until we found our window of opportunity - four continuous days without rain.
This would be the first time for the both of us to try to cut hay. It didn’t help that we were using equipment from the 50’s that was prone to being finicky and breakdowns. Tyler spent a lot of time prior to hay season, researching for hours and watching as many youtube videos as time would allow.
The equipment we needed for the first phase, the cutting stage, was the tractor and the sickle bar. The sickle bar is a long piece of equipment with many “teeth” that work like scissors to cut the grass. We soon found out that the sickle bar was going to make Tyler work for his first hay cutting. Every fifteen minutes or so, the sickle bar would get clogged, and Tyler would have to get off the tractor and pull out the long grass that was tangled in the blades that kept it from cutting. A little later that morning a bolt snapped, and Tyler had to run to Tractor Supply twenty minutes away to get a spare part. As if that wasn’t enough, some of the “teeth” fell off because of the condition of the sickle bar, which decreased the efficiency of the cutting. There were a few more bumps in the road, which made for an incredibly frustrating and unsuccessful morning for Tyler.
After our unsuccessful morning, Tyler spent the day making modifications to the sickle bar - he replaced some of the “teeth,” oiled up the equipment, and did a few more tweaks that he hoped would remedy the issues he had the previous day. Unfortunately, the issues we faced the previous day came back with a vengeance. Tyler yet again faced obstacles that would make for a painstaking and unproductive day. It would take another morning before the hay fields got their first cut, and that was just the first stage.
For all of you who are interested, traditionally, there are four stages of hay cutting. The first is the cutting stage, during which, as the name implies, the hay is cut. Second is the tedding stage, which is the fluffing out of the cut hay on the ground, a process that helps aeration and speeds up the drying of the hay. This step is usually done on the second or third day. Next is the raking stage, where equipment rakes the loose hay into long rows, called windrows. Windrows are made right before the final stage in which the bales of hay are actually produced with the help of a baler, in the baling stage.
When we finally made it past the cutting stage, the next two stages were a lot easier. In terms of equipment, there wasn’t much that could go wrong in either the tedding or raking stage. Luckily, Tyler was able to get these done in a timely manner, after which we were faced with the final stage, baling.
The baling stage proved to be just as troublesome as the cutting stage. Again, we were using a piece of equipment that was from the 50’s, and Tyler had to keep stopping for various reasons; the twine was not tying knots, the hay was getting clogged. One time, the baler wouldn’t even start. The time that was needed to fix the baler each time it broke was adding up, and we were losing hours in the day.
Manually feeding loose hay into the baler after a bale “exploded” due to a malfunction in the twine knotting process.
Needless to say, we were both very frustrated. If this was how each hay season would be, was it going to be worth our time and effort, especially for Tyler? Realistically, how much money could we make at $3 a bale, even $4, and would we even have a market for hay? We didn’t really have the answers to those questions. Sure, when it was all said and done, we were pretty proud of ourselves for being able to accomplish such a feat; unfortunately, we couldn’t ignore or forget the frustrations we encountered either. We knew we would have to do another cutting before we could get a full sense of what hay season would require from us. Tyler also had more ideas about how we could make modifications to the equipment to avoid these problems again, and that gave us a glimmer of hope. For the time being, hard as it was, we would try our best to focus on our accomplishments and stay optimistic for next season.