MachineryLink

The other day I was driving and I came across a familiar scene happening in many rural areas right now. Brome hay was being baled.

An older guy was driving the 1960s John Deere tractor and two younger guys were "riding the rack," stacking bales of hay on the hayrack. It was interesting to see someone baling hay the old fashioned way -- without the help of specialized attachments for moving hay with a tractor and loader.

Riding a rack is how I spend many summer days in my youth.

Among my earliest memories involving the farm was my dad baling square bales and putting me in the driver's seat of our John Deere 4010 and telling me to keep the hay feeding into the baler while the tractor crept along at a few miles per hour. I didn't really know how to stop it (looking back that doesn't seem very safe) but I could keep the hay going into the baler.

Then when I got older it was my job to ride the rack and learn the fine art of stacking bales on the rack. Two across, one the other way, two more across and then the next row was the opposite with usually 4 or 5 rows high.

Then we took the racks back to the home place and unloaded them into the barn by electric bale elevator. Careful though, if you didn't put the bales on it perfectly square the chain would jump the track and you would get a gentle reminder from Dad about putting the bales on it straight.

By the time I was helping him in the early 1980s, my dad already had bought a round baler (Gehl 1500) to go along with square baler (New Holland 273). We usually had just one cutting, or even part of the second or third cutting of alfalfa, baled into squares.

This was a walk in the park compared to my dad's childhood as he grew up on a dairy farm (his Holstein cows become our Angus cows in the mid-1970s) where he spent all summer baling multiple cuttings in squares. I usually didn't complain much about the hot weather because I knew I only had this chore a couple times a year and not all summer long like he had.

When I got into high school, a couple neighbors hired me to help them bale hay. A foreign concept to me up to this point in my life -- I actually got paid for riding the rack.

I would help the one neighbor who still milked cows at that time and then we would in turn help his elderly uncles. One uncle would drive the International tractor running the baler, while the other brought racks out to the field. The nephew and I rode the rack.

The uncle who brought the racks out of the field had arthritis really bad and we all had to stand clear when he would bring them out to the field. Sometimes his Farmall M rear left tire and the baler's right tire would meet.

The neighbor was also a big man, probably 6'4" and well over 300 pounds. He always thought he was making the bales light. At the time, I was a skinny teenager maybe 150 pounds. Needless to say I am not now.

When I put my hay hook into the bale and could not even move the bale, he knew to make them lighter. When I could get them off the chute and struggled to get them stacked, especially the last couple of higher rows, this was the right weight, apparently.

Over the years, our square baling decreased as we just needed a few bales to grind over the winter. For many years we would just buy 50 or so square bales and this was it.

We still have the New Holland square baler, although the Gehl round baler has been replaced by several different balers, including the John Deere 535 round baler we have now. We did bale about 150 square bales a couple years back.

Now that I have two sons of my own, I think we will have to bale more in the small squares so they can ride the rack. However, I think this will have to wait a few years as they are only 4 and 8 years old.

Right now the only job they could do is steering the baler tractor, not knowing how to stop, of course.

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