WI Farm Life: Chopping Company

Yesterday was a work day in town for me but Bruce continued to get ready to chop hay. The feed in the silo bag is now gone so we need to have something to add to the TMR the cows get in the barn. Bruce spent part of the day raking windrows together and then later in the day Ed raked and Bruce chopped a small amount and fed cows. When he was chopping he realized that the small tire that helps support the header on the chopper was flat. Ed came and took that for repair this morning while Bruce fed. Bruces day started out with the torque arm on the corn silage unloader coming loose. As a general rule, anything that comes in contact with a running unloader is pretty much junk. Luckily Bruce has an extra unloader in the shed but by the time he got the broken part taken off and the new one on and then got done feeding we started milking more than an hour later than we should have. Since we were late, we skipped breakfast and went straight to dinner and then went out and chopped. Mike likes to ride anything he can and came out to the field with Bruce, riding on the platform on the open tractor like a pro. He then joined me in the cab tractor for the afternoon. As the pictures show, it's a pretty stressful day for him. He slept for a couple hours on the floor but every time I got out of the tractor I would find him on the seat when I got back.

For the farmers trying to bale dry hay this weather is perfect. When we were first married they baled anything that didn't fit in the silo into small square (actually rectangle) bales. Often we were able to bale by 10 a.m. and would make 14,000 bales a year. Making hay this way required 3 people, 4 if someone was raking while we baled. We had to wait to bale until cutting was done because we didn't have enough people or tractors. Raking was the first thing I did on a tractor. In those days Bruce's mom would run the baler on an open tractor. This baler would form the bales, tie them and then kick the bales into an enclosed wagon. When the tying didn't work it would throw hay everywhere. Bruce would haul the loads and unload. We were lucky enough to have a conveyor system in the barn that took the bales up and then dropped them on an elevator and into the mow whichever direction we wanted. Bruce's dad would pack the bales in the hay mow. Later we made round bales with a rented baler. These we stacked in the pole shed and mow driveways. Generally the hay would be raked in double wind rows and then I did all the baling. Bruce always said a trained monkey could run the round baler since it was so much less complicated than the small bale baler. This baler wrapped the bale with twine and then deposited it in the field where we picked them up later. When it wouldn't tie and I was crawling under it rethreading it I always wondered how the monkey would handle that! We had a trailer to bring the bales home, 12 on a load. This required someone to drive the wagon and Bruce loaded and unloaded using the skid steer with a big spike attached to the bucket. We would borrow Ed's skid steer and have one here and one in the field to speed the process up. The weather has changed and getting hay dry is a challenge. Our labor force is aging. We now try to chop everything and have been renting a bagging machine for quite a few years. Now two of us can do the chopping. The silo bag can handle haylage that is dryer and also wetter than the silo so it is more forgiving with weather and timing. Progress : )