Fessin’ Up

This story is long overdue, just as the reason for the story is also. During the Eternal Hay Season Of 2020, and my determination to put some fun into the ordeal, I offered up winnings to those who could guess the correct numbers for our harvest.

Finally, FINALLY, I passed out the winnings to the last of the winners, and I even made them drive over to the farm to collect the winnings if you can believe the nerve of me!

It was a long, long time from the end of hay season and much longer than what I like to take to pay off my debts but the winners have now been compensated. Whew, now I realize that I did not take any pics to put with this story!

Instead I’ll just remind you of the fun we had during the torturous month and a half…

Prize #1 Congratulations to  Cathy C-L to being the closest to Mike’s number at 826 bales. (Mike’s guess was 800)

Prize #2 Congratulations to Bonnie coming in the closest to the actual number. (Guessed 575 with actual at 779)

Prize #3 And we have a special Congratulations to Baker who not only did a lot of math to come up with a total but showed the work in an email! (outstanding reasoning)

My confession is now complete, unless you know about some other transgressions, but I may deny any knowledge!

 

 

Sad Sack

Jackson the dog had a long, tough hay season just like the rest of us did. Normally he is a bundle of energy from daybreak until the dark, but he seems to be slowing down a bit.

As a precaution, we tether the dogs on the Gator when it is time to cross the county road or when we go up the road to the other fields. There is just no telling when a random scent or a kamikaze chipmunk could distract either dogs leading to dog projectiles flying off the Gator and into danger.

On the last day of hay season, Jackson was so tired that he barely had enough energy to jump into the bed of the Gator.  When I tethered him, he give his normal shake and the tether looped around his head. Instead of tipping it off, he just gave me the look of utter despair as if he did not have enough strength to drop his head down to drop the leash off his head.

Between fits of laughter I snapped a few pics, which seemed to put Jackson into a tired funk and I really got the sad dog look. I was forgiven when I added a juicy dog bone to the served meal that evening and that sad sack of a dog perked right up along with his brother.

You gotta see the pictures! They are posted with this story on SchmidlinAngusFarms.com. While you are there, if there is any online shopping you plan on doing, please go through my picture links. By doing so, I may make a small commission without a charge to you! The commissions help pay for my user charges for this site, Thank You for supporting the farm

Equipment Jigsaw

We do not run irrigation lines in our hay fields, we prefer to let nature do it’s thing with our grass and pastures. Because we are not forcing the land to produce the next crop of hay we use the areas of hay fields as grazing fields for the cows once the hay harvest is complete. That means we do not have a second cutting or third cutting as some farmers are able to do, it also means that the one crop we do get is precious and is all that sustains our cattle throughout the winter beyond what they are grazing.

Now that we are done with the hay equipment for the year, it is time to get it cleaned up and stored away for next year. The process of getting all the chaff, hay seeds, dust, dirt and clingy wads off each begins with the high-powered air blower.

As each piece of equipment is cleaned, it needs to be stored away. The equipment takes up a lot of valuable real estate in the barns and it takes a jigsaw approach to get it all put back where it needs to go so they all will fit.

The first piece to go in is the Henry loader, the handy elevator that scoops bales off the ground and drops it over the top of the truck bed for stacking. The Henry has to be rolled in by hand in order for the tall top to fit into the space between the rafters in the barn. It takes two people to inch the Henry around the pole, past the stack of lumber that is scheduled to be used on a new fence in the bull pen during the winter months, and back into the designated resting place.

Next is the rake that has to tuck in right in front of the Henry without hitting the cement wall and leaving a walking path to the back of the barn that holds spare parts for year round repairs.

After the rake, the baler is inched in and with the help of hydraulic power of the tractor is swung to one side so the back of the mower envelopes the handles of the rake that protrude out. If the baler is in the correct position, the mower gets moved in next and fits snugly right up to the hitch of the baler.

If all goes correctly up to this point the fluffer gets folded up into a compact shape and wheeled into the last remaining square footage of the barn equipment area. Luckily, this year everything seemed to fit in correctly the first time, this is not always the case.

Hay season 2020 now can begin to become a memory, except we still haven’t unloaded The Big Red Beast, it may take a day or two before I want to mess with it.

You gotta see the pictures! They are posted with this story on SchmidlinAngusFarms.com. While you are there, if there is any online shopping you plan on doing, please go through my picture links. By doing so, I may make a small commission without a charge to you! The commissions help pay for my user charges for this site, Thank You for supporting the farm

 

It’s A Wrap

Call me done, the hay season that seemed to last forever is finally finished!

Every single field that we mowed got some rain on it during the drying cycle. Even the fields that we broke into three smaller fields got at least damp during the curing process. The hay is not the prettiest we have ever made but at least it is now in bales and in the barn for the upcoming wintertime.

The fields have been running heavier than usual this year lots of sweet clover mixed in with the grass. The cattle will be happy with the hay even with the extra moisture we had to fight during hay season.

The counter on the baler showed a half bale short of and even 3000. That is quite a bit more than last year and the hay barns are stuffed.

You gotta see the pictures! They are posted with this story on SchmidlinAngusFarms.com. While you are there, if there is any online shopping you plan on doing, please go through my picture links. By doing so, I may make a small commission without a charge to you! The commissions help pay for my user charges for this site, Thank You for supporting the farm

Drum Roll Please

For all of you who were playing along with our riddle of the hay harvest, thank you for all your guesses, tips, queries, well wishes, quips and astounding support! I am in awe of my wonderful readers and I count on all of you…Now on with the awards!

The actual total of the last third of our amazingly trying field came to 779 bales. Mike had penned his estimate as 800 (since he mowed, raked and baled most of it he definitely had a good feeling about his guess).

Prize #1 Congratulations to  Cathy C-L to being the closest to Mike’s number at 826 bales.

Prize #2 Congratulations to Bonnie coming in the closest to the actual number.

Prize #3 And we have a special Congratulations to Baker who not only did a lot of math to come up with a total but showed the work in an email! This is an excerpt from the letter:

My best guess (because I am an optimist) is 1239 bales

I think Mike would be a bit less optimistic (more realistic) and guess 1033 bales

If I only get one guess, my guess is 1239 bales, because I am an optimist!

Here is how I did my calculations. The second cut was 2.3 better than the first. Optimistically, you would get yet another 50% growth which would yield 3.47 times better yield than the first cut (1239 bales). Realistically you would get 25% growth over the second cut which would be 2.89 times the first cut’s yield (1033 bales)

Field	Acres	Bales	B/Acre
first	3	153	51		50%	25%
second	5	590	118	2.313725	3.470588	2.892157
last (optimistic)	7	1239	177
last (realistic)	7	1033	147.5

Talk about blown away! Very cool to see a great mind at work, I just wish the elk that kept coming in to graze their way through the field paid attention to how much we were looking forward to a good yield.

Thank you to all that participated and I will be contacting the winners to see what kinds of goodies they will be wanting!

I Don’t Care

This is a pre-PS to the story for today. But instead of Post Script at the end of the story, I wanted to make sure that I answered some important questions about the riddle and your many, many answers to the query… The biggest question is: when will I get around to telling who won? I promise, PROMISE, all will be revealed on Monday (that means most likely it will be Monday, but may be Sunday or Tuesday because that is how I roll). Second question is: was your guess counted in the group, pile, plethora of answers? I believe that I found all the answers throughout the different sites such as the original website, official website at SchmidlinAngusFarms.com, the LinkedIn account, the Instagram account, my email and text. If by any chance I missed your guess and you can provide a screenshot of your winning number that you sent to me, I will make sure to include you in the prize giving along with the winners I announce. Third question: does Susan know what she is doing? I’m not sure if I have a good answer for that one. It seems like I do know some of the time, other times not so much. I can tell you that seeing your guesses and some of the unique ways you came to your conclusions really brightened my days during this grueling hay season. And speaking of hay season, we are almost through with the season, finally, and that is why it is going to take me until Monday to get all the guesses out of the file I dumped them into, get them sorted into  some reasonable sense, and find the winners. Now onto today’s story…

My Mom had a way with words. Sometimes she would say she did not care for something. If someone was acting recklessly, naughty or rude, she would say that she did not care for that kind of behavior. She was never dissing the person, but what they were doing. When moving into the Senior Living apartment she had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, for the first time in her life she had meal service on a daily basis. When asked about food preferences she only stated that she did not care for Brussels Sprouts.

Now I do not know what very rural Kansas in the 1920’s did to Brussels Sprouts to make her loathe them other than boil them to mush, but Mom truly hated them without actually saying so. She wouldn’t touch them.

My sister and I took Mom for a Lady’s Night Out at a local nursery. There were samples of food and wine tasting every few feet around the giant greenhouse. There was live music and the place was jam-packed with many happy females with a few gentlemen sprinkled in. One of the samples was of Brussels Sprouts lightly cooked with butter and bacon. They were delicious and we talked Mom into tasting them, she was as surprised as we were to hear her say that it was no longer true that she did not care for Brussels Sprouts! But it may have been the previous wine tasting that tipped the scales toward that declaration.

I have always said that I loved hay season and many years have given lists of why it is my favorite holiday of the year. The biggest reason for my happiness was because of how good I felt when hay season was officially over for the year. With this current hay season dragging on for a month and a half, I no longer care for this hay season. I don’t think wine would help my current feelings.

 

Full Tilt Into Hay Season

Our farm ground is broken up by topography. We have several small fields dotted on each side of the meandering river, have some areas on one side of the county road and most on the other, we have the hillside and slopes all around the place. There doesn’t seem to be one flat spot anywhere on the place. It tends to make farming a more creative process.

On Sunday, Mike mowed the far, far field. This is the one that we have access to by traveling up the county road and in a densely vegetative logging road. The field itself has a slope on one side that is the steepest grade of all the hayfields. It is so steep that we cannot drive side-hill for fear that the vehicle would tip over. We cannot drive up the slope with a load of bales because they would all slide of the back of the truck or wagon. We can only drive down the slope with an empty rig or we would free-wheel on the steepness.

This field also has a patch of dense clover in one section of the field. When cut, the thick mat of clover tends to bunch and does not dry as quickly as the rest of the field consisting of a higher volume of grass. We also have the upper portion of the field that is drier and thinner in the stand and tends to be ready to bale a full day earlier than the rest of the field.

With all the quirks, we are going to try to finish off this field before Saturday when the forecast calls for rain. We are diving in full tilt on this field and will not cut another field until we have this one safely stored in the barns and there is another dry spell in the works.

You gotta see the pictures! They are posted with this story on SchmidlinAngusFarms.com. While you are there, if there is any online shopping you plan on doing, please go through my picture links. By doing so, I may make a small commission without a charge to you! The commissions help pay for my user charges for this site, Thank You for supporting the farm stories.

Sharpening The Blades

Trying out the hay equipment that had been stored all winter showed that we had neglected to put the final touch up on the blades of the mower. Mike remembered grazing a metal t-post as he was negotiating a turn during the final field of last year but had never gotten around to checking on the blades to see if they were still sharp enough to cut the thick grass for this year harvest. The small test plot showed that the far edge of the mower was not cutting as smoothly as it should.

With everything a muddy mess right now, Mike decided it was a good time to address the blade issue before we got busy in the fields.

Our old mower had a strip of triangle shaped serrated blades that were lowered when the mowing began. The whole strip of individual blades would shimmy back and forth with a sawing motion as the grass would begin moving into the machine when the tractor moved around the field. As the grass reached the pointy tips of the blades and moved closer to the bar, the grass would get cut off as the row of blades wiggled back and forth.

Our new mower, now more than ten years old runs off a different design and only has knife-shaped blades spinning on the bottom edge of six cone shaped domes. Each dome only has two blades each and the spinning is driven by the PTO (power take off unit) of the tractor. The mower makes a high pitched whining sound like a helicopter taking off and is quite loud.  The grass gets cut off by the spinning blades. When one or more blades gets damaged, the grass that went through that part of the machine is not cut smoothly and the strip of uneven grass left behind is noticed after we have the bales picked up out of the field.

With loud rain pelting the tin roof barn, Mike crawled under the mower to begin the sharpening process. It is very close quarters, and very dark in the belly of the machine. Most of the blades just needed a touch up with a sharpening stone, but the two blades on the far outside cone needed to be replaced completely.

Removing the bolts that hold the blades in place took longer than the actual replacement but Mike was able to get the mower ready for the next hay field as soon as the ground dries out enough so that he does not bog down in mud.

You gotta see the pictures! They are posted with this story on SchmidlinAngusFarms.com. While you are there, if there is any online shopping you plan on doing, please go through my picture links. By doing so, I may make a small commission without a charge to you! The commissions help pay for my user charges for this site, Thank You for supporting the farm stories.

Barely

The only word I can use to describe the hustle on Friday afternoon and evening is barely. We barely could get the bales in under cover before showers. Barely got the field completed before dark. And barely had enough energy (both human and machine) to get this small harvest safe before Mother Nature stepped in.

We had to dose with analgesics before bed or there would have been no rest for this weary bunch. But the new day is on us and it is time to finish what we started. First, Mike will jockey the bale stacker into position to up-end the load into the bay in the barn, when we will unstack the “Big Red Beast” by hand and getting the bales into position where they will rest until winter.

On the outside round, the ones under the tall fir trees are not good quality bales since their moisture content is high. These bales will mold if we stack them tight in with all the rest of the harvest. So instead we moved them, five and six bales at a time with the Gator and spread them out in the bull barn and the show barn. Mike salted them down and staggered them for air flow. We will be feeding these first before they have a chance to mold.

You gotta see the pictures! They are posted with this story on SchmidlinAngusFarms.com. While you are there, if there is any online shopping you plan on doing, please go through my picture links. By doing so, I may make a small commission without a charge to you! The commissions help pay for my user charges for this site, Thank You for supporting the farm stories.

 

Four Days Of Good Weather

In a typical year we begin hay season closer to the end of June. This year things especially our pasture grass seems to be getting mature in the fields a little earlier than normal and Mike is getting antsy. The weather forecast calls for a stretch of four to five days of dry weather and so he went ahead and mowed a few acres to get started on the fields.

If we can get get this small amount put up into hay bales and stored in the barn successfully, we will move the equipment up the road to begin the far, far field that is 16 acres in size.

Mike mowed the field three days ago, fluffed the rows twice and will be raking into manageable windrows before getting down to baling the dry hay. Weather forecast is now calling for rain on Saturday so the push is on to get this first batch completed and into the barn before the weather changes.

You gotta see the pictures! They are posted with this story on SchmidlinAngusFarms.com. While you are there, if there is any online shopping you plan on doing, please go through my picture links. By doing so, I may make a small commission without a charge to you! The commissions help pay for my user charges for this site, Thank You for supporting the farm stories.