I just got back from spending most of the day at my Uncle’s place helping him get the hay from his fields into stacked bales in sheds. Sounds simple enough, right? Not really. The operation went something like this: a tractor in the front pulled and powered an aging New Holland baler made in 1965, which in turn pulled a trailer. The baler was a surprisingly complicated piece of machinery; it reminded me of the machine that made pies in the movie Chicken Run. And, just like the pie maker, it was not always cooperative. We spent a good part of the day replacing parts that broke and recalibrating the wiring mechanism. When everything worked like it was supposed to, the machine slurped the hay up from the ground, squished it all together, jammed it into a chute, and on the hay’s way out of the chute, wrapped baling wire around it, chopping the ends off and tying them at regular intervals. The end result was a neatly packaged hay bale that needed to go somewhere before the next one shoved it out of the chute and onto the ground. That’s where the people on the trailer come in. The three jobs on the trailer are to yank the bale onto the trailer, retie the ends of the wires (apparently the wire they make today isn’t fully compatible with the old baler), and stack the bale on the end of the trailer.

My job for most of the day was to yank the bale onto the trailer. This involved waiting until just the right time, when the bale was about to come out of the chute, then sinking a large Captain Hook style baling hook into the bale and pulling real hard on it so it would gracefully arc into the trailer for further processing all while maintaining surfer-like balance on the not-so-stable trailer. It wasn’t always graceful and the bales seemed to get heavier as the day wore on. I also spent some time in the shed stacking bales. Luckily, it wasn’t too much time because there was effectively no ventilation and the work was very hard.

It was a good, though tiring, experience, and I learned a lot about the baling process.