You’ve heard it said many times – make hay while the sun shines. Well, it’s finally shining here, and the frenzy is on.
Every John Deere, Kubota, International and ancient M-F is out there cutting, tedding, and otherwise getting the grass made into hay. These pictures were taken just over a week ago, when we had a non-rainy spell, and our top field got cut. Imagine blue skies, and a different field, and it’s the same action everywhere I look today. Hay Guy is a die hard John Deere fanatic. I think he has a fleet of about 8 of them, but I have no idea which models are which, sorry.
The macerator – it crimps the stalks of the hay, helping them to dry much faster
This is the tedder – it fluffs up the grass to turn it and get air under the damp bits
The dip in the field hids it a bit, but the one on the right is raking the loose grass into windrows, he’s about 2 rows ahead of the guy on the left, who is baling.
This is a snazzy device – an automatic loading wagon – it scoops up the bales, makes rows of them flat, then lifts the rows up into a vertical wall and pushes them back, till the wagon is full.
In the picture below, the uncut patch in the middle bottom was left last week due to impending rain, but it got cut yesterday. In fact you can see from the grass colours that he cut this field three times in the end.
I think this is a vulture, but it might be a raven, he was doing a lot of swooping, it was hard to tell.
I do fear for our small black cat when hay season is on – she must look just about right to the various eagles, vultures and ravens circling above the cut fields, waiting to dart down for a tasty mouse or rabbit. She’s a keen mouser/rabbiter herself, so I hope she’s not oblivious to her place in the food chain when concentrating on a hole somewhere.
Teak – our small but mighty mousing machine
When it’s finally time to make hay, farmers really do get a kind of fever – they are driven to get the whole job done in a short window of good weather. It’s stressful, because the crop can be ruined if the weather changes at any point during the process., but because of that risk, the satisfaction when the crop is safely under a roof is wonderful.
Sailors Small Farm 