At Large : Haymaking
The weather's given us a lot to whine about this month, in fact all spring long. No, actually, during the winter too. It's a long time to whine, but we're practiced at it, and we take the job in stride. Ordinarily, we also have the pre-seasonal weekend crowds to whine about, but that hasn't been true this spring, so we've whined about their absence. We Vineyarders can make a silk purse out of a rainy spring.
Dan Cabot reports this morning that, unlike most of us for whom whining is just fooling around, some of our neighbors have had good reason to whine in late May and June. But, being farmers, even ephemeral farmers (Dan's description), they've learned that farming's not for whiners, so they've quit the habit.
For these folks - hybrid farmers, considering some are in retailing like David Douglas, with whom Dan spoke, and some are in chickens, eggs, pigs, transportation to the slaughterhouse off-Island, and custom fieldwork like Elisha Smith - it's time to make hay.
Putting thousands of bales in his barns, as David does, for his Charolais cattle and for sale to horse people, or putting up round bales for his and others' livestock, as Elisha does, this is the moment when some of the hardest, weather-critical work on the farm gets done. It's torturous, for sure, but, as I've written before, it's fun too.
Beyond fun, there's great beauty in haying, though not so much when it rains every day. And there's the fragrance of the newly mown grass and of the hay when it makes properly and timely. And finally, there's the teamwork that gets the work done. Despite the advances in agricultural machinery, without question astonishing in its contributed efficiency, there are still some bales to be toted, and all that machinery demands maintenance. You get your hands dirty making hay, and your hands and back will certainly be sore.
The time for the 2009 first cut has passed. Poor quality hay is likely. But, with luck - and farmers depend on luck - second and third cuts later in the summer will rebound. The Island's few good hay fields - big, flat, with a respectable overlay of topsoil, tilled smooth and fertilized and planted with the good alfalfa, clover, timothy mixes - have lost their May promise. Still, the work has to be done, and one morning soon, the moment will arrive.
Hoping for a string of hot, dry days, the haymaker will set off to mow a few acres. Not too early because the sun has to get up and dry the overnight moisture. There's a lot of drying that needs to be done after a month of drizzle and sunless days. But, not too late because the windrows that the mower/conditioner creates have to be tedded out so the sun can get at every bit of the plant.
The mowing machine, Verlyn Klinkenborg explained in his small 1986 volume called Making Hay (New York: Nick Lyon Books), describing haymaking on a large scale by Montana farms, "does what it looks like it should. It cuts a wide swath of alfalfa, crushes it, and leaves behind a crop line, or windrow, narrow enough for a forage chopper or baler.... First the sickle blade chops off the alfalfa near the ground.... To force the alfalfa to fall neatly, a long reel with protruding steel fingers urges the plants onto the knives. The reel is as long as the blade, anywhere from ten to sixteen feet, with a diameter of about five feet, and moves like a vastly elongated ferris wheel, reaching down into the standing crop, pushing it past the knives, and coercing it onto the conveyor that transports and organizes the crop.... The conveyor reduces the swath from the blade width...to the width a baler can pick up - usually about three feet. It shuttles alfalfa from both sides of the header and feeds it through a narrow gap in the center to the header's fourth major tool: the crimper or crusher. This is nothing more than an old-fashioned washing-machine wringer of huge proportions.... These rollers wreak a terrible fate on alfalfa, crimping or crushing the stems in order to make them more palatable to cattle and to force the crop to dry faster. After it has been 'conditioned' by the crimper, alfalfa desiccates with despair."
The cut and crimped hay flows from the mangle like a fragrant, green, arching river, leaving a windrowed track astern. Across a neatly mown field, sunlight and shadow play on windrow and mown ground in verdant shades.
And the smell. "The smell of newmown hay is an agricultural talisman that survives in our language.... Alfalfa is not the antique hay crop of peasant Europe, but its odor is rich enough to compete with that of the freshly scythed mix of grasses in traditional hays." Rich enough, indeed.
That tedded hay, spread out across the field at midday, must be raked and windrowed before late afternoon dampness, or the dratted fog, gets to it. You don't leave your clothes on the line after four in the afternoon, and you don't leave your hay spread across the field either. Not if you want it to become hay. One day's drying won't do the trick, and in the morning of the second day, when the dew has dried, the partly made hay will need to be tedded out once more.
Here's where it gets dicey. The best thing would be for the hay to make by mid-afternoon, so it can be raked and baled before supper. If it gets cloudy, or if the alfalfa is terribly thick, some more sun might be needed, which means the tedded hay will have be raked up again and left unbaled a second night, then spread out and raked up again. That means torturing the crop.
As the hay dries, the leaves on the clover and alfalfa plants become more and more fragile. If too much natural moisture is dried off, the tedding and raking will destroy the leaves and with them lots of the nutritional benefit. If there is a thunderstorm overnight, the tedding and raking has to begin again, and the rain will have washed away much of the goodness.
But, assume for the moment that late on day two the hay has been made. It's time for the baler to travel ker-thunking around the field gathering the windrows, compressing the hay into bale-sized, 90-pound chunks, and tying it with twine. Here's where the teamwork comes in. Whether the baler drops its creations in its wake or hurls them up onto a wagon, the work of getting the hay in the barn has to be done before dark. For that, you need the hired hands, the kids, their friends, the neighbors, and their guests. It's itchy, sneezy work that, nourished by a beer or two, or a Coke and a sandwich, goes happily and quickly with a big gang. It's how you fill the barn.
