Bringing in the Sheaves

Now that the wheat is off we’re baling straw.

Our combine makes the windrows of straw a little too wide for the baler. Baling will go smoother for us if we rake the straw first into a smaller windrow. I figured this was a good job to get the Super M out for and see how my engine rebuild last winter went.

The M did good. There’s an oil leak, and the throttle tends to slip, but other than that it worked hard for 3 hours raking the straw. By the end I was longing for the modern tractors with cushy seating, a cab, and air-conditioning.

With the straw neatly raked, it was time to bale.

We do it old style, baling the straw in small square bales that a person can handle. We can stack around 130-150 bales on each wagon. It’s hard, hot, dirty work. You’re quickly covered in chaff and pricked on any exposed skin by the straw. That’s why I’m in the air-conditioned tractor driving the baler and my nephew is on the wagon stacking.

Once they’re baled and loaded on the wagon, we then unload them and stack them in the barn.

Stacking the straw in the barn is hot miserable work in the 90 degree days we’ve been having. That’s why the young’uns are in the mow.

Then we sell the straw. Sometimes truck loads to other farmers for bedding for livestock. Landscapers often buy numerous bales to mulch newly seeded grass. And we sell a lot one or two bales at a time to people to put around their dog house in the winter, mulch a garden, or use for a hayride.

It’s hard work on hot days, but it’s also deeply and fundamentally satisfying work. At the end of the day, and I mean that in the literal sense of tools put away and the sun going down, not as the pointless catchphrase it has become, you can look in the barn and see all the neatly put away straw and be very certain of what you have done this day.