Willow Glen Resident

Columns

Making hay out of a trip home to the family farm

By Dave Kehmeier

A few years ago, my older brothers and I came up with the idea of going home to Colorado for a week or so each year to help my parents with the spring farming. My dad and mom are still pretty spry and don't really need our help, but it's a good excuse to go home for a visit and indulge in some parental pampering.

We named this the SAP (Sons Assistance Program). It didn't occur to me at the time that with one of my brothers living in Germany, the other teaching school in Kansas City and me not working, I'd be the only one to make it home regularly in the spring. This happens to be when the farm work is the hardest. I guess that makes me the real SAP.

This year, I couldn't make it home for the spring farming, so I went the week after Labor Day instead. My dad was in the middle of harvesting hay. That's all he grows on the farm nowadays because raising hay takes the least amount of work and loses the least amount of money.

The first step in haying is to cut the hay and put it in windrows using a machine called a windrower. My dad had already done this. That was fine with me because of all his farm machinery, the windrower is the one that breaks down the most. Also, its air-conditioner doesn't work.

After the hay dries for a few days in the windrow, the next step is to bale it with a machine called--you guessed it--a "baler." First, though, it has to rain a bunch, which ruins the hay so that nobody wants to buy it, and you lose even more money. Fortunately, that didn't happen this time.

The baler hooks on behind the tractor. As the tractor pulls it along, the baler slurps up the windrow like a long strand of green fettuccini, swallows it, and spits out (or to be metaphorically accurate--poops out) compacted blocks of hay tied with plastic twine. It's a very complex piece of machinery. Nobody actually understands how it works, and if they did, they'd be too terrified to use it.

Baling is my favorite part of haying. The air-conditioner on my dad's tractor works great, the driver's seat is comfortable, and the cab is quiet. It's the closest thing to a desk job I've had in years. The tractor even has a radio, although radio stations in western Colorado are limited. The choices consist primarily of extra-twangy country music and Rush Limbaugh. I'm hoping one of these days John Deere will come out with a wireless tractor so I can surf the Internet while I bale.

The final step of haying is to pick the bales up with a machine called a bale wagon (because bale-picker-upper is too long) that loads them neatly and, if all goes well, dumps them neatly in the stack yard. I don't like the bale wagon. It has too many levers that have to be pushed or pulled at just the right time for the bales to load correctly. Dumping the wagon once it's loaded is an intricate 15-step process. One little mistake reduces the stack to bale rubble and/or breaks the bale wagon. It takes a lot of concentration, especially with Rush yakking away.

Besides, hauling hay with a bale wagon is cheating. Back in my day, we hauled and stacked the bales by hand, by golly. When I was in high school, a couple of friends and I went around the county hauling hay during the summers. It was hot, exhausting work, but it was a good way to earn money to blow on cars, pizza, and eight-track tapes of the Doobie Brothers.

Plus, stacking the bales was like playing with Legos--60-pound Legos. We took great pride in building haystacks so tall and tight that the old farmers we built them for had fits trying to pull bales out of them in the winter to feed their livestock. They didn't mind though, because our stacks kept more of the hay from getting wet and spoiling.

All in all, it was a good week at home. We got a lot of hay put up, and I didn't break any expensive machinery. My mom fed me well. I had time to go to a football game at my old high school and watch them get creamed --just like the good ol' days.

Best of all, while I was gone, my wife, Ellie, got a chance to be alone with the kids--getting them to and from school, dance and soccer, making their lunches and cooking their dinners, checking homework, policing computer usage, forcing them to each take a shower sometime during the week. She was very excited when I came back and reassumed my full-time job as Dave the Homemaker.

Looks like I made some hay here, too, while I was gone.

Dave Kehmeier can be reached at
djkehemeier@sbcglobal.net.