Preparing for the winter months

It is extremely important for us to renew our food sources for the cattle during the summer months. The crop of choice this year so far is oats. Dad baled some in round bales, but because of lack of moisture, they aren't exactly pretty. As long as they hold together they will do the trick though. Fluffy is not supposed to be the term of choice when describing round bales ;-)

We have also done a lot of square bales and they are a little more labor intensive to pick up and put in storage. For our smaller loads, we prefer to use the car trailer which means we have to load them all by hand. I can help to a certain points, but it gets too hard for me to throw them up about three or four rows, so I primarily stack them while someone else throws them on.

These are partially unloaded, but as you can tell we had them at least four rows high. I think we had around 90 bales on this load.

In order to not wear yourself out quite as quick (each bale weighs anywhere from 40-70 lbs. and in this case I was handling every single one...so that's somewhere around 4500 lbs. if these bales were around 50 lbs.) it is important to learn the technique. Learning how to use your knee to "buck" the bale is the biggest secret for me. It takes a lot of stress off of your back when you are trying to throw the bale or lift it up.

The "bounce bale" is another key. If you situate a bale just right at the end of the trailer you can throw the bale you are carrying so that the edge hits the bounce bale and rolls the other bale about 6 feet further than you could throw it. It saves a lot of walking while carrying the bale.

Dad or someone with more upper body strength than me usually stacks the bales inside. There just really aren't any shortcuts. The picture is a little blurry but dad shows his technique for "bucking" the bale up and guiding it into the correct spot in the stack.

He's an expert and always makes a much nicer stack than me or any of the other people we have help us.

These are some of our "helpers." It's fun to have them along, but they often get in the way, so they got put in "jail" in the barn so they weren't in the way of the flying bales and our feet ;-)

We still have some wind rows (rows of cut oats) to bale, but they were pretty skinny so dad taught our hired hand how to rake the other day. Raking is driving a tractor with a large rotating rake behind it so it takes one wind row and combines with another to make a larger wind row. This makes it so the baler can pick up the crop easier and make less trips back and forth to pick up the necessary oats to make a bale.

First they had to set the rake at the right height to catch the oats.

Dad drove the tractor on the way down, and our hired hand drove it on the way back. That's another thing I admire so much about my dad. He is incredibly patient while teaching us on the farm. He knows that it's a skill that will be helpful for us to know and he understands that it will take us a while to get it figured out.
Here is our hired hand on his way back, I think he's getting it figured out...although we did have to giggle at how crooked he was driving at times ;-)

He got the hang of it after a while and did an awesome job! Just another day of learning on the farm ;-)