With third cutting alfalfa right around the corner, Erin much to my chagrin, suggested that we make some small square bales. While it is true I don’t particularly care for them, they are nice to have around. Square bales work well to call cows when it’s time to move pastures or stalk fields, and they also work well to feed a cow penned up in the calving barn during a snowstorm. And really, for any other general emergency arising that may call for a square bale. Even so, I have a difficult time driving past a field of square bales without mumbling some sort of joke about the hay.

For those of you who may not know, I grew up on a dairy farm. Dairy cattle need long-stemmed ruffage in their diet to aid in gut health, regurgitation, and generally speaking to keep everything moving (moooving, sorry I couldn’t help it) through the digestive system. On our operation while I was growing up, we fed square baled alfalfa to our cows, it fit the requirement for long-stem hay, and good quality alfalfa worked well to bump the protein up in their diet.

While loading corn silage in the morning, Dad or Grandpa would throw 20 or so small squares from the hayloft and carry them out to the bunks in the cow lot. As time went on, this became part of my chores as well. It was a bit of a challenge to get to the bunks, probably very similar to carrying a tray full of cupcakes through a classroom of grade schoolers.

Back in the dark ages, we fed a lot of squares, so we made a lot of squares. The reason I harbor so much disdain for stamping out square bales today is tied directly to overconsumption in my youth. In Southeastern Nebraska, irrigated alfalfa almost always provided us with four cuttings a year, and I remember randomly a fifth. The first two cuttings would be chopped for haylage, and we would square bale most of the third cutting and everything that came after that. In the hierarchy of the Fairley Dairy, Grandpa ran the baler and Dad ran the stack wagon.

Grandpa had one primary goal in mind. Sure, sure he wanted to make good quality hay with all the leaves in the bale, but mostly, he wanted to try and get all the alfalfa into one bale if possible. I remember on more than one occasion; we stacked several loads of 90-pound bales. They were heavy, and they were tight. Grandpa didn’t mess around, it was a twine tie baler, and we would break a bale occasionally as Grandpa’s baling skills surpassed the tensile strength of the twine. Usually, back then an International Harvester 656 gas burner pulled the baler. Every time the plunger stroked, it would bump the governor on the tractor, on a calm night from across the hay field you could hear the tattle tale whaa whaa whaa of the tractor letting you know the hay was getting a little tough and tomorrows bales were going to be heavy.

Times were lean back then, but we were fortunate to have a New Holland Stackliner bale wagon to gather bales in the field with. Dad ran this most of the time, it would pick up and haul 120 square bales at a time, with very little manual labor. After the wagon was loaded Dad would bring it to the yard, the wagon would then unload the whole stack at once against the front of the old red barn, and he would go out after another load. Now we have come to the point in the story where there is a difference in opinions. Dad would say this is when the fun starts, I on the other hand wasn’t always sure about that.

The bales would be stacked high in the hayloft of the big old barn. And while we did have an erector set-type collection of bale elevators used to relocate bales to the second level, it was still a mammoth amount of work. As a young enthusiastic hay technician, I remember high school boys stacking hay in the barn, they were mostly farm kids, and/or football players that my dad had hired. My job was to get in the way, and I took it very seriously. I did my best to be constantly underfoot, peppering them with an assortment of questions from my overactive 8-year-old brain. The thing is, I remember them all being great to be around. If I was bothering them, they never let on, and I learned a lot in that haymow.

I learned that music makes everything more bearable. There was always an old radio cranked up to 11 that the guys would sing along with, and it played both kinds of music, country and western. Just kidding, it also played a fair amount of classic rock, although back then it was just called rock. I also learned that despite being rough tough football players, some of the guys had an unhealthy fear of garter snakes. One day I discovered that my granddad was some kind of Superman when one of the guys challenged him to a bale throwing contest. I cannot remember now exactly how high it was, but it seems like they had bucked them six or seven high. The challenger tried a few times to get the stack one bale higher but couldn’t do it. I remember being filled with pride when my granddad put a knee into that bale, and landed it on top of the stack, one bale higher than the high school boy. Talk about instant street cred, if there was any doubt this aging gentleman farmer was tough as nails, that settled it. Grandpa wasn’t a one-trick pony either, on more than one occasion when he’d finished baling, he would stand in that barn stacking hay with young men a fraction of his age.

As my wife and I plan on making our own little square bales in the next couple of weeks, my mind drifts back to standing in the hayloft of that big ol’ barn and holding onto the steel track in the peak of the roof, waiting for my turn to climb down the bale elevator, because we had quite literally stacked the thing completely full and that was the only way down. As time progressed Dad ended up with a vertical mix feed wagon, capable of handling large quantities of hay at a time. They put up big square bales now, and he uses a loader to put the long-stem hay he needs right in the mixing wagon with the rest of the ration.

Gone are the days of sweating through your boots stacking hay by hand. Gone are the days of trudging through snow to throw bales in the bunk. Maybe Erin and I do really need some small square bales around our place, or maybe we just do it to be nostalgic, to keep a little bit of the old way alive. Either way, if you have a hankering to sweat off a few pounds later this month let me know - I’ll keep the baler running.