Square baling hay.

IaGary

Well-known Member
The post over on Imp. Alley got me to thinking of baling hay in the 60's and early 70's.

Seems like I handled bales every sunny day of the summer for someone from the age of 14 till 20.

WE had our own baler and custom baled for 6 or 7 neighbors and relatives.

Anyway the worst baling day I had was behind another neighbors baler. 98 degrees and no wind.

He had 20 acres of heavy hay ready to bale.

He asked me to come at noon and the barn crew would be there at 1 to unload. After 2 hours I had 500 loaded and was on my second gallon jug of water. To my surprise the barn crew kept right up to me. They were more of the city type boys at the barn.

After 1300 bales at about 5:30 I started to cramp up even though I was on my 3rd gallon of water. When a buddy of mine got there to get a full load I asked the boss man we were baling for if he could stay and help load the last 2 loads. We had 3 empty racks setting there.

I about lost it when my Buddy piped up and said yes he would stay cause there were 4 guys in the barn and 2 outside loading the elevator. Boss agreed.

I was so mad I think I could have loaded those last 2 myself when I found out there 6 at the barn and me by myself.

When we got done loading I jumped in my car and went home to set in the shower. I did not stay to help unload that last load.

Couple of days later boss man showed to pay me.

He asked what he owed me. I asked what he paid the others. He said 2 bucks an hour. I replied I handled every bale the 6 of them did.

He paid me 10 an hour. Yup I went to help him again and got over being mad real fast.

Gary
 
Your story sure brings back memories to me. My brother and I did the same thing for all our neighbors when we were that age as well. I would have been about 11 years old and my brother 12. We started out making 1 cent per bale. We would work all day long....the heat never seemed to bother us. We finally graduated up to 1 1/2 cents per bale. Some days he and I would ride our bikes home with 10-12 dollars in our pocket. We probably averaged $7 per day. Dang.........we had more money than we knew what to do with! When I turned 14, one of our neighbors hired me as their full time hired hand in the summer working on their dairy. He and his wife would take a 10 day vacation every summer and leave me there to take care of their entire dairy. 'Quite a responsibility for a 14-15 year old kid. He still shipped milk in milk cans to the creamery. I had to haul the milk cans to town as well. I drove his old Chevy pickup the 6 miles into town (no drivers license)and delivered the milk. I thought I was pretty big stuff doing that! "BIG MEDICINE" for a 15 year old! I remember those days just like it was yesterday.
I had an accident one summer with his old Chevy pickup. I was driving down this grade on a gravel road and the brakes went out. 'Absolutely no brakes. There was a 90 degree curve at the bottom of the hill. I made the curve but took out the neighbors fence. That was one scary ride. I walked to the mans house and told him I had run through his fence. He replied "probably driving too fast weren't you"......I said "no sir, the brakes went out on the pickup". When we went back to retrieve the truck and fix the fence he acknowledged "young man, you told me the truth about the truck". That made me feel good.

Wow..the memories.
 
My teenage experience was the same. We baled for ourselves and neighbors. The time that stands out most to me is when I was hired to help at a farm with 2 slightly older guys than me. I was on the wagon and the driver pushed the baler HARD. It was tough keeping up. If that wasn't enough they had me help stacking in the mow. It was one of those cases that you didn't want to admit you were whipped. Afterwards I could barely lift my arms.
 
Gary, when you were walking the field loading...was it uphill both ways? Just kidding, don't get mad at me! I thought your story was great! We do grass hay here and loading it on the wagons is a terrible job. Especially first cutting with sharp stems in the bales. I cherish the memories of doing that with my kids. All of us working so hard putting up bales as high as we could. Buyer loads the hay now and I discount it for the labor. I wouldn't go back for any amount, but I cherish the memory.
 
That's for sure, but I also like the security and $ I have these days....not to mention a treasure trove of good memories.
 
I'll never forget the last time I helped with square bales. My uncle was baling and I was home from college, so I got drafted to help. He had two sons that were big enough to go bear hunting with a switch, but they had hay fever so bad they couldn't look at a bale without sneezing. So I did all of the stacking inside the barn, with the promise of a good lunch prepared by auntie afterwards.
Lunch turned out to be tomato sandwiches because it was just too hot to be in the kitchen. I got in my car to go into town for a hamburger, and forget to go back and finish stacking the hay.
 
We started baling on Friday and as of yesterday we've baled a little over 1600 bales. That ain't much but most years we only put up about 3000 total including first, second, and third crop. Gonna be a lot more this year.

Donovan from Wisconsin
 
It makes me love that bale accumulator and loader all the more. You know how hard it is to find kids willing to lift a bale here? It's iust easier to get a bunch of us older guys and go twice as slow.
 
We had four hay wagons and two or three trucks for putting up hay - the wagons could handle about 120 bales each and the trucks about 160 each.

We never hooked a wagon to the baler. Tractor drivers could be as young as 5 years old and as old as 12 - more than 12 and you were picking up or stacking. A crew of 6 or 7 usually loaded and unloaded everything at least twice and that was with 10 to 30 miles from the farm to the field. We usually started the day walking milo fields cutting tall heads so you'd be soaked from foot to chest before you started handling hay.
 
There is something to be said about learning what a person can do physically, and learning to do without financially. My wife has never had to do either, while I have had to to a degree. Makes a difference in how you look at things/projects/difficulties.
 
Yea, I wouldn't want to be as smart as I thought I was back then...... ;)

This early spring I pulled some small squares out of the barn we put in 10 years ago. I think we did 1300 or so one day, 2 hay rakes and a NH 270 baler, two friends and my wife.

Now I look at 200 bales by myself and wonder if I'll make it through the day. ;)

Paul
 
The summer I (city kid)was 16 (1959) I worked on a farm. I was up in the mow stacking bales as the farmer was putting them on the conveyor, I couldn"t keep up. I yelled down "slow down". The farmer couldn"t hear me over the noise of the conveyor. Finally I let a bale go down the back side or the conveyor. The farmer said " am I going too fast"
 
Dixie and my one daughter keep trying to get me from doing any baling. 200 bales would look like a thousand now for me now. This year I am only cutting enough to make 20 to thirty bales at a time here at the house. I have about 3 acres in hay here. Up at the farm my Son in law and Grandson take care of that. I don't ask for help here as they would take over and would leave me to watch. I baled 36 bales Saturday and used the loader bucket to bring them in.
 
Not me. I like it where I am.

While I can't do near as much as I could in my 20's, that was not a particularly happy time of my life.
 
We don't have a kicker and I'll be dipped in goose poop before I drop them on the field just so I can come back later and pick them up. IMO that's nuts and completely wasted effort, even though I know a lot of people that do it. We load off the bale chute directly onto the wagon. I've filled the wagon myself many times doing the driving and stacking, and then mowed it away alone too. Not a lot of fun, 500 bales is a days work and a killer!

I don't mind mowing the bales alone at all as long as I don't have to do a lot of walking on the bales. My ankles and knees can't take that. I have a 16 foot skeleton conveyor that the big conveyor dumps onto. The 16 footer carries the hay across the mow about 2/3 of the way and it's a life saver. I also have 75 or 100 feet of mow conveyor to install one day. That is waiting on my doing a lot of other work in the barn first. Not sure how that will work out.
 
Horizontal conveyors are the best things on earth.

Just loaded 1800 bales into a friends hot/humid
barn last weekend. If that conveyor wasn't there,
we'd still be loading. Never used one before
his, I'm used to dumping them off the elevator and
trying to work downwards from there... The
conveyor is equivalent to at least two warm bodies
if the barn's configured for it.
 
2500 bales a day.....$3.00/hr....learned to appreciate hard work and what a dollar really was.
 
BTDT many times. Just made sure that I could outdo anyone else on the crew! Road the wagon and stacked heavy bales out of the old hand tie wire baler when I was 15 - those bales were heavy, but I wouldn't give in!
 
Agreed.

I'm 47 and have sat in airconditioned offices the last 26 years and have the extra weight that comes from sitting for a living. Last summer I hired two different highschool seniors to help handle hay. The first kid was state wrestler and I hoped I could work hard enough to get a decent days work out of him (he threw them on I stacked). About the third wagon load he headed for the house saying he needed to cool off. About half an hour later he headed for home never to return and I finished off the last couple of wagons by myself.

Next week I had about 400 bales on the ground and another kid that is a physical trainer that wanted to "get a work out". He lasted two wagons and said he couldn't take it anymore and left me to finish by myself.

Granted both days were extremely hot and heat indexes were around/over 100 but I truly thought I would be the weak link working with these young men.
 

Good story, Gary. When I was a young adult I would try to bale and put up 100 or so bales in a day. never had a wagon to pull behind the baler, picked up all of them. Sometime in my mid 40s I decided I was too old for that and got a round baler, which involved other issues.

KEH
 
Can I ask what you were paying those two kids? Sometimes pay determines how much stamina a person has, or is willing to have.
 
When I was in my teens we usually had 3 guys in the hay mow and two unloading the wagons, one hauling and one baling. Being young and cocky we would try to load the bales unto the elevator and keep them touching each other for as long as we could stand it. About two hours of that and we started to slow down a bit! By the three hours mark we had slowed down considerably and looked more dead than alive. Drank gallons of water and ginger water (old timers version of gatorade) between loads. Pacing ourselves was not an option because NO ONE was going to admit they "couldn't take it". Idjit kids! Dang, I hated haying! Idiot cubes, indeed!
 
I worked for a lot of farmers putting up hay,from cutting to racking to baling. My favorite was Vernon,I would mow the hay(sickle mower,he had a three point, ours was a trailer type) rake it and he had old Kenny Ford(drove a Chevy)bale it with an AC round baler.
Vernon had a Popup bale loader that hitched to the wagons and the trucks. Two guys stacking and one to keep the bales pointing the right way for the chute. Two 16 foot trucks,three wagons and it was time to ride back to the barn, 5 miles. Vernon would feed the elevator,that fed the flat hay elevator to the back of the barn and three of us to stack. We were making $5.00 an hour and minimum wage was around $1.25. And then there were guys that only wanted to pay $15.00 a day(they did not get much help) Oh yea, Gen could cook too,if you went hungry it was your own fault.
 
I thought we had the world by the tail when Dad finaly GOT a square baler. He baled 10 to 15000 little rounds/year with an allis chalmers round baler from the 50"s well into the 70"s. He started me driving tractor between rows when I was old enuff to steer the tractor. He used a short handled pitch fork to load wagons with both a front and back rack, When I first started I had a hard time pushing in the clutch so he would get me started up the field, and he would load wagon from the ground from both sides. I can still see him jumping over the tounge of the wagon to get the bales on the other side before I got past them. He kept this up all day long sometimes. I am not exaggerating when I say he was by far the hardest working Man I have ever worked with. The old saying that hard work never killed anybody held fairly true for him he lived to be 87. He was still baling hay albeit little easy to handle square bales till the summer before he passed away. A lot of the reason I like this site so well is the storys people tell on here remind of the "good ol days" working with Dad.
 
For about 20 years I had my whole 12 acres in hay, and a several neighbors that had similar amounts. Somehow between us we had enough equipment to do it all, remember we were young and broke at the time. Nothing like coming home from work at 4:00 and baling 400-600 bales. Somehow we managed to put up some pretty darn nice hay, drink a little beer, and have some really great meals afterwards. Must have been how threshing was in the old days!! Some really great memories and friends for life.
 
I was 20 yrs. old in 1969 and I didn"t do a lot around the farm after that, my first recollection of hay making was a IH baler with a motor on it. First tractor was a new 48 Farmall M so I think the baler was new at that time but I heard a lot of cussing involved in getting it started. A few years later came another IH pto baler and that would"nt tie very consistently but bales were loaded on two racks and all the barns had hay forks and the tracks across the top. Then a new 53 Super C showed up with a bunch of 2 pt hitch implements and a few years later I was in action with the Super C on the rope pulling bales up in the barn, really boring real fast.
So when I was about 13/ 14 we got another M and a new side mount mower and a new JD crimper and I mowed all the hay, crimper didn"t stay long, spent most of my time under the back with my knife cutting hay out of the rolls,did it all the time. That was replaced by a New Idea or maybe a Cunningham, can"t remember but then I had the hot setup, even cut for 3 of the neighbors when they needed help and sometimes we rented some too.
When ever New Holland came out with the first kicker I think we had one of the first in the neighbor hood, used 3 wagons, elevator outside barns, mow conveyer in the big milking barn rope controlled a flipper that derailed them anywhere you wanted and we mowed them when we had time.
That barn was built in 48, round roof, second milking parlor in the county I think. 3 cow parlor Delaval pipeline. I didn"t use it over over a couple dozen times, hated milking.
I liked mowing and baling, plowing and discing and hauling corn , he ran the planter and the mounted IH picker, hated installing that, he ran the combine and cultivator.
My dad died in 54 so 3 older brothers ran it for awhile, then 2 of them left in the next few years, the last brother got married and she was good help but for a lot of those years it was 2 of us and a helluva lot of hay. Haven"t touched a bale in 45 years.
 
I forgot about that, when I started driving the baler tractor, Farmall M, my brother would put it in gear and stack bales on the wagon, after a while I could push the clutch or the brake but not at the same time and it was tuff steering.
 
(quoted from post at 17:20:56 07/08/14) Can I ask what you were paying those two kids? Sometimes pay determines how much stamina a person has, or is willing to have.
Right now as a high school graduate of 18 I get paid $10 dollars an hr. to stack square bales for neighbors. I work free for my girlfriend's family and with her driving and me stacking on the wagon we do 500 to 600 bales a day... Stacked 400 on the gooseneck the other day and drove 25 miles to deliver with the promise of labor to unload. When I get there their 18 year son and friends were to busy playing video games in the house to help unload the hay for his own horses. left his mother and father unload into the mow so I helped unload the trailer... Sorry for a little rant there but had to let that one out.
 
I did a lot of hay baling as a young fellow Grandpa had 3 racks and a New Holland baler with an M.T.A. powering things I was usualy on the wagons in the feild. We would stack em Tall over 100 on a rack. then after we were done in the feild we would have to help finish up putting the hay in the barn. I didnt like that part too much.No breeze at all and way hotter in the haymow. I helped a couple of the neighbors too good way to make a few $ and I filled out and got tougher than the town kids who spent all day in the house.
 
My summer was no different than the rest of you guys. Neighborhood baling ring so I baled all summer long. My job was on the rack alongside the owner of the baler. He had a big family so one of his kids ran the baler and he and I stacked. He made sure every bale on the reck was placed perfectly and if I stacked a bale a little off center he made me pick it up again and stack it right. He was thirty years older than me, was overweight and smoked and sometimes drank a bit much but he could still outwork me. When it came time to stack the last few bales on the front of the rack he made me jump off so he could stack them. When I look back I admire his perfectionism and toughness. Jim
 
we always bought our hay.
Stacking it in the barn was hard work when you are a kid, and the only pay was.....supper.
I used to help out the farmers to get my family a discount on the hay. no pay for me.
It's where I got my respect for 'real' farmers.
When you are a kid, they all seem as strong as Superman and never get tired!
Watching me struggle with an amused look on their face just made me try harder.
I don't understand some young workers today.
You could have just buried me where I dropped, no way, no how, would I quit in front of those guys.......
 

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