Bringing in (some of) the hay

It's that time of year when we need to start considering winter. This means, among much else, bringing in the hay.

Last year, somewhat out of desperation, we purchased a moderate amount of oat hay to tide us over the winter when we ran low on feed. Not oat straw; but oat hay, with the seeds intact. There was nothing else available for sale. It made for immensely heavy bales, but the seller assured us his cows loved it.

Yowza, he wasn't kidding. Our cows positively stinkin' adore this oat hay. So, since the seller's prices are comparable to regular grass hay, we let him know early in the spring that we were committing to purchasing eight tons when he harvested his fields.

Before we could take delivery, however, we needed to figure out how to stack and store the hay. This took several weeks of strategic planning. The reason is because neither Don nor I are willing (or even able) to lift 100-lb bales, much less 160 of them (eight tons), at our age. We needed to let the tractor do the heavy lifting. To do that, we needed specialized implements. And so the planning began.

We already have heavy-duty spikes that attach to the tractor bucket that can be used to support heavy things, such as hay bales. But when Don tried to stab a bale with these spikes to lift it, the spikes were too thick and didn't penetrate the bale. They merely push it. Last year we got by with these spikes because I pushed every bale on top of the spikes, but it was brutally hard work and awkward to place the bales where we wanted.

So this year, Don wanted spikes that actually penetrated the bales. To this end, he worked with a neighbor who does welding and metal work. Don ordered a couple of stainless steel rods capable of supporting 200 lbs. each, brought them to the neighbor. This fellow sharpened the tips of the rods into a dull point, and then welded the rods to a base that could attach to the tractor bucket. This way, Don could stab a bale to move it. As it turned out, these steel rods worked extremely well.

We ordered a delivery of 20 pallets from a nearby hardware store. We have pallets all over the place, but by this point most of them are so rotten and broken that they're not worth much more than scrap wood. This hardware store sells newer pallets for $5/each (delivered). We'd have gone to pick them up ourselves, but we're without a truck at the moment so delivery worked better.

The next thing Don did was to order fork-lift attachments that fit on the front of the tractor bucket. The idea is we could stack the bales on a pallet, lift the loaded pallet with this fork-life attachment, and transport the pallets into the barn and/or into an outdoor location to be tarped for the winter (we knew in advance we didn't have room in the barn for all the hay).

Next, of course, we cleaned the barn and made as much space as possible.

The issue of stacking the bales was compounded by a lack of room. The driveway area in front of the barn is V-shaped and bisected by an enormous plum tree, as well as being sloped. The barn itself is limited in space since it has both the wood shop and the tool shop bracketed the center aisle, so maneuverability with the tractor is limited. This is the reality of what we have to deal with. Our job was to make it work.

The seller made arrangements to deliver the first two tons, which come in two-strand 100-lb. bales. Here, Don is directing the farmer who is backing his trailer up our lower driveway.

Forty bales. That's our first load. It would be an opportunity to test our equipment and techniques to see what works and what doesn't.

These are the steel tines. They worked beautifully as long as we positioned them lower in the bale. If they were higher, they just slid out the top and snagged the baling twine, which was too unsteady (the bales were more likely to explode).

You can see the tips of the tines poking out.

By this technique, we managed to get first four, then six bales neatly stacked on a few pallets. My job during this process was not just guiding Don on the finer points of positioning, but then to push and shove the bales into cross-wise positions (since there was no room for the tractor to come in from different directions).

Incidentally, we stacked the pallets under the plum tree in the driveway, which proceeded to rain overripe squishy plums on top.

As we worked, we squashed plums underfoot and against the pallets. Honestly, it looked like we were working in a crime scene, with blood smeared everywhere.

After we got a few pallets stacked, it was time to remove the steel tine attachments and switch over to the fork lift attachments to move the pallets into the barn.

As it turned out, Don got the wrong-sized attachments. He thought the 43-inch attachments would suffice, rather than the 60-inch attachments. What he didn't realize was those measurements didn't apply simply to the length of the tines, but to the overall length of the attachments (including the portion that affixes to the tractor bucket). As a result, the tines didn't extend or support the entire width of a pallet, which meant transporting a pallet of hay bales was tippy to the point of dangerous.

The first pallet he tried to pick up tipped, tumbling all the bales off and exploding one of them. Grunt.

This was due, in part, to the limitations of the tractor as well. The weight of the bales plus the pallet, cantilevered out from the front of the bucket, was too much for the hydraulics on the tractor. He could lift the pallet, but the hydraulics would not let him tip it inward to compensate for the angle of lift, so everything fell off. Ironically, if he had the means to attach the fork-life tines to the back of the tractor, he could have lifted all six bales with ease – but we didn't have that. In other words, we had to figure things out as we went.

In the end, we restacked the pallets with four bales instead of six, and that worked well enough that he could carefully creep and transport a few pallets in the barn. Frustratingly, there wasn't enough space in the barn to maneuver the tractor to stack the pallets in a tidy rectangular arrangement. Instead, we had to put them in a diagonal formation. We tried stacking ten bales high, with me standing on a stepstool to position the bales while directing Don on the tractor. It. Took. Hours.

By this point we had some weather moving in (thunderstorm), so we hastily transported the exploded bale inside. We just dumped the hay on the floor, to be used first.

Then we tarped the remaining stacked pallets until conditions cleared. (We moved them into the barn a couple days later.)

Processing these forty bales took, I kid you not, about eight hours of work – and we still have another 120 bales coming in! At least now we have a better idea of what works and what doesn't. We estimate we can fit about half the total number of bales in the barn, and the rest will have to be stacked and stoutly tarped outside. It will actually be easier to stack them outside since at least there's a little more maneuvering room than in the barn.

I guess all this exercise is keeping us healthy at our age....