[humblegunner]

One Helluva Bad Day

Hit count plunging at Canada Free Blog?

[marktwain]

Did a fair amount of haying when I was that age. Hot, sweaty, itchy, dangerous, hard physicallabor.

Mostly mechanized now.

[chris37]

It's funny how you link to the same website all day, every day, and you never say anything to anyone.

Things that make you go hmmm...

[alexander_busek]

Bucked bails (rarely straw bales - usually hay bales... often even pea-hay, which is especially dense) every summer of my life from age twelve to 22 in SW Washington. Usually without a grain elevator hitched to the side of a big truck with high side walls, travelling up and down the field at 2-3 mph. My little brother (at first only ten years old) would drive, my father stood in the bed and stacked, while I walked alongside the truck and used hay hooks to drag the bales to the back of the truck and heave them up and onto the bed. (Later, when the truck was nearly full, had to push them up the sides.) We would average 175 bales per truckload, and four or so truckloads per day (including unloading the bales and stacking them in the barn).

Unfortunately, my father also dealt in bales, so we would buck far more than we needed for our own livestock (Polled Herefords).

Dirty, back-breaking, dangerous work: Ever get a hay hook in the back by mistake - or your fingers caught in the chain drive of a hay elevator - or fall off a pile stacked 20 bales high - or breathe in the dust while crawling around in the black crawlspace at the top of a stack reaching almost to the rafters of a barn?

Modern health and safety laws would prohibit an adult worker from doing those things - and we were pre-teens.

Regards,

[IronJack]

We raised horses (among other livestock) and fed them a lot of hay. Alfalfa mostly. I tossed my share of bales onto the flatbed and from the flatbed into the barn. The heat ... the dust ... the sweat. Vivid!

You couldn’t go shirtless or wear shorts unless you wanted to shed a few layers of skin, so you sweltered in long-sleeve/long-pants attire. Brutal, soul-shaping work.

[Twinkie]

I chopped cotton for two weeks when I was 14. That was hard
work; but I’m thankful I didn’t have a lifestyle that
called for that kind of manual labor all my life.

I used to have to toss down small haybales to the animals
below from the loft of the barn.