Making hay

Saturday morning (July 11th) was our second farmers market. We still don't have any vegetables since its been so cold.

We have lots of pork though and it sold quite well.

In the afternoon I cut a bit of hay, here I'm getting started.

Finished cutting. Its a little hard to see the hay because of the camera angle. This field was on the thin side also. The hay crop has been poor this year, a lot of farmers are getting only a quarter or half of what they'd normally get.

We started incubating eggs to hatch some more egg birds. And tonight we had the first arrivals, the baby chicks in the above picture are a few hours old.

The first cutting of hay for the season. Its been really dry so the hay is pretty thin looking. We've been having a drought for the last five years, and the stress is really starting to show.

After hay is cut and has dried its then raked into windrows so it can be baled.

Finished raking. Basically a rake just scoops the hay into windrows.

Baling the hay, a baler scoops the hay up and compresses it into bales, we use square bales.

The bales are pushed out the back of the baler so you can grab and stack them.

Sometimes bales break, this tends to be a problem when the hay is really thin. We got about 80 bales off this field, last year it was 130.

Sometimes the baler jams and doesn't work. The previous owner didn't take care of this baler and the plunger (the part that compresses the hay) will get stuck. Using chains and a come along we got it moving again. We had to do this twice, and it made for a really long day night. It should have only taken an hour to bale up this field, instead it took about two and a half.