Haying: A ritual of necessity (June 28, 1988) This may be the only feature article ever written about haying for a daily newspaper, at least in Massachusetts. Considering how many acres of hay are grown in Franklin County it’s an enormously important activity that’s as much a part of our landscape as the hills and rivers. I loved spending the better part of a day with these Shelburne folks and riding on their Ford tractor to get a rolling view of haying.
SHELBURNE – Jonathan Graves, 18, is dwarfed by the blue Ford 5610 tractor under him. The teeth of the red farm mower it’s pulling cut a 9-foot swath of thigh-high timothy hay and orchard grass, crimps and spits it as the noisy equipment rolls over the field off Peckville Road.
One field over, separated by a row of tall trees, his uncle, 41-year-old James Graves, is riding a red Massey-Ferguson tractor down windrows of hay that were cut a couple of days before.
He looks behind him often, watching as the cut hay is scooped up, tied into neat bales, and then thrown into a red wagon trailing at the end of this agricultural train.
Along comes Timothy Graves, 16, driving another blue Ford tractor, with which he will pull a wagon load of about 130 bales his uncle has just collected.
He hitches the wagon on the back of his rig, nods casually to his uncle across the field and hauls the wagon of hay back to the barn.
It’s a ritual that began in late May and will continue into the fall. It began late in the morning and will end long after dark. It began generations ago on the Graves farm.
It’s called making hay while the sun shines.
Jonathan and his brother Timothy are ninth-generation farmers on what is today the 300-acre Ira W. Graves farm. It’s not as though all other activity stops for haying season on this dairy farm, presided over by its namesake, their 80-year-old grandfather … or on any other farm, for that matter.
Half of the 110 Holsteins still have to be milked, the heifers still must be fed, the barn cleaned and manure stored for later spreading … and the countless other chores that make dairying a more-than-full-time proposition.
Business of necessity
If the boys’ father, 53-year-old Edwin Graves, seems like he’s taking it easy — eating his breakfast after 9 a.m. before heading out to tend to the replacement heifers — that’s because he’s recovering from a late night of putting hay away in the sweltering “mow,” or storage area, of the 105-foot-long barn just the other side of Wilson Graves Road (named for Ira’s father, Edwin’s grandfather.)
“We’re pushing, pushing, pushing,” says Edwin, explaining the haying business as he finishes his oatmeal in the kitchen of what is the oldest house in Shelburne.
“We just try to get enough sleep to keep going.”
On the wall behind the balding, graying-haired man is a sampler, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
“Last night, we were working ’til 10,” he says, by way of explaining why he hasn’t started his chores at 7 today, as usual.
“We didn’t get the wagons unloaded until late. It was a hot, humid day. Up in the top of the barn, you can get lightheaded. When you’re out in the field, the wind is blowing at you and it helps.”
“The hay business here is one of necessity,” he explains, “to feed the cows.”
At the rate of about 100 40-pound bales an acre with some 100 acres of I hay fields to go over, the family farm may yield about 10,000 bales a year — give or take a few thousand.
Up to 3,000 bales, however, may be sold for horses. In fact, Edwin Graves plans to deliver the last 100 bales of last year’s hay this afternoon to the federal government for its wild horse adoption program in Whately.
“The weather’s been super,” Graves says. “The hay’s just as green as grass.” The dry spring doesn’t affect this first cutting, which began May 25 i and which has been soaking up the i springtime groundwater to yield a ‘ fancy, tender crop, Three-quarters of the yield may be from the first cutting, which tends to have more of the bulk and goes to the heifers and for horses.
The second, or rowen, crop, which begins to grow after the first cutting, twill more likely be affected by the dry weather. That cutting, which I comes about six to eight weeks after the first, will be used exclusively for the milking cows. It should be completed by Labor Day, says Edwin Graves.
“Attention during September goes t to harvesting corn, raised on 50 | acres of rented land. After that harvest — which is fed as 1,200 tons of t silage to the 70 milking cows along I with the rowen hay and four ton a | week of soybean grain — the family ” returns to haying.
The third cutting, “whatever we can cut from there on out,” is “green chop,” trimmed into smaller bits and fed directly to the milking cows rather than being baled and going ‘ into storage in one of the family’s three barns * The Graveses, unlike many farmers, don’t pasture their milking cows, but find it’s better economically to feed them in the barn and harvest the ha
The family has harvested as much as 1,000 bales of hay a day, says Edwin, but the total usually runs been 600 and 700 bales.
But hay isn’t just hay. It’s timothy a long-tipped grass — or orchard -grass, the tip of which is composed lot clusters of short grains. Or it’s alfalfa, which has short leaves, and which alter a while will be squeezed I out of a field by the other grasses so I that it has to be re-seeded. The alfalfa needs to be cut and baled before | its small leaves — which hold most i of the protein fall off.
A bale of hay will often contain all timothy and orchard grass, and “Sometimes alfalfa, blossoms and all.
Eye on the sky
“Everything stops when it’s raining,” says Edwin Graves, finishing his morning coffee. Those are the days the family turns attention to spreading manure, which it gets both from their own cows and from the Diemand egg farm in Wendell.
If the hay is left out, ready to bale, in a heavy rain, he explains, it can still be tedded, or fluffed up to dry, enough so that can it be fed directly to the heifers “You keep an eye on the sky all the time,” Edwin says.
“The minute it stops raining, my son grabs the tedder, that stirs up and gets it up in the air so the sun and wind can get through it.” It may be two to three days from he time the hay is cut until it’s raked, tedded, baled and stored in the the mow, depending largely on the weather during that time.
“Sometimes it’s perfectly dry when it’s on the ground,” says Edwin. The minute it’s baled, it goes onto the wagon. If it’s on the ground (in bales), it picks up moisture underneath. It goes right into the barn,” often keeping some of its warmth from the sun.
There is a problem if a bale contains moisture, however. That can produce heat, which can lead to spontaneous combustion. For that reason, some bales lie near the base of the barn elevator, rejected because of a telltale strip of moisture.
This bale, which weighs perhaps 60 rather than 40 to 45 pounds, won’t go up the vertical elevator into the barn. It’s separated out and “goes right to’the heifers,” says Edwin.
At about 6, the outdoor haying process ends, Edwin says, because of dew on the ground. Attention turns to milking and getting the remaining hay up in the mow.
Old days Ira Graves, a white-haired man sporting a blue Ford cap and wearing suspenders over his light-blue work shirt, recalls when haying wasn’t as mechanized, but was done with hand rakes, pitchforks and scythes.
“I was brought up with a scythe when I was 16,” says Graves, a bespectacled man who lives on the side of the 1762 house that was originally a tavern on the Cheapside-Jacksonville, Vt., stagecoach road.
“We never really started haying ’til the Fourth of July, and we finished by the 25th of July. There were just two cuttings. It was just a means of survival. Now we’re just as commercial as General Motors,” he adds, with a wry smile.
On what was originally a 29-acre farm with more apple trees than cows, “we’d almost ration the hay. Everything was rationed. It was very efficient.”
“When we first started raising alfalfa, they’d say, ‘Don’t cut it ’til it’s three-quarters in bloom. Now farmers are so eager.” The elder Graves recalls when hay was shaken up with a pitchfork and hand-raked into the windrows, then put from the horse wagons up into the barn using a “double harpoon” and pulley system His son, Edwin, recalls when the wagons were backed up to the big red barn and the hay was thrown loose inside and packed in.
“There’s just 24 hours in a day, and if you do it by hand, you’re limited,” he explains. “We never had but 20 cows then.” The barn holds 5,500 bales of hay in its third-story loft. There are 3,000 bales there already, estimates Edwin.
Now, his 14-year-old daughter, Stephanie, climbs up the rungs of the ladder to the loft and looks down from the window to brother, Tim.
Picking them up by the twine, he’s placing the bales from the wagon onto the chugging elevator on the barn’s eastern side.
The bales are carried up with spikes. Stephanie helps each for a second as it turns and enters the barn, where it continues its journey on the 100-foot-long chain conveyer to the mow on the opposite end. A “butterfly” lever controls whether the bales drop to the right or left, as needed. Usually, Stephanie explains, her father is there to place the bales in their final resting place. Today, he’s out delivering hay.
Neat bundles There’s a big black metal box perched on the fender of Jim Graves’ blue Ford tractor, aimed at the driver’s seat. It’s an AM-FM radio.
“It helps when you start to fall asleep,” he explains. Hours of riding in patterns — such as the concentric rings he’s making as he rakes hay now in a field off Colrain Road — can be monotonous, particularly in intense heat. “It gets bad when you get into July and August,” he says
Jim Graves, a heavy-set man wearing green suspenders, a blue T-shirt and a “Graves Maple” hat — recalling the sugaring operation he’s responsible for in late winter — figures he spends about seven hours a day haying in season, in addition to barn chores like milking.
The hay his rake is working was cut two days earlier and raked once yesterday. Now he’s turning it over again so the bottom will dry out before it’s baled.
This is one of about half a dozen rented hay fields, totaling about perhaps 60 acres.
“The houses keep popping up,” he says. “We keep moving around them lunch in his house — just down Wilson Graves Road from the 1762 homestead — Graves switches to the red Massey-Ferguson tractor, pulling behind him a John Deere baler and the 16-foot-long red hay wagon.
Before starting on the field he’d re-raked a few hours earlier, he loads a spool in the baler with 4,350 feet of new twine. When the collected hay reaches a predetermined weight, it will be tied into a neat rectangular bundle, then passed onto a “kicker” which will throw it maybe 15 feet in the air into the back of the wagon.
It doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to, though.
Graves alternates between watching where he’s going and watching the hay that collects into the baler and then, every 20 seconds or so, shoots upward as a neat bundle.
From his seat, the driver can adjust how far the bales are thrown, and tilt the toss to either side of the wagon.
At first, the bales overshoot the metal fence, maybe 10 feet in height, at the far end of the wagon and then drop back onto the field. There’s a little anxiety as the bale nears the top of the hayrack — like watching a basketball hovering on the rim of net — to see whether it will stay in or not.
After he adjusts the mechanisms to make the bundles a little heavier, the misses come more seldom.
Sometimes, though, the kicker shoots just as the wagon turns a 90-degree corner.
Less frequently, the baler itself misses with a bad knot, so that the bale “explodes” as is tossed up toward the wagon.
Graves plays it cool. He knows the equipment works a lot better than before there were these “kickers.” Then the bales went onto a “sled” where they collected and dropped 10 at a time onto the ground to be hand lifted by a worker onto a wagon. A few weeks ago, the baler broke, and the Graveses had to borrow a neighbor’s, one that which didn’t have a kicker.
“The kids thought that was great fun to have to pick up the bales and throw them on,” he recalls with a laugh. “That was because it was unusual.” The tractor continues slowly around the field until all the windrows are gone, with Graves watching carefully when he approaches the roadside to see that the bales are not kicked straight into the utility wires.
“You can’t go too awful fast with the baler and the kicker,” says Graves, shifting into one of the tractor’s 16-odd gears.
The wagon is piled maybe eight bales high — 135 or so in all, worth $2 each — when nephew Tim approaches the field with his blue Ford tractor, ready to haul it back to the barn.
The sun is heading down behind the hills toward Colrain, and Jim Graves has at least two more fields of haying to do before he can head back to help at the barn. But there’s a nice breeze, there’s no boss at his back and overall, this isn’t a bad place to be.
“They say if you enjoy what you’re doing,” he says, “it’s not work.” — RICHIE DAVIS