Making Hay

I grew up mostly in suburbia and my career path has always kept me in big cities. Colloquialisms like “make hay while the sun shines”, or “having a field day” were quaint sayings of another era that pretty much never came up in conversation, and if they did it was to garner a laugh. I knew they had agricultural origins, but the pragmatism of them escaped me until the first time I watched the dairy farmer up the road come and hay the field to the south of us. When I see Harold on his tractor, we’re going to have sun, or at least no rain for the next three days.

He got a loan a couple of years ago and upgraded his equipment to include some Case tractors, a new cutter, tetter, bailer, and some contraption that will lift a thousand pound bale of hay, spin it while two opposing arms loaded with plastic wrap spin on the opposite axis and set it back down looking like a very large sugar cube. Or if he’s doing 1,300 pound round bales, the field ends up looking like some giant dropped their bag of marshmallows. There is no Winslow Homer romanticism or Monet hay stacks here. This is all business, and the speedier they can get from standing grass to bale the better. The sun doesn’t have to shine as long with this kind of high-tech giddyup, and not one hand touches that hay.

DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS
The farmer that hays our field is a different kind of animal. He’s a nice guy even though he has a tattoo on his arm that says, “does not play well with others”. In contrast to the speedy newer machines, he has a much older tractor and attachments. They’re always breaking down, and we never know when he’s coming, but I’m not sure which is more satisfying to watch. No spinning, swirling, or shrink wrapping here. His bailer spits out seventy pound square bales, and when it’s time to pick it up, three or four, or if he’s lucky, five strapping young men will show up, grab those bales and toss them onto the hay wagon as it’s being slowly pulled around the field. This is called “bucking” and while slower, it has the same economy of motion as the new gear, but it comes from years, possibly generations of learned efficiency and practicality. An urban sophisticate would do well to watch and learn. The frenzied multi-tasker might gain insight by seeing a process started and finished with such methodical, tangible results.