Battling the baler
In a surprising stroke of luck, we have completed our first farm’s worth of hay. We have 30-plus round bales of lovely green feed hay tucked into our barn already, awaiting (hopefully for a good while) the winter.
We don’t often get started this early, due in part to my husband’s lack of desire, and end up baling what he calls “a few.” We often need an extra day or two of dry weather to get put up all of what he mows down, so to have an entire farm complete already makes me, at least, feel a bit accomplished.
It wasn’t without its struggles, however. We had one section that wasn’t particularly nice hay, so we planned to square bale it for mulch. The first night we attempted it, we got rained on. Not so much rained on, actually, as poured on. You remember that rain that was super difficult to drive in and see through late last week? Yeah, we were outside in it, trying to cover the baler and what bales we had in the wagon with a tarp.
Limited success, by the way.
A day or two later, we shook the last few windrows out to dry again and pulled the equipment back into the open. The baler made a couple of very nice bales and then would kick out a bale about three inches wide. Hubby made some adjustments and tried again with the same result. Finally, he changed a wheel that feeds the arm that tells the machine when to tie a knot (or something like that, I’m not mechanically inclined!) and we tried again.
The baler needles began to repeatedly swing each time a bale was made. This resulted in a mass of twine wrapping around the duck-billed thingy and several of the other thingies involved in the knotting process. It also resulted in my husband beginning to swear.
The act of cutting the twine off those components and rethreading the twine took several minutes each time. My smaller hands were employed in reaching the small spaces on more than one occasion. Fortunately, it was only one occasion that one of the knotter thing fell and smashed my fingers. Ouch!
We finally completed the field by stopping each time the needles moved, signaling the completion of a bale so that I could manually complete the knot on one side of the last few bales. We figured if we could get the hay home and unloaded, we could back the baler into the barn and deal with it there, rain or shine.
That is the plan for the week: to feed hay into the baler in the barn over and over until we find the problem with it tying. Any volunteers to help? I promise you won’t have to stick your fingers in anywhere that they could be smashed!
I won’t promise, however, that my husband will refrain from swearing.
Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@verizon.net.