View From The Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

A couple Saturday mornings ago as I watched my favorite weekly farm show US FARM REPORT, there was a segment regarding antique hay carrier equipment in dairy barns like I still have.

A fellow on the east coast collected a wide variety of these “trolleys” that helped thousands of livestock farmers in North America to move their hay from the field to storage in barns.

Seeing that triggered my curiosity in my own barn, which was converted by a skilled carpenter to its present use as a machinery storage building.

The whole inside of the former dairy barn looks entirely different than when it was used until 1999 for milking around 40 cows.

The hay mow floor was removed to make room for modern farm equipment to be stored in there, which would have been impossible with the underside of the hay mow being made about 10 feet above the cement floor.

The barn, with a round type of roof high enough to store many tons of hay, with four “chutes” designed around and built around 1930 by my grandfather Andrew Tollefson, for actually, loose hay.

Anyone with any practical knowledge of construction would know that you cannot take out the hay mow floor, but still have proper bracing for the round roof.

So my skilled carpenter designed heavy wood braces bolted into the cement floor of the barn, extending high into the underside of the roof in numerous places on both east side and west sides.

The north side of the barn was remodeled to accommodate a very tall and wide overhead door.

Ok, back to the track in the underside peak of the barn—it’s still there, bringing back memories of filling the hay mow with loose hay.  The picture with the column will show the north side of the barn with the peak extending out so that the heavy sisal rope could lift the “slings” of hay from the hay rack into the barn via a rope extending out of the northeast corner of the barn, hooked onto first horses, and later a small Ford tractor to pull the slings, one a time (usually two or three on a hay rack) up into the peak, where it would end its vertical journey, to become a horizontal journey as far into the barn as desired.  It would be “tripped” by a small rope extending to the ground.

To load the loose hay from a windrow of hay dry enough to store, was usually put onto hay racks with a hay loader pulled behind the hay rack.  The hay loader extended over the rear of the hay rack and picked up the hay with curved tines and moved it either with side-by-side wooden bars with one-way tines on them, or some models had chain-driven wood slats that deposited the hay at the rear of the hay rack.  The farmer then had to distribute the hay over the length of the hay rack by pitch fork, a formidable job for sure.  Fortunately, my brother and I did not have to do much of that.

When balers came on the scene, they were still handled by hand, but the bales were moved by grabbing the two twines, or often using a bale hook with a handle on it to stack them on hay racks.

Once at the barn, the bales could be moved with a clamping device which would grab maybe 8 or 10 bales, and be put in the barn with the same rope device as with using the hay slings.

At our farm, we designed hay conveyors into the barn which meant that the fellow or gal on the hay rack would put one bale at a time onto the chain conveyor, then one or two people up in the barn would stack them as necessary.

However, bales of hay are highly compressed, and given that the barn floor was strong enough to support loose hay quite high in the barn, baled hay was much more dense, so we did not stack them more than ten or fifteen feet high.

Some years before I quit milking cows in 1999, I had invested in a Farmhand bale buncher and clamp, which was a handy invention. The buncher, which held 8 small square bales, was pulled behind the baler and would automatically make individual stacks of 8 bales.

To move those 8-bale piles, an attachment for my tractor loader could grab those individual piles, hydraulically latch onto them with 2 clamps on each bale, and the pile could be moved to a hay rack, stacked outside or under a hay shed.

In the realm of hay harvesting now you can drive through the countryside and see at least three methods of handling hay, mostly alfalfa, but of course some grass hay from road ditches and other odd places.  Maybe the most popular is round bales, which are made with balers that can move very quickly through the field.  Those are bound up with sisal twine, plastic twine, or as is very common—net wrap.

A lot of alfalfa is put up by chopping, where the crop is cut by a swather, either self-propelled or tractor-drawn, and crushed or crimped to speed drying.  Quite often hay put up that way can be cut one day and chopped the next, into a silo or a pile on the ground, or into plastic-wrapped “sausage-like” bags, or individual bales to be wrapped with plastic.  And you will also see a considerable number of large square bales being made, to be handled by tractors or skid loaders, loading onto flatbeds or semi-trucks for transporting short or long distances.

At my farm, I chopped alfalfa for many years, and it went into an 18 by 60-foot cement silo with a ring-drive unloader in it. With that larger silo, I also had a silo with corn silage in it, as well as a silo with ground shelled or ear corn, combining the contents of all three in a feed bunk outside, where the cows ate twice a day.

So in my farming career, I have seen lots of changes since starting farming on my own. It is fun to be part of “feeding the world!”

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Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net