Unfortunately I did not have my camera with me today. What a shame, I saw some great stuff! At tractors this morning Erika and I were up on a new field doing some raking when the hydraulics went on the tractor. We walked down the road to find John and Greg who were baling on a lower pasture. We spotted them out past the barn so we decided to cut through his barn area to get out to him. Big mistake! As we were trying to find our way over fences and obstacles and tall unmowed grass it started to get sort of mushy. I told Erika, "Hey maybe this is a swamp or something, we should probably just go around the other side of the barn." She was like "nah, it'll be fine." She begins confidently leading the way with me trailing behind. We come to a dusty brown clearing and figure we're past the worst of it. Erika takes two steps out onto the clearing and sinks in up to her waist. I watched in amazement as the entire surface of the clearing rolled like a wave when she hit it. After we both stopped laughing I said "wow that looks like a bog or something...or maybe a leech field." Erika clearly needed help so I passed her a long stick and laid out some plastic so she could crawl out. Note to self: Fences are there for a reason. Turns out we wandered into the Dunbar's manure pit. Rather than use layered hay bedding that must be mucked out after several weeks they use sawdust. The sawdust is emptied out daily along with the manure and dumped into a big pit. Then they pump the pit into a manure spreader to fertilize the pastures when they need to. Apparently cows wander in to it sometimes and drown (it's 6 feet deep in the middle). Last year they had a calf swim out in the middle and they couldn't get it to come back. Finally Mark was able to lasso it with a garden hose and drag it back in. I was told there is also a popular pastime called "a mexican dare" where the hired immigrant help dare each other to try to run across a manure pit. I wouldn't recommend it.
In the afternoon I had farm hand work. Stewart brought me up to his kickass old farm house to help him move a freezer and a wood stove. Then we went down to Jodi's farm (my farmstead arts teacher), to help her husband with the haying. He uses a square baler instead of round baling like John Dunbar does. The square bales are smaller and lighter (40-70 lbs) than the round bales (500-700 lbs) so they can be moved by hand and stacked in a barn. Our first job was to follow around the baler and pick up any stray bales that missed the wagon. I say missed because a square baler has a "kicker" on it. Instead of just dumping the bale like a round baler, the square baler shoots the bale out the back of the baler and into a wagon in tow. Sometimes if you're going around a corner though it might shoot one off into oblivion down an embankment or something. Next we loaded the bales from the wagon into the barn. One guy was down below dropping the bales onto the conveyor belt, one guy was taking the bales off the conveyor at the window to the hay loft (Jodi's 9 year-old daughter), one guy was taking the bales from the floor and heaving them up into the upper loft (me), and one guy was arranging them up in the upper loft (Jodi's husband). It was great exercise, great people, a beautiful view, and a beautiful day. All around Great work! I don't have any pictures so I guess I'll get to keep this day for myself.
I might want to start wearing gloves though...
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