and straw bales in a few weeks……..all stacked up in fields, in the sunshine……they are just begging to climbed aren’t they…. I mean come on…..just look at them…….Paul (aged 49)

RIP Mike Edwards

I miss the proper old bales. You could build amazing tunnels and castles with them. These modern circular ones are no fun!

I miss the proper old bales. You could build amazing tunnels and castles with them. These modern circular ones are no fun!

Really? Danny Mac seemed to have fun on one…

My lungs probably disagree. But, the tunnels and dens we used to make as kids were labyrinthine works of art. Such fun. Such a health risk 🙁

I miss the proper old bales. You could build amazing tunnels and castles with them. These modern circular ones are no fun!

Will probably have 1000 or so to stack by hand in the next couple of weeks at the in-laws. My fingers are sore at the thought of it.

Hay bales

Hey speshpaul!

Having spent a few weeks one summer loading the ‘good old’ bales onto a trailer then unloading them at the farm I love the big new ones.

Having limited space on the farm where I grew up we would set the compression on the baler quite high so the bales would weigh 30-40Kg. It wasn’t too bad with the old sisal baler twine but with the newer polypropylene the weight really dug into your hands so you had to use either gloves or a bale hook (think along the lines of a big fishing hook with a wooden handle).

In the 1960s there were a lot of bad summers so we’d stack the bales in the fields in long rows of two bales lent against one another and aligned with the prevailing wind to help dry them a bit more before putting them into the barns.

The modern big bales require less manpower to move around, loading a trailer with the old style bales required at least two people, usually three, then a similar number at the barn.

Ah baling…

I used to love stacking bales by hand – good bit of graft it was & just a touch of skill to building a good stack.

I kind of missed it went the bales got bigger even if it was a sh1t load easier!

When I was younger I used to have a casual summer job bringing in the old rectangular bales and stacking them. It was the best job ever. Outside in the sun (you could only do it in good weather 8) ) standing on a trailer playing giant, real, 3D Tetris as the farmer loaded bales 6 at a time onto it. Eventually, you’d end up on top of a haystack of your own building, 20 foot off the ground, whereupon you’d sit on your creation and get towed back to the farmyard. Then chuck it all off and stack it up again. Break for a bacon sarnie (it was a pig farm 😀 ), sit on the stack and put the world to rights, then start again. Happy days.

At the risk of sounding old I can remember helping to make haystacks with a pike when a child on my dads family farm, none of these fancy bails.
However my dad did spend an hour watching a bailer working at a farm a few years ago and was mightily impressed so perhaps the old ways weren’t so good!

I have so many great memories from summers as a kid, helping get all the bales back to the farms.
It was all manual work, stacking them on the trailer, then get to ride on top of this massive load of bales back to the farm(having to lie down to avoid power lines etc)

the smell of a harvested field always takes me right back to all this.

Sounds very familiar thenorthwind..
😉

The only time we used pikes was with oats: we had an old binder that cut and bound the oats into sheafs. We’d stack these in the fields in a similar manner to how I described stacking bales and once they’d dried we’d load them onto the trailer using pikes.

At some time during autumn a threshing machine would come round all the local farms and we’d pitchfork the sheafs out of the barn into the thresher and get grain and straw out of the other end. All the farms would work together, so a couple of days everyone would be at our farm then a day at the next farm along and so on.

Things move on, lack of itinerant labour, general costs, farms moving to silage (I really don’t like the smell of silage even though it’s nutritionally better for the animals).

Yes just googled a pike for some reason my dads lot always called a fork a pike – don’t know if that’s from the Irish as they were in a Gaelic ish region

Blimey @whitestone.. How old are you??? 🙂

If I never have to handle a small bale again in my life I will be happy. Didn’t get the little baler out of the shed this year despite saying we would make 50 just because they are handy for feeding ewes when they are in the lambing pens. When the time cane though it was just so much easier with the big bales. And it was too hot to even think about manual work and leaving my air-conditioned cab 🙂

Next year maybe

Can’t get anyone to bale our fields. They’re only a few acres and sloping, the bloke who cuts it says the slope is too much for his baler 🙁

Loved the small bales as a kid.. lost count of the number of times I’ve been buried under a collapsed straw castle.

At least the modern giant square ones can pose a fun physical challenge to the destruction of the haystack.

Only thing the big round ones are any good for is rolling down hills which is not only boring but dangerous if they’re at the side of the road.

Spent many hours on my mate’s farm playing in the barn, throwing cow shit at each other from behind bale fortifications.

Used to build some great things out of bales as a kid. And climbing up the big stacks they sometimes built in the fields was a great challenge – always annoying when the bale you’re holding onto decides to part company with the rest of the stack 😯
I remember my friend and me being caught by the farmer once, but all he said was “I thought you were two lads” then just drove off. Obviously girls wouldn’t be rebuilding his stack from the inside…

It really is the best job on the farm. We used to build some pretty amazing stuff in my grandparent’s barn but making and stacking bales as a family was half the pleasure in it all.

@welshfarmer.

I’m 58. I grew up on a hill farm on the edge of the Lakes so big machinery wasn’t really an option with small fields, stones, slope of fields, etc. Plus everything was very traditional with all that implies. A lot of the machinery used land drive rather than the PTO on the tractor, basically it was stuff from when horses were the means of pulling stuff around and they’d just been replaced by a tractor. Why replace something that works?

Some years ago we visited the Museum of Island Life or whatever it’s called on Arran and my wife was somewhat embarrassed as I’d be going: “There’s a bit missing off that” or “They’ve fitted that lever on wrong way round!” I doubt anyone else would have noticed!

Not hay or straw bales but I once had a summer job filling a massive warehouse with the entire output of a glass wool factory, about seven artics would come in every day and we would throw the bales up onto the pile, somebody walking around on boards to stack them. Once we reached the roof we began building an amazing town of bale chambers with connecting corridors while waiting for the next artic to unload. The rooms were incredibly quiet but hot in sunny weather. My fingers used to ache with throwing hundreds of bales and if we could, we would speed up the unloading by persuading the drivers to open the doors, reverse back at speed then hit the air brakes, which would eject about half the load rather pleasingly onto the floor.

Out on the bike today I smelt the unmistakable smell of pigshit. Took me right back. It was almost unbearable and I was 200 yards UPwind (and it was pretty windy) 😯 Got me all nostalgic, but I probably don’t really miss that bit.

Baling those square bales was **** hard work!!

“I’d kill for a pint of water”
[video]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mPDJSblJeMc[/video]

Can I go up on top of the trailer! I swear to god I’ll be careful 😀

Seen the Saw Doctors a few times back in the day with old friends.

Sometimes when I’m grinding away on a long road ride or fire road climb, I get “bale ’em, bale ’em, hay, hay” coming into my head to the rhythm of my pedalling.

thank you, Mary MacDonald, for some very special hay bale memories.