For all my life I’ve handled small square bales of hay to feed to the cattle. It is a lot of work unloading them off of the hay wagon and putting them away in the barn’s haymow. It’s very hard, hot work in the middle of the summer, but the cattle always need baled hay for the coming winter months. It’s what we’ve done on our farm for many years, but as we’ve gotten older, it’s gotten to be too much and too hard of work for us to do.
Over the years, I’ve baled many thousands of small square bales with my baler. One day several years ago, when I was almost done baling a large field of hay, my hay baler made a very loud bang. It was iron smashing against iron. One of the shafts in a gearbox twisted off, resulting in a lot of busted-up iron. That was the last hay that baler ever baled.
Since I had a little bit of hay left on that field to bale yet, I called up my neighbor and asked him if he could come with his round baler and finish baling it. Harley was more than happy to help us out. I rode on the tractor with him as he round baled it. It was my very first experience with a round baler. I was impressed.
The next couple years, I hired a farmer to make large bales of baleage for us. It was less work for us than the small squares, but it wasn’t the best. It cost a lot of money and there was a lot of wasted hay with it. In the end, we didn’t like it.
So the next year I called Harley back up and had him come and round bale a large field of hay for us. It worked well and we were able to store the round bales in our haymow where we could easily get at them in the winter months. And it was so much easier handling these than what the small squares were. Better yet, the cattle liked them better too since we didn’t lose near as many of the alfalfa leaves in the baling process.
That coming winter, Harley informed us that because of his age he was getting out of farming. He wanted to know if we were interested in buying his baler. I had been hoping we could just keep hiring him to do our baling and be able to use his bale wagon too. Now that was out.
At my age, I didn’t care to learn how to run a round baler anymore. But, having made some changes around here, the round bales were working really well for us. So I decided I better learn how to run a round baler.
I told Harley I was interested in buying his baler, and I wondered what he wanted for it. He told me he wouldn’t sell it to me. I was surprised. He told me that he wanted me to come and get it the next summer and try it out – and then if I liked it, we would talk price.
Summer came, and I took my tractor to Harley’s. He helped us get it all hooked up. A few days later, I was out baling hay with it. I really had to watch what I was doing at first with it. It worked well and I made a bunch of beautiful round bales with it. We were able to put up a lot more hay in a day with it, and the bales were so much easier to handle. And the cows greatly look forward to that hay.
After that, Harley sold me his baler for a reasonable price. We were so happy to get it. It has made haying so much easier for us. It’s been a real blessing. I only wish now that I would have had a round baler many years ago already. I’m glad my old baler went bang.
They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, which may be true. It may be true that some older people don’t want to learn new things too. But I’m glad I was willing to learn something new, even though I was kind of hesitant to do so. We’ve been so blessed making hay this way.
We can all choose to keep learning and growing no matter what our age is. When we stop learning and growing, we start dying. As for me, I want to keep living, learning and growing until the day I go home to be with my Lord.
