Suburban homeowners have a different set of fall chores than we did back on the farm. In our years on the farm from 1974 to the early eighties, all seasons were busy, even the dead of winter. Fall could be especially busy. It was a short season because the snow could and come at anytime. Fall was especially busy on our farm because we had to gather food in for our herd of cattle which produced upwards of sixty-five calves each year.
Haying usually started at the end of June and continued for three to five weeks. The way we hayed was with a round baler. We cut, raked and baled hay as fast as our Vermeer baler and 21-ft rake could handle it. The hay was left in the field until we were done haying. We were among the first to use round bales and store them outside in New Brunswick. Ideally, we would have put the bales in a building but we did not have the money to build one that would even hold one third of the three hundred large round bales which each weighed up to one ton.
We had two farms, one where the cows stayed most of the time at least when the fences held. The second farm where we had our own hay fields was a little over two miles away. We also bought standing hay as far as five miles away. We had two ways of hauling the hay, one wagon that took five bales but which was not self unloading so needed a large tractor with a loader at each end and the second self-unloading trailer pictured at the top of the post. Hence most of the far-away hay bales were hauled three at a time. Even with less than one hundred bales coming from afar that is a lot of trips at 15 miles per hour.
With loading and unloading, opening and closing gates, each long-distance round trip I made took over an hour. At best with all the other chores that needed doing, four to six trips a day would be as good as I could do. That is an average of fifteen bales a day means that seven full days of driving just from the far away farms. It is likely that we (I had a part time helper) spent at least three weeks hauling hay. A lot of it was very cold work.
Another fall chore that worked into my schedule was chopping second-crop grass or fall oats into a self-unloading wagon. It allowed us to feed the cows on the home farm instead of trucking them to fall pastures. Then there was fall plowing and field clearing. We did not do a lot of plowing, but we each year I tried to do fifteen to twenty acres. In the spring the same field would get harrowed then seeded with oats and triple-mix grass seed.
Along with all these regular items, we had a huge garden, a cow that I milked once a day, manure that needed spreading and all the repairs that go with running a farm. That includes using a welder to fix all the hay handling equipment that broke while handling the large round bales. Then there was putting three to four cords of hardwood mill ends in our woodshed before the snow came.
We also had a large family with three children who were still very young. If my wife hadn't been a complete partner and very supportive of our farming effort, it would have all been impossible. It also helped to have some amazing neighbors and live in a community that supported farming.
Choosing a career where the fall chores were raking leaves and cleaning gutters would have bee a lot easier but not nearly as rewarding. Actually, when the snow came, things slowed down a little. All there was until the calves started coming was to blow the snow off the road which ran a mile back to where the cows wintered. It was easy compared to hauling hay.
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