Making Hay

Every summer we made close to 100 acres of hay. My father disapproved of silage which he thought tainted the milk. In Ayrshire, at around 600 feet above sea level, we made our hay in July. The tractormen did the more skilled tasks of mowing and baling, but working the cut hay and gathering it in was anyone’s job. Bales of hay are heavier than straw, oblong in shape, and secured by ‘binder twine’ which burned your fingers if you let them slide along the cord. Usually it was better to dig your fingers into the bale to lift it. Until your hands toughened up, dried thistles or grass stems under your fingernails were an unpleasant hazard.

The baler would chug along, dropping bales at intervals across the field as it consumed the lines of hay. As children we were too weak to lift bales but we got a few pennies for rolling them together into heaps. This made it easier for the men to fork them onto trailers or the old milk lorries that were drafted in for the season. Later a bale ‘sledge’ was acquired which was towed behind the baler. It consisted of a wooden platform with stout steel prongs mounted behind it that supported the bales until the miniature stack was complete. The task of arranging the bales into a triangular pile resting on these forks at the back of the sledge was brutally physical and was conducted in a choking cloud of dust and flying fragments of dry grass. The ram on the baler rocked the whole rig back and forth making it difficult to keep your balance. Once a pile of 10 bales was constructed, a lever at the side released it onto the field. This had to be done sharply to avoid the pile tipping over. The process then began again.

I started driving tractors at 9 and cars and lorries at 11. Aged 9 I was insufficiently heavy to depress the clutch on a tractor using gravity alone. I had to brace myself against the steering wheel and push down with all my strength. On the way back up, with the spring resisting, controlled engagement of first gear was tricky. The accelerator on a tractor was a lever mounted on the steering column and it stayed wherever you put it, fixing the revs. My favourite tractor was our ancient ‘wee grey Fergie’ (Ferguson TEA 20) which had 4 forward gears and was quite fast. You started it by depressing a brass button with the inner side of your right lower leg and pushing the gear lever into ‘S’. It also had a ‘Ki-Gass’ button which I never understood. I loved the smell of fresh hay and diesel.

At first I simply drove the lorries or tractors between the piles of bales in the fields, stopping at each one so that the two-man team could fork them up to whoever was building the load. The older lorries’ gearboxes lacked synchromesh so I learned early how to double declutch to changing down smoothly. This was useful later when driving cars at rally speeds around country roads. As I got older and stronger I graduated from driving to load-building, learning to lock the bales together like laying bricks.

Bales varied in length and some of the longer ones needed slammed into any gap that was slightly too small. Kneeling down, this took considerable strength and timing, especially when the team with the pitchforks were trying to bury you in more bales. I never made it to pitchforker status. The relentless parade of tractors and lorries shuttling from field to hay sheds meant that the men with the pitchforks were in constant action. In addition to strength and stamina, timing was needed to get the bales onto the top as the load rose higher.

Whoever had built the load would also drive it back to the farm for unloading and storage in the hay sheds. There was an element of taking responsibility for your construction skills. On the lorries we simply relied on gravity to hold the bales in place but the biggest tractor-drawn trailer loads overhung the sides and were so tall they often had to be roped to cope with the big sways caused by negotiating ruts at the field gates. This made riding on top of such loads quite exciting. Even if the load held – and sometimes it didn’t – the branches of nearby trees would threaten to brush you off your perch.

On really hot days little whirlwinds would pick up loose hay and deposit wisps of it onto the tops of nearby trees. Rain usually meant work was suspended. As a small child I remember sitting on top of the last load of the day along with the men in the pitchfork team as it left the field. As it started to rain, one of the men lifted a bale out to create a space for me. I jumped in and they placed the bale across the hole for shelter. It was very pleasant to ‘coorie-in‘* as my refuge swayed back and forth.

Before baling, the hay needed to be sufficiently dry to stop the shed turning into a massive compost heap. The weather was critical to this. While it takes only three consecutive dry days to cut silage (which is preserved by fermentation) at least two weeks of dry weather are needed to get any significant acreage of hay. This rarely happened. In the worst years prolonged rain could turn hay that was almost ready into a blackened mess fit only for burning. My father sometimes called Prestwick Airport to get an indication of what was coming towards us over the Atlantic. If it was rain, you might bale hay that wasn’t quite ready rather than lose it altogether. The longer the mature hay lay in the field, the less its nutritional value.

The tractor men ‘opened’ the fields of long grass by cutting the ‘end-rigs‘ next to the hedge first, then cutting the rest of the field into long rows. After the top layer of grass had begun to dry the rows needed turned over. The older turning machines used the movement of their wheels over the ground as a source of power. Later I used a more modern ‘Acrobat’ rake with 4 large yellow wheels of sprung tines which rotated by being dragged over the ground. Set separately these would pick up two rows of drying grass and flip them over individually. By rearranging the 4 wheels into a single line the Acrobat could be converted into a rake for clearing any residual hay left after all the bales had been removed. Whether turning or raking, it took a long time to do a whole field. A cleared field was described as ‘redd‘. Clearing up at the end of a day was getting ‘redd-up‘ as in; ‘We’ll need tae get redd-up, it’s lowsing time‘. Lowsing or loosing probably refers to the unyoking of horses or oxen at the end of a day’s work.

One summer while turning a field, I noticed a hint of putrefaction as I reached the end rigs next to the hedge. Returning to the same place on the following set of rows the smell got stronger. The next time it was detectable far from the hedge and became quite overpowering. I stopped to investigate. Over the hedge, trapped in a ditch by thorns, was a black-faced ewe, still alive, but with her hindquarters seething with maggots. It’s a distressing image I cannot seem to erase from my mind. A couple of seasons later I had a parallel experience – but this time the smell was sweet. As I approached the source it was obvious that it emanated from a huge mound of wild honeysuckle, its yellow flowers covering the hedge.

Once turned and dried on the reverse side, the maturing hay needed ‘tedding’ – using a tedder of course. These machines were power-driven from the PTO (Power Take-Off) on the tractor and their job was to throw two rows of drying hay into one large row, fluffing it up in the process. This allowed the sun and wind to further dry the hay ready for baling. The machine I favoured had two horizontal rotating wheels with large tines attached. We called this process ‘wuffling’ as one make of tedder was actually called a ‘Wuffler’. Once, when enthusiastically experimenting with how fast I could turn round on the end rigs, I miscalculated and wuffled the hedge. Bits of hawthorn flew in all directions and I bent some of the armatures. Our engineer had to straighten them with a welding torch and a hammer.

Later on as a teenager I would spend the summer mornings working in the dairy, loading milk bottles into crates as they came off the bottling plant, or get up at 4am to deliver milk for one of the roundsmen. After this very early start the dairy was finished by the afternoon and it was time to go to the hay fields once any morning damp had dispersed. My mother would bring refreshments out to us. It was lovely to take a break and sit on a bale under the shade of a tree eating sandwiches and taking tea from a flask. The men got a beer. It was good for morale. If it remained dry with no early dew, work would continue far into the evening, making escape to the pub before closing time increasingly difficult.

During the day, priorities might change and my father, who was supervising it all, would sometimes stop me working in one field in order to go to another or help out elsewhere. The constant drone of the tractor engine and the noisy machinery were like white noise. You stopped noticing it after a while. Paradoxically the racket and monotony of traversing a field over and over again allowed your mind to wander.

My father had a powerful whistle which he could deliver without using his fingers – something I never mastered. This was how he got my attention if I was working on a noisy tractor. Hearing his whistle, I would look up and see him in tweed cap, waistcoat and rolled-up sleeves, waving at me from the gate. He died when I was in my third year of medical school and while I was in a bit of academic trouble. The year after that, I was working a field when I thought I heard a whistle. Automatically, I looked down the rows to the end of the field, which was – of course – deserted. It was like a waking version of those dreams where you discover someone you loved and lost is still alive. My dreams about my late father finally stopped a few years ago and I no longer wake up just as I am demanding to know why he has kept his survival a secret from us for so long.

Building the hay into the corrugated iron sheds was tough. Each shed was divided up, by the girders supporting the roof, into several sections or ‘dasses‘ (another Scots word). These sections were stacked to the roof in turn. Open wooden trunking was placed on the floor of the dass to allow it to be ‘blown’ later. As the dass rose, the space under the curved metal roof got smaller – and hotter. Reversing into the shed was tricky and the men would amuse themselves by shouting false instructions at us:

‘Up the hill!’

‘Naw, doon the hill!’

‘Back, back, back, come on! Oh Christ you’ve hit it!’

The last dass in a shed was completed using an elevator to take the bales up through a small opening high in the gable end. In summer the roof was hot to the touch and the atmosphere inside suffocating. It was easy to overwhelm the unseen team in the shed by loading the bales too quickly onto the elevator. More shouting was required.

Inevitably, no matter how dry the hay was, it tended to heat in the shed; the same process that takes place in a compost heap. In an attempt to stop this happening a huge power-driven, heated, fan was mounted on a tractor to blow air into the trunking at the bottom of the dass. Steam would emerge from the openings in the gables in a satisfying way. The noise of the tractor engine droning on into the evening is associated in my mind with late summer, as too the glorious peace that ensued when the engine was cut, leaving just the sound of swallows twittering on the telephone wires.

Throughout the rest of the year the hay sheds were our playgrounds. We would build houses out of the bales or jump off the top of one dass onto loose straw on the lower one next to it. There is no recreational value to be had from a silage pit.

*snuggle in.