Nobody is Done Until Everyone is Done

Nobody is Done Until Everyone is Done

My dad was a hard and steady worker, and he instilled this work ethic in his kids, whether we liked it or not. One of the jobs on the farm that provided many teaching opportunities was baling hay. Hay is cow food composed of alfalfa, grass, or some combination. Baling hay was a particularly amusing, intense manual labor type task on the farm that was repeated three to four times per summer, depending on the alfalfa, the rain, and the sunshine. It consisted of several steps needed to provide nourishment to the cows that provided nourishment (meat) for the farm family.

[Image from my memory to AI — Gemini]

Baling started with first mowing the alfalfa with a sickle mower. The sickle mower is pulled by the tractor and driven by the Power Take Off (PTO). The PTO was a rotating shaft driven by the tractor motor that could be connected to implements on the back of the tractor. It was known to be in cahoots with the devil, as many is the farmer/farm kid that lost a finger, limb, or life by making inappropriate, albeit accidental contact with the PTO. The functional part of the mower, a reciprocating serrated blade about ten feet in length, was driven by the PTO by the usual Rube Goldberg-esque series of exposed rotating shafts, clattering levers, and articulated arms, all of which were coated in grease and festooned with protruding bolts and pins to better snag the unsuspecting human. This reciprocating blade (and the sharp and pointed guides) was attached to the steel arm that was attached to the left of the mower that was attached to the tractor by connection to the draw bar (hitch) and the PTO. This implement was driven through the field to mow the alfalfa (and guillotine any gophers, snakes, or frogs that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time).

This alfalfa was then raked into windrows to dry. The rake was a 15-foot-wide, angled, two-wheeled implement also pulled by the tractor, driven, in this case, by one of its wheels through a series of gears and shafts. It moved the cut alfalfa to one side into a row (a windrow) by the horizontal motion of a series of sharp tines made of spring steel arranged on five steel rods attached with a ball joint to the perimeter of the rotating wheel driven by the aforementioned gears and shafts. Raking involved driving back and forth over the mowed field to make rows of a size that could reasonably be consumed by the baler — too large and the baler would plug, too small and it would take forever to make a bale. Since the rake was driven by the wheels, if you drive too fast, you could send the alfalfa flying, thus not making nice, neat rows — don’t do this. Also, the rake was hooked to the drawbar relatively close to the tractor for who knows what reason. The significance of this becomes apparent if you turn too sharply: the rake frame would contact the lugs on the large rear tractor wheels, causing mechanical mayhem. On the other hand, you would often want to turn quite sharply because of the goal of making neat consolidated rows; balance is a virtue on the farm. This little problem, tractor/implement contact, was of a general nature as the tractor was designed to turn quite sharply, and virtually all of the implements (mowers, rakes, plows, drags, combines, discs, trailers, etc.) could connect with the tractor wheel if the turn were a tad too sharp. For those items that were driven by the PTO, the clatter of the PTO shaft and associated joints served as an audible warning of imminent, if not present, distress.

I digress; back to baling. The hay was “baled” using a machine called a “baler.” This implement is quite a complex mechanical (and since all of our implements were old), often unreliable machine. “Baling” is the creation of bales by compressing alfalfa into a cow food unit that is approximately 1.5’ X 1.5’ X 4.5’ secured by two strands of baling twine — lightweight yellowish orange hemp rope — wrapped the long way. This twine was tied mechanically, a feat that was as wondrous as it was inconsistent, at least with the balers that we used. The baler was driven by a shaft connected to the PTO and to a large (about 3-foot diameter) flywheel to keep the momentum needed to deal with “plugs,” bunches of alfalfa. If the plug was too large, a shear pin that attached the flywheel to the rest of the mechanism would break, and we would stop, replace the shear pin, hand-turn the baler backwards, remove the plug, and restart the baler. We always had a large supply of shear pins.

The hay, currently in the form of a windrow, was picked up and fed into the baler by a series of tines in one continuous stream. This stream was pulled into the rectangular compression chamber by reciprocating metal teeth. Timing was critical; precisely as the teeth lifted out of the way and returned for another “bite,” a reciprocating plunger was propelled into the bale-shaped chute, slicing off the windrow and compressing the hay. It was this action that was responsible for the demise of many a shear pin; a rock, a wad of hay, or some other less sliceable material stopped the plunger from cutting the windrow. Timing is everything in life. Many gophers and frogs met their maker in this farm implement. On the other hand, a cat was once baled up on our farm, missed the “Plunger of Death” and was heard in the bale as it exited the chute. The bale was cut open, and the cat bolted with only a missing portion of the tail — a true story that gives credence to the theory of a cat’s nine lives. (Other evidence of cats’ nine lives that I witnessed was when a cat seeking warmth on a cold winter day, perched in the working of a tractor radiator. Upon starting the tractor, the cat flew in one direction while fur flew in all directions. The cat lived to tell other cats with only a few bits of shaved skin.)

At any rate, the hay bales exited the chute, and they were deposited onto a hay rack (a wooden flat-bed 4-wheeled trailer with a rear board to hold the bales in place). The job of the farm hand and my job on this day was to grab the bales as they came out of the chute and stack them on the rack in an interlocking fashion. This was done as the tractor pulled the baler and trailer in a chain. This little parade bounced down the field that was pockmarked with gopher mounds, more mounds as the years went on. (Alfalfa was planted to replenish the soil with its ability to “fix” nitrogen in the soil from the air. The alfalfa came up year after year without replanting for about three to four years before it was plowed under and a different crop planted.) Gloves were required as the twine had quite a bite. Also, the cut alfalfa was good for poking at your arms and legs, so long-sleeve shirts and pants were typical. Did I mention that this was done in the heat of the summer (90 and 90, humidity and temperature, respectively), and that the alfalfa was quite dusty and that horse flies were plentiful?

So after a long afternoon of this fun and games, we returned home, and I was famished and looked forward to sitting down and eating significant quantities of food. Upon returning from the field, I headed to the house. My brother and a neighbor who shared the baler with us were still unloading the last loads of hay into the barn. I thought I could escape to the house, but before I got halfway across the yard, Dad yelled to me, “Hey, get back here. Nobody is done until everyone is done.” Back to the barn to finish the job. As much as I resented Dad’s attitude at the time, I believe in this philosophy and apply it now in my life and in my current job, much to the consternation of some.