When the hay wagons got to the barn the unloading process began. We had to get the hay from the truck up into the hayloft of the barn. We did this with a
Hay Elevator which is basically a truss with a chain connected to an electric motor, with the chain having protrusions to hook onto the hay. Jimmy would get the hay to the back of the hay wagon and I would load the hay onto the elevator then the hay would be removed at the top and stacked in the barn. We had to do this as quickly as possible because our goal would be to get the hay wagon to the barn and unload it, then get back to the field as the other hay wagon was getting totally full to repeat the process.
This is of course me (I believe first picture of me on the blog since I cut my hair and shaved my beard). Not all of the wet on me was due to sweat, some of it was due to our method of cooling. We would simply stick out heads under a tap of cold water, then fill out hats with water and put them back on. You can see how high the hay was stacked based upon my own height.
The full length of the barn stacked with hay. Sorry about the lighting, but it started raining at the very end of the second day, so the lighting was not to good and we shut the hayloft doors to keep out the wet. By my approximate math, we harvested somewhere around 25 tons of hay. Almost all of it went though my hands, and much of it more than once because we had to move hay around in the barn to stack it. Although we did load hay in from both ends of the barn there was still significant amount of stacking required to get everything in the correct place. The barn was designed in a very cool way. At the outside edge where the roof hits the floor, there are holes cut into the floor so that hay can simply be dropped trough into the animals stalls below.
This is the result to my arms from the nice soft hay. This is a result of all the sharp edges and such (I did not have a long sleeve shirt to use to protect my arms).
This of course is the good horse Pasha, he seemed really happy about being in a stall and is all ready to eat all the hay he helped harvest (there was some amount of chewing on hay while in the fields and such, after all we were farming).
This is of course me (I believe first picture of me on the blog since I cut my hair and shaved my beard). Not all of the wet on me was due to sweat, some of it was due to our method of cooling. We would simply stick out heads under a tap of cold water, then fill out hats with water and put them back on. You can see how high the hay was stacked based upon my own height.
The full length of the barn stacked with hay. Sorry about the lighting, but it started raining at the very end of the second day, so the lighting was not to good and we shut the hayloft doors to keep out the wet. By my approximate math, we harvested somewhere around 25 tons of hay. Almost all of it went though my hands, and much of it more than once because we had to move hay around in the barn to stack it. Although we did load hay in from both ends of the barn there was still significant amount of stacking required to get everything in the correct place. The barn was designed in a very cool way. At the outside edge where the roof hits the floor, there are holes cut into the floor so that hay can simply be dropped trough into the animals stalls below.
This is the result to my arms from the nice soft hay. This is a result of all the sharp edges and such (I did not have a long sleeve shirt to use to protect my arms).
This of course is the good horse Pasha, he seemed really happy about being in a stall and is all ready to eat all the hay he helped harvest (there was some amount of chewing on hay while in the fields and such, after all we were farming).
No comments:
Post a Comment