Make Hay When The Sun Shines

By Uncle Hans

So our city girl, Renee, has always had on her bucket list to learn to bale hay.  Recently, we caught our rancher buddy in the act.......

....with a little arm-twisting, he invited her into the cab for a few minutes of instruction....

The hay is cut and crushed or "conditioned" so it dries quicker by a machine not pictured.  After drying some, it is raked into windrows or long linear piles to dry some more and then be picked up by the baler and compressed tightly into huge round bales.  Hannah relies on our buddy for hay during the winter for her horse.  She pays for the hay by driving this old John Deere to do the raking after work in the summer.  Crazy?.....

.....the baler is a complicated techno-wonder that senses all sorts of thing and reads out on a dash-mounted screen and warns of problems.  Bucket-list girl seems very intent on learning this stuff.  Maybe she has a career change in the back of her mind?.....

.......When the bale is built, the dash-screen twinkles a message to stop.  The result looks a little like child-birth......

....but eventually, she is convinced to get out and climb down.  Just as well. She didn't like his taste in cab music anyway.....

By Uncle Hans