making hay

[john70t]

Originally Posted by gordner

One year when they fell behind and the stack had been sitting untouched for about a month, it ignited in the center due to composting. Burned for over a week, made for quite a show having firefighting aircraft dumping in basically the center of town.
All they did was wet surrounding areas to deter spread, according to the fire fighters they had to let it burn down, no way to actually extinguish it wherein it would not just immediately re light.

Wet fresh wood does not "self-combust". Ever.
A full week of burning?
No water sources?
Air Force bombs the entire town with chemicals?

[oldE]

With 2 horses,a pony and a miniature donkey, we put in about 500 square bales for ourselves and another couple of hundred for some neighbors who have some critters.
I do the mowin, teddering and raking, the wife drives the tractor and bales. I ride on the wagon behind the baler and build the load.

Beat
Les

[gordner]

Originally Posted by john70t

Wet fresh wood does not "self-combust". Ever.
A full week of burning?
No water sources?
Air Force bombs the entire town with chemicals?

I did not say wet or fresh. And would in various states is able to "self combust" given the right circumstances.

Smoldering and burning for a week yes, some fires have actually lasted longer believe it or not.

I never said ground based was not also involved

Air force was definitely not involved, not sure where you got that one.

They dropped mud and water both, from dedicated forestry service and private water bomber fixed wing and helicopters. Not sure if you are aware, but they can actually hit what they aim at, so no they did not bomb the entire town with anything.

Any other questions? I probably have some pictures of the A-26's and electra's they used somewhere, we helped support them during the fight.

[VINMAN]

Mulch/ wood chip pile fires are very common. I respond to numerous ones a year.

They can get hot enough from decomposition that they will self combust. Biggest problem is, the fire normally starts deep within the pile. As someone stated above if you don't break it apart you are effed. If you break it apart you are effed. It just gets bigger until enough water is placed.

This is one we had back in May of this year.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by VINMAN

Mulch/ wood chip pile fires are very common. I respond to numerous ones a year.

They can get hot enough from decomposition that they will self combust. Biggest problem is, the fire normally starts deep within the pile. As someone stated above if you don't break it apart you are effed. If you break it apart you are effed. It just gets bigger until enough water is placed.

This is one we had back in May of this year.

At least it was just a little one

[Tobra]

Originally Posted by IROC

I hauled a lot of hay when I was a kid. And cut/spiked/hung/stripped a lot of tobacco. I forget that not everyone grew up that way and assumed everyone knew about the process of making hay.

How nasty was working with raw tobacco?

[MRM]

Originally Posted by Tobra

How nasty was working with raw tobacco?

It’s not bad if you’re careful, but if you are spearing fresh tobacco and aren’t careful to keep the juice off your body (or if you have the habit of touching your face) it’s a lot like chewing tobacco. Lots of Chewing tobacco. All day long in the hot sun. There’s no getting around the fact that tobacco juice is sticky and unpleasant, but Planting the small plant is mostly just muddy and dirty because you don’t get so much juice on you. Packing it in the spring is gross because the concentrated juice is everywhere, but you don’t ingest it like you do when you’re spearing and hanging it. Ok, so in retrospect, it is gross and disgusting when you confine all the juice to your clothes, and it’s like swallowing a can of Copenhagen in the hot sun when you don’t.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by MRM

It’s not bad if you’re careful, but if you are spearing fresh tobacco and aren’t careful to keep the juice off your body (or if you have the habit of touching your face) it’s a lot like chewing tobacco. Lots of Chewing tobacco. All day long in the hot sun. There’s no getting around the fact that tobacco juice is sticky and unpleasant, but Planting the small plant is mostly just muddy and dirty because you don’t get so much juice on you. Packing it in the spring is gross because the concentrated juice is everywhere, but you don’t ingest it like you do when you’re spearing and hanging it. Ok, so in retrospect, it is gross and disgusting when you confine all the juice to your clothes, and it’s like swallowing a can of Copenhagen in the hot sun when you don’t.

You make that sound like a really good time! You should have been paying them to have that kind of fun.

[herr_oberst]

Interesting that some of the more, uh, rational people on this board seem to have farming and thus an early appreciation for hard work and self-sufficiency in their past.
Just an observation.

[Bill Douglas]

Hay making I had worked as a hay carter and shed stacker since I was about 13. Really hard work.

Then when I finished high school at 17 before I went to uni I worked the summer making hay. We worked every day for about 10 or 12 hours unless it rained - my luck, it didn't rain for three months. But it paid for my uni expenses. I think I've still got the abs from those days of hard work.

[herr_oberst]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

By then the hay was almost all alfalfa

[unclebilly]

I will chime in later. I am currently walking to my baler / tractor to replace the cam in the pickup… 2nd time in a week.

[A930Rocket]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

.

I always wondered what these were for. If you drive in the country, you see them all the time.

Thanks!

[MRM]

Originally Posted by masraum

You make that sound like a really good time! You should have been paying them to have that kind of fun.

Well, when I was that age, minimum wage was $3.35 an hour and us teens competed for any job that came open. At the same time the local farmers, who didn’t have two nickels to rub together, were paying five to six dollars an hour for tobacco work. And they didn’t always get enough workers to finish the field. So, I guess I realized the market was telling me something and it kind of pointed me in the right direction.

[Bill Douglas]

Originally Posted by A930Rocket

I always wondered what these were for. If you drive in the country, you see them all the time.

Thanks!

You townie types could call them a fluffer, as they kind of fluff up the hay to make it dry more easily.

[cgarr]

If you want it to rain, cut your hay field, never fails

The neighbor keeps mine cut

[IROC]

Originally Posted by MRM

It’s not bad if you’re careful, but if you are spearing fresh tobacco and aren’t careful to keep the juice off your body (or if you have the habit of touching your face) it’s a lot like chewing tobacco. Lots of Chewing tobacco. All day long in the hot sun. There’s no getting around the fact that tobacco juice is sticky and unpleasant, but Planting the small plant is mostly just muddy and dirty because you don’t get so much juice on you. Packing it in the spring is gross because the concentrated juice is everywhere, but you don’t ingest it like you do when you’re spearing and hanging it. Ok, so in retrospect, it is gross and disgusting when you confine all the juice to your clothes, and it’s like swallowing a can of Copenhagen in the hot sun when you don’t.

Yeah, it's pretty nasty. I seem to remember one of the worst parts was that the plants (in the field) seemed to have these giant caterpillars on them and it never failed that when you were cutting, you would grab the plant and one of those caterpillars at the same time. Just nasty. We usually did a one guy cuts/one guy spikes and you really had to keep moving.

One of my coolest scars is from a tobacco spike. I was cutting and the guy spiking dropped the stick (with the spike on it) and as it arced down it sliced right across my forearm. That was probably 40 years ago and I still have a a big scar. Probably because we kept working and I got tobacco juice in the cut all day long...

[Seahawk]

The farm I own is a former tobacco farm. I was able to convert two of the old tobacco barns into storage and a shop, including the old "stripping" room. We replaced another large tobacco barn in rough shape with a stable.

My wife grew up on a tobacco farm across the peninsula and we were NOT going to get involved with tobacco in any way shape or form.

As MRM and others ave mentioned, tobacco farming, based on my wife's description since I never had the pleasure, is evidentially touch labor to 10th degree, nasty touch labor in the field, stripping it, hanging it and packing it for sale.

It was very profitable in this area, however.

[GH85Carrera]

One of my PCA friends worked in the large corporate HR department for many years and made good money. He retired, and bought a ranch that is 160 acres. He started raising longhorn cattle as a hobby and his goal was to have enough longhorns that his wife would quit naming them so he could take them to market and she not get emotional.

He goes to a lot of farm auctions, and early on saw a square hay baler that was almost free it was so cheap. He bought it and started making square bales on with his fields of grass. Then he realized why it was so cheap. It almost killed him throwing all those bales on the truck, and then up into the hay barn.

He was happy to unload it at an farm auction and went to the round bails. With a wet year like this one he has a full hay barn, and sells the excess.

Of all the "hobbies" in the world, farming is way down near the bottom the list for me. I know very little, (basically nothing) about livestock. He has 5 horses, and many dozens of longhorns now and just loves farm life. His wife keeps all the dogs dumped out there and they have a lot of dogs the (expletives) jerks of the world dump in the country. Only two dogs are inside dogs, the rest have a warm dry place in the barn.

[wdfifteen]

My grandfather had a tobacco base that he leased out. He acquired it back in the 1930s. He never grew tobacco that I know of, but he made some good money off of it over the years. Most of the farms that grew tobacco in Ohio were an acre or so in size.
Paul, was your farm a central processing facility or did one farm use all those barns? Ohio tobacco farmers co-operated drying barns because the individual farms were so small.

Glen, I always wanted to get back to farming as a retirement hobby. I grew up on a farm and spent most of my life writing about farming and farm machinery, but never had time to do much of it. We now have 5 acres that I love putting to good use. We so far have not gotten into livestock, but we do want to grow some meat chickens. We've thought about raising a butcher hog and a steer, but the "becoming a pet" aspect of it would be hard for us. It would be tough to spend the better part of a year feeding and caring for the welfare of an animal and then killing it.