Hay Baling Circa 1980
I enjoy a nice surprise, especially when it involves a little unscheduled time travel. Each time I smell fresh-cut alfalfa, a Sunday afternoon drive with Lisa takes a turn into a wormhole that leads me back in time.
Those who are cutting or baling alfalfa are betting that there will either be a market for it or that they will have cattle to use it this winter. A recent Sauk Centre auction report reported one lot of large square bales at $284 per ton. Inputs for alfalfa are substantial so it’s hard to say what the profit is on the sale however it shows that a producer is playing with some very large amounts of money when they crop alfalfa. My memories are more nostalgic and sensory and don’t require that I “pencil-out” the experience.
I really enjoyed baling hay back in Viking, circa 1980. Our tractor- baler combination was a 300 International Harvester Farmall and a New Holland baler. I liked the baler because it had hydraulic tensioning for setting the tightness on the baler twine. It also had a storage area above the mouth of the baler that held twine and a thermos of water. The Farmall 300 had power steering which was pretty nice, however I once used dad’s John Deere 4020 with Power Shift and a cab to bale hay. The “luxurious” experience almost made it impossible to go back to the 300, even though I really loved that tractor.
You can’t square bale moist hay so typically we waited until about 10 am when the morning dew dried. During the summer, this gave me just enough time to watch the morning “David Letterman Show” before I went out for the day. (Yes, David Letterman once had a morning show, it was great.) There is something so nice about starting out a day, still fresh and clean, to go make hay.
As long as the bale knotter wasn’t fussy and you weren’t breaking shear bolts, hay-baling was the best job in northwest Minnesota on any given summer day. Breaking shear bolts could lead to a poorly timed knotter which entered you into a vicious cycle that ended with removing hay by hand so major baler surgery could be performed. I guess this was the other head of the alfalfa-making coin.
I dreamed so many dreams out in the alfalfa field. I thought about how I would buy a specific chunk of land from my dad one day and live there. This was a little triangular island of land that was bordered by the railroad and a coulee. You could easily walk the tracks to Viking from there which would have been an ideal for me as the Community Center had three pinball machines. I dreamt of how I would have a nice little place and lead a quiet life. The quiet life would have been easily achievable in Viking, particularly at that time.
I was happily seated on a baler tractor in 1980, and oblivious to the farm crisis that had already begun. My concerns were about what kind of car I would one day buy, the girl I would one day marry and my chances of again using that 4020 with the Power Shift. Life was good and the smell of alfalfa was creating a place in my mind where it would become a trigger for all that was simple and good in 1980.
