The hay is in the barn. That’s one of those simple, declarative sentences I love to pronounce every summer, when, in fact, the hay is in the barn. Saying it gives me a sense of security. It’s a false sense, of course, but one that I crave nonetheless. I want to believe that no matter what else happens in the world—no matter how long it takes to get the tractor repaired or how much it costs, no matter how many fires are raging in California or how many floods are rising along the Gulf Coast, no matter how many more people succumb to Covid 19, no matter what happens on November 3rd or during the eleven weeks following, my sheepngoats will eat this winter. And eat well.
I got a call from Mr. Meadows early one evening in mid August. “Mickey,” he said. “I had you down for another fifty bales of hay. I’ve got it ready, if you still want it.”
I was in the middle of shushing some dog skirmish at the time, and I was surprised to hear from him. He’d delivered 150 bales of second-cut orchard grass a few weeks ago, and I thought he said he wouldn’t have any more until fall. I stuttered a little.
“Let me tell you what I got,” he said in his slow, broad mid-South drawl. “This is a mix of orchard grass and fescue. It’s real clean, and it’s good hay. It’s $5.00 a bale, delivered.”
He had me at “$5.00 a bale, delivered.” Let me explain, in case you’ve never bought hay before. Around here, it’s possible to buy hay for $5.00 a bale in the summer, but at that price it’s sketchy—full of weeds, seeds, and stems. And the bales are inconsistent—some are tight and heavy, which is good, but others are light and loose, which means they’re more likely to come apart as you’re carrying them or, worse, putting them in the loft. And at $5.00 a bale, it’s never delivered.
And that’s just plain, old hay. If you want a specialty hay, like alfalfa, which has a high calcium content and is, therefore, good for animals that are lactating, you’ll pay $7.00 or $8.00 a bale and delivery is generally an extra dollar a bale. That makes a difference even if you’re buying a small amount, say two or three hundred bales a year, which is what we buy. God help you if you run out mid-winter and have to buy hay from the feed stores or the Co-op. Then you’ll pay $10.50 a bale for what you could have bought for $6.00 last summer, and the alfalfa is long gone.
So, I was happy to hear from Mr. Meadows. As I said, we’d already bought 150 and bales, and since we reduced the size of our flock this summer, the extra fifty bales would likely be all we need for the year.
When I first started buying hay, it was a scramble every summer to find enough to get us through the winter. I’d pour through Craigslist ads and look for hand-scrawled signs posted on the Co-op bulletin board. I’d often end up driving an hour or more each direction to load up forty-five bales at a time—the most I could safely get in my pick-up and on my little 5’ x 8’ trailer. Then I’d drive home, not being able to see anything less than a hundred yards behind me and wondering when I’d get pulled over because the brake lights on my trailer didn’t work consistently.
Before Mr. Meadows, the thing buying hay reminded me of most was buying pot back in the 70s. It was a cash-only business, deals were negotiated over the phone, you met in an isolated, often lonely location, and beyond a little sniffing and sifting a few flakes between your fingers, there was no chance to try the merchandise before the transaction. And no returns.
Mr. Meadows legitimized the process for me. He has a business card and a farm up on the ridge, about half an hour from our place. The first time I bought hay from him, I went up there to get it. It’s a large, but surprisingly tidy operation that he and his wife run. They grow about 250 acres of hay a year, and he has all kinds of equipment for planting, cutting, raking, baling, stacking, storing and moving thousands of bales without ever having to actually touch any of it by hand. They also raise cattle and used to have a milk cow for cream, butter, and cheese, and they tend large flower and vegetable gardens and spend a good deal of their summer canning and preserving. “I hardly buy anything at the grocery store anymore,” his wife told me.
Listening to them talk, and getting advice about which varieties of tomatoes, onions, and pole beans do best our zone, it would be easy to peg them as old hippies who have long lived an alternative life-style, but talking with them the little I have over the past three years of hay deliveries, my sense is that they are good old-fashioned country people. He told me that he used to work in construction, but he always wanted to farm, and now he can.
And his hay is high quality, the best I’ve found. It’s weed-free, it’s not full of pesticides or herbicides (though I don’t think it’s organic, at least in the fashionable sense), and he uses a natural cotton-based baling twine, not that bright orange plastic stuff that will lie all balled up in a land until doomsday. But what’s most amazing to me is that they built a twenty-thousand-gallon system for collecting rain water from the roofs of their various barns. The large holding tanks, spread out across the farm, are all interconnected and leveled with lasers to make sure the water flows between them and into the underground pipes that feed the animals and the gardens and the outer fields.
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When Mr. Meadows brought the hay on Wednesday morning a few weeks ago, he had an extra ten bales, so I bought that, too. As insurance. I spend a whole lot of time in January and February up in the loft, counting bales, calculating our daily usage, wondering if we have enough to get to St. Patrick’s Day, when the pastures start greening up again, and then refiguring it until the first week of April because we might get a cold spell.
It wasn’t cold, however, when Mr. Meadows and his wife came lumbering up the drive with their hay wagon in August. It was about nine o’clock, and already in the high eighties. And humid. We transferred half of the bales from his large hay-trailer to my little trailer. I’ve done this so many times that I’ve worked out a system of stacking in threes to get the best over-locking, which keeps the hay stable once I get it up four or five bales high. Using this method, I can get four rows of seven bales on my trailer lock them in with five bales at the very top, for a total of 33 bales. It didn’t take us long to unload the hay. There were three of us working, and we had gravity on our side most of the time.
Not so when I had to move the bales from the trailer to the barn loft. I have a system for doing this as well. I back the hay-filled trailer into the barn and park directly under the loft. Then I climb up the hay. When I’m standing on top of five rows of hay, the floor of the hayloft is about level with my shoulders, so I can pick up the top row of bales and toss them into the loft. The problem is that every time I toss a bale, I lose some of my footing, and since the trailer is small and top heavy when it’s loaded, it rocks a little.
Once I get the first five bales in the loft, I climb back down, and Vanessa, who has a natural fear of heights, climbs up to the top of the trailer. I climb into the loft and feed her a rope with a hook. She hooks the rope onto a bale, I pull it up, unhook it, carry it to wherever we’re stacking in the loft, and put it in place, which could be anywhere from the floor to five bales high, which is just above my head.
It takes about forty-five minutes to put one trailer load of hay in the barn. The first ten or fifteen bales aren’t that hard. Largely, however, that’s because they’re on top of the trailer, and I don’t have to lift them that far. Of course, we always put hay up in the summer, and the hayloft is always the hottest place on the farm. By the time I’ve hoisted up a dozen bales, my shirt and the remnants of my hair are soaking wet from sweat. A dozen bales later, I’ve also sweat through the tops of my pants and my leather belt. By the time we get to the bottom row, which is also the hardest because it’s the longest pull, I’m panting and finishing through sheer force of will. The most bales Vanessa and I have ever put up in one day was about a hundred. After that, I couldn’t use right elbow for a week.
That day, however, we only had sixty bales, so I figured I could do it. We finished just before lunch. I walked down to the house drenched in sweat and covered with ends and bits and stems of hay plastered across my shoulders and torso. I was wearing a tank-top, so I stopped at the hosepipe, as we say around here, to rinse my arms and shoulders, I didn’t want all that hay washing into the shower drain and clogging the septic system. The water felt good, cool but not cold. There was a horse-fly buzzing around, trying to bite me, like they do in late summer, so I cut the outside shower a little short.
When I went into the house and took off my shirt, I saw that I was still covered with hay all the way down my torso. So, I figured I’d strip off completely and hose myself down—one of the nice things about living so far out in the country is that the only people who could see me naked either belong here or are trespassing, and either way, it’s their problem. Then Vanessa came out the side door and asked why I was naked on the patio, and I told her, as I swatted at the persistent horsefly, and she said, “You want me to hose you down?” and I said, “That’d be great. This horsefly is driving me crazy,” and then she turned on the hosepipe and the water came spraying out and this was not the relatively cool water I had experienced just a moment ago—which, as it turns out, had been sitting for days in the hose and was the same temperature as the surrounding air—no, no, this was water from Dante’s frozen hell, ice shards, b.b.’s of frozen nitrogen pelting me in the chest and running in rivulets down my stomach, past my belt line, and into dark corners of my privates at the precise moment that damned horsefly decided to take a bite out of my still-sweaty, hay-drenched left shoulder.
I don’t think I have ever seen Vanessa laugh quite as heartily as she did at that moment. I could sense her joy at having the hay in the barn.
