My Blog List

Tuesday, 24 August 2010

So This Is How They Do It!

On a bike ride across Brusselton Hill, to assess the ripeness of the blackberries we spotted this. Hay-making! These days it involves a lot of machinery and few people. The tractor was just dumping a black-plastic covered hay bale. There were five tractors operating in the fieldOne was raking up the hay into long piles. Another was sucking the piles up into a baler and spitting out big round rolls of hay. Two were bringing the bales to the black plastic binding machine, from each end of the field and the last one was attached to the black plastic wrapping thingy. But this is how they do it! The bale rolls around and around and up and down and is thoroughly bandaged by the gadget on the back of the tractor. It then dumps it off the end like a great roll of glad-wrapped/cling-filmed left overs.The blackberries are not really ripe enough yet.
Cheers Gillian

4 comments:

Sue said...

Wow what a clever machine to wrap the hay in the black plastic! I never knew how they did it either. Hope the blackberries are ripe next time you go picking!

stitching and opinions said...

It was the baler that shorted out and set fire to several fields round here, not always so clever.

Heide said...

We're in blackberry season here as well. Many of the farmers here use white plastic and the fields look like they're covered in giant marshmallows.

carol said...

I think the marshmallows sound more fun than the black rabbit droppings these look like scattered across a large field Heide!

There's only one place I know that still makes stooks and that's on Iona. Just a tiny field though; I suppose it isn't practical on a large scale sadly. The bits of plastic tear off through the winter, get free, get stuck on things and make horses spook. Ah well. Progress.