Undoing the good work with hay

As the seasons roll by farmers find themselves doing all over again what they did only a few seasons ago.

Grass hay is like that. You get it cut, dried, stacked and then, in a surprisingly short time, you pull the stacks down a little at a time through the winter, hoping the hay will last until spring.
In spring it is time to start the process all over again.
In last week's story I got up to the stack building. There we entered on a process that would today be considered torturous for children, though we didn't know that. As dad pitchforked the hay onto the stack mum would spread it carefully, maintaining the shape, and we little tackers would tramp round and around, packing the hay down firmly.
I still remember the dusty eyes and the itchy skin from all the hay-dust, but that meant it was really dry. If it was not it might spontaneously catch fire as it rotted deep inside the stack.
We only had that happen once at Longwarry, and we were late for school that morning. The whole stack had to be pulled apart with forks and spread out so we could stop the smouldering, and then we would let it dry out more and save what we could. That hay was our lifeline.
We'd be allowed a drink from time to time during the stack-building, and we did stop and walk up to the house for lunch. The refreshment down at the stack was a milk-can of cold water from the well, with a good few sliced lemons floating in it. I remember it as wonderfully refreshing and wonderfully tasty.
If we got a little weary, or a little lazy, a gentle prod from mum's pitchfork would fire us up again. It never drew blood but the message was clear. I can't quite remember how we got down off the stack after mum had bult a neatly curving top on it.
It was time then to pull the feed-bag cover on, up and over, with all of us hauling on it, weight it down with short logs hanging all around and then fence it. The wood for the weight logs came from our bush, trimmed with axes and crosscut saws, and the posts and railings came from the same place.
Postholes were dug, posts were stood up straight and in a very neat rectangle. I don't think any of us knew the meaning of hypotenuse but Pythagoras would have found both of them exactly the same length, I'm sure.
The rails were wired on because these little fences were temporary and sometimes the rails could be used again.
It was a long day, or a long series of days, for little blokes, and the adults, but we all took comfort from the facts of working together and doing something important. I can still hear dad saying "if the cows don't eat well through the winter nor will we."
Neat stacks, securely fenced, always left us with a good feeling and with enough summer left for a fishing trip to Benambra and the Morass Creek.
A few months later we'd be pulling the first stack apart to feed the cows and we'd watch the supply diminish, watch all our good work being pulled apart. Dad would fork the hay onto our cart, usually with quiet old Prince between the shafts, and then I would drive him round to the paddock where the herd was, and I'd fork out the hay while Prince did a wide circuit of the paddock with absolutely no direction from me, then he'd walk steadily back to exactly the right spot for dad to throw on the next lot.
Horses can be very, very intelligent animals. They are certainly smarter than tractors.
One of the things that entertained us at the time was dealing with the mice that would be found in the last 18 inches or so of the stack. Dad would flick them out into the open with the pitchfork and the dogs would deal with them very smartly, normally catching them while they were still airborne. It sounds a touch gruesome now, but we hated rats and mice for the damage they could do. Strangely, the dogs killed them but they never ate them.
We grew maize, too, back then, and I remember the urgency of getting a paddock ploughed, harrowed and planted. Again, for those who were not with us back then, the harrows were a rectangular frame with cross members. Those cross members had small blades under them and after ploughing harrowing broke up the clods and the furrows and generally tidied up.
If the ground was particularly hard, weight could be added to the harrows, with logs or bags of feed or even children. I'm not sure that would be legal today, but it worked well. The cows did eat fairly well during the winter, and so did we.
Harrows mustn't be confused with jinglers, a much lighter device used for breaking up cow manure lumps and spreading the manure more or less equally across the ground. Our jingler was easily pulled by one Clydesdale, and following it around and around until the high paddock was done was one of the boring downside of family life.
I mention the maize – it was never called corn back then – because it was the other side of the winter feed coin. Even with both maize and hay available and in use there was a need to put added feed into the bails for the cows to munch upon while they were being milked.
Dad would cut the maize and throw it into piles and horse – any one of the three – knew when to stop so the cart was exactly beside the piles. We'd throw the maize on and tell the horse to "giddy up" (yes, we did say that) and it would take the maize to whatever paddock the cows were in with no further directions. Like the hay, we'd throw it off and the cows would come running. It had to be thrown at just the right rate so the cows didn't tread it into the rain-soft ground and so there was a trail that all the cows could get at.
Believe it or not you could say "all gone" or almost any thing like that and the horse would turn toward the gate and bring the cart back to next pile. Some of this was training. Some of it was from experience. Much of it was because Clydesdales are very intelligent horses.
I was driving those horses with the hay, and the maize, while I was in grade two and grade three, so about seven or eight. Dad did not only love his horses (and us, mostly), he trusted them, and they never let him down.