Maggie's Farm

I used to make hay as a youth spending my summers on a farm in Indiana. My job was to ride on the trailer behind the bailer and stack each bail on the flatbed as it popped out of the back of the bailer. The farmer would drive the tractor and bitch about us on the flatbed working too slow. Later, we would restack the bails into the barn. Hard work but it built muscles!

Traveling through Nevada and California last week, I see the new method is to make much bigger bails (size of a Fiat 500) and leave them in the fields. Another machine would come along and haul them to a shed where a forklift machine would stack them four or five high. Big plastic tenting would then cover it for storage.

Makes sense but it is more capital-intensive and uses less labor. One Mexican can do the work of four Americans!