Into Each Life, Some Rain Must Fall

Into each life, some rain must fall.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Oh Henry! I suppose you're right. But it would be nice if it didn't fall on freshly-swathed hay.

Don't get me wrong: Many times, we are thankful for rain. And I know some of our farm friends in other states would gladly take an installment of rain to break their drought conditions. So I truly should not complain.

However, much of our first cutting of hay has had four rain showers on it. Yes, count them: 4!

 

Randy custom bales some hay for a neighbor. He got the neighbor's field done before 0.80" of rain fell during mid-afternoon last Saturday. Earlier in the week, we'd already had between 0.30" and 1 inch of rain on the hay. Then Sunday afternoon, we got another 0.10" shower. Then on Monday, the humid day wasn't conducive to drying it out either.

Before he got going again, Randy gave it the "feel" test (demonstrated in the first photo of this blog post). But a more accurate moisture test is completed with a hay probe. Before Randy got rolling full steam ahead, he completed one round bale. He then stuck the probe in the bale to test the moisture. This one was 14.2. If it were above 18, he'd wait until it dried down some more. 

Yesterday afternoon, he got rolling again after it finally dried out enough. He kicked out 130 bales, and then we got another 0.25" of rain. In one field, he had two more rounds to go before it would have been finished. Oh well! There's nothing that can be done about it. 

People always want to know when harvest will begin. And, if they are talking wheat harvest, we'll probably be looking at next week some time.

But another kind of harvest - alfalfa - is already underway ... complete with stops and starts and false alarms.

Let's hope it's not a foreshadowing of wheat harvest!