What's a metaphor? Why for growing hay, of course. Some of the old technolgy on display at threshing shows illustrates past methods of handling hay and straw. Square bales are now the old way of handling forage crops for most of the people who display equipment at these shows. If you check out the age of the show participants you can deduce that most of them grew up with the big round bales you see in fields around the midwest. Before baling twine, before baling wire, there was loose hay. The technology of handling loose hay is a chapter in history that today's farmers don't know at all. This first picture was taken in northwestern Missouri in 1906. The horses in this photo are pushing gathering rakes, commonly called go-devils to bring hay to the stacker. In later years this method was updated by replacing the horses with an automobile or tractor.
My great grandfather Henry is the man on the right on top of the hay stack. His wife Ida is the lady standing on the right. She is carrying my grandmother Helen and twin Homer, who were born in 1907.
A major improvement was the hay stacker which was pulled by horses. This machine loaded loose hay onto a wagon, which then would be off loaded into a barn. The loose hay could be baled by a stationary baler in the barnyard, or packed in the barn as loose hay. Square balers pulled behind a tractor for baling in the field rendered these old methods obsolete very quickly. There is so much history in the brief time span of the Twentieth Century that we must not be too critical when folks don't get it right, but I think it is OK to chuckle.
There is no way this hay stacker could have loaded BALES! (Photo shamelessly stolen from Engineering Johnson)
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