I think my children’s favorite part of haying season is the swathing. They get to spend hours on end riding with dad in the mower just spending time talking to him. It’s also fun to watch the hay get mowed. The smell is is even better than freshly mowed grass. This first clip is of Special Dark. It’s also kind of dark because we were in the house with out lights on. SD could see and hear the swathers out in the pivot right next to our house. He was beside himself, he wanted to go out and ride so bad.
We have two John Deere swathers that we use to cut two pivots a day. It usually takes about 3 hours to cut each pivot. Because the pivot creates a circle everything else we do is also done in a circle. First some straight windrows are cut along the pivot itself then all the other rows are cut in concentric circles that follow the pivot tracks, where the tires of the pivots go as it makes its way around the field. When a pivot is all swathed it looks like this aerial shot taken two years ago of one of our pivots.
Isn’t that a neat picture? Now when you look out of an airplane window and see circles in the land below you’ll know they are some farmer’s pivots.
The hay usually ends up being about 2 – 3 feet tall when it is cut. It needs to be mowed before its purple flowers bloom for optimum nutrition for the animals it will be fed too.
These last two videos are of the swathers. If you listen close in the last one you can hear Special Dark make excited giggles as the swather comes closer to us. He is all boy! He just loves machines!
That is so cool! My kids loved the video clips…
Those swathers go much faster than I imagined!
My kids loved the clips. They always wonder how farms work!
Ditto about the speed of the swathers. My husband walked by the computer and commented, “wow, they go fast!”
My eleven year old said, “They should farm chocolate mom!” :o) I thought you’d appreciate that!
I really like the video clips and seeing all the stuff that goes into it (especially cause we couldn’t stay longer this past weekend). Now is it just me, or is the swather “backwards?” I was laughing at myself trying to figure out if it was a rear implement that requires you to drive backwards, or if it’s a front-mounting implement for a different tractor model (one with the bigger tires in front…).
Is it alfalfa hay? And wow, the girls must love jetting around the fields, it’s like a little racer.
It is alfalfa.
You guys always were the fastest at swathing! I think I need to quit checking your blog cause when I do it just makes me miss home and seeing that all summer long! Haha.
WOW! I really had no idea about any of this before I started reading. I must say that just watching the video make my nose run and my eyes itch. Alergy season.
What a beautiful part of the world you live in!! I loved seeing the videos and can’t wait to show them to my kids tomorrow.
Special Dark is soooo cute. 🙂
Oh, I LOVE your videos!!! Thanks for having “farm week”. It’ll be fun to watch.