Hauling Hay

Not much quilting going on around here this week.  My hubby and I have been hauling hay.

Yes, my other car is a Peterbilt--with 70 feet of trailer behind me.

I drive the truck and hubby runs the telehandler--that's this fun little gizmo. It's like a cross between a forklift and a crane. It can telescope out about 20 feet (hence the name). Another handy feature is crab steering, so it can turn on almost a zero radius-and rear wheels can turn independently of the front wheels for getting in and out of tight spaces.

Each bale weighs approximately a ton (2,000 lbs.) and we haul 34 at a time.

Here, the last pair are being pushed onto the very back of the trailer You might notice in this particular photo, the front trailer has stacks of 3 bales, they just come out of a different brand of baler.  But a stack of 3 bales equal a stack of 2 bales in volume and weight.

This is a pretty common sight around Southern Idaho, there are lots of mega dairies within a 100 mile radius. Most of the alfalfa hay raised is trucked to the dairies. I do not use the term mega-dairies loosely, they are 30,000 to 50,000 cow dairies, miking 23 hrs a day with one hour to clean.  

Then out to the stack yard.  It takes about an hour to load the truck, unload at the stack and return to the field. We have radios so we can communicate, otherwise it would be very difficult to know when to stop, when to move, turn left, turn right, "I need 6 more bales," or "it's time for dinner!"

When it is sold, we head up onto the scales to weigh the truck. The light weight of the truck is already in the scale house computer, so it automatically calculates the weight of only the hay, the driver and the level of fuel.  This scale is accurate to 20 pounds and we keep it certified, so we know it is accurate--important when you travel through ports of entry. 

This photo was a few years ago, but is my all time favorite picture of the bales in the field.

Well that's my past week in a nutshell, but it's probably way more than you wanted to know!