Anyone can stack hay. Not as good as me though.

So I've slipped on the farm stories here, but I've got one today and then a guest post next weekend.

Candid shot of me around 17 or 18, with a freshly stacked truck.

Me and that old white Ford moved a lot of bales together.

My last post was in regard to hay and since we're in the middle of summer, barring any rain, every day is a day for hay right now for my old man back on the farm. And the title of this post might be clouded by years of not actually stacking hay, but in my prime, as it were, I fully would have stood by that statement. At twelve and thirteen I was the little guy on the crew, so I couldn't toss the bales up onto the wagon or truck all day. With that physical deficiency I was stuck on the wagon stacking what was tossed up to me. Now whatever I stacked had to travel, sometimes only a few hundred yards others it would have to go miles. It had to withstand rough ass ground out in a field or coming up a steep slope from a bottom pasture. The stack also had to withstand speed out on the road.

Different techniques could be employed to strengthen the stack. Simple things like crisscrossing the layers or stair stepping the tiers as you go up, and then obviously tying down the stack. It all sounds simple, and well it is, still though the ability to stack hay while balancing on top of a moving wagon while it bucks and shimmies across the less than even ground of a hay field is no easy feat. And simply put I was damn good at it. I lost a stack here and there, but when your bale count gets up into six figures you're bound to have a few problems. Plus I can still blame some of that on poor driving and not my stacks.

As I grew I had to step off the wagon and actually throw bales, but I also continued to stack quite a bit. But when you start on the job training at thirteen by the time you're twenty you're an old pro. And all I'm saying is that for a few years back in the day I'd a been starting stacker on a hay hauling all star team, if there was such a thing.