Posted by
Sarah Van de Berg
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Hay Stacks

The biggest barn in the Farmyard is used to house our tools, bedding and hay. Loading hay into the Hay Barn generally takes a few people, mostly because we get a little competitive and stack as quickly as possible (7 minutes and change was our best time to load 70 bales into the barn!). This needs to happen every 6 to 8 weeks depending on how many bales we order (or how many our local farm has to offer us), the speed we go through them, and the size and quality of the bales.

Hay bales change size and weight throughout the year depending on how the grass is growing. Early to mid Spring can be a bit of a challenge for us since the bales tend to be at their smallest and Max is eating a whole bale on his own. The smaller, Spring bales don’t fit in our stacking system quite as easily as the larger bales we have during the rest of the year. The last hay delivery was not attended by Kent or myself. Apparently, when the people who typically help load the barn are on their weekend breaks, those who get involved in loading the hay barn decide to get a little bit creative with their stacking.

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This is how I found the hay on Sunday when I came in. To an untrained eye, this might look like well-ordered hay; however, note how all of the hay bales are facing the same direction and the slight lean of the bales toward the left side of the photo.
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This is how I found the hay barn later that day. In total, 17 bales fell and several of them slipped out of their strings, leaving hay pretty much everywhere.
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A volunteer and I unstacked every one of the bales and restacked them in a more traditional pattern.
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Look how nicely organized they are!! Bales stacked in alternating directions use gravity to keep the bales on the row below them from falling, plus, they look pretty.

 

2 responses to Hay Stacks

  2. Sherry Samuels says:

    I was involved in this stacking. It was amusing to say the least, as there were disagreements among the stackers as to the method the bales should be stacked.

    Of course, our main goal was to provide information for a blog post, so we succeeded.

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