Posts Tagged ‘pulling trailers’
Unfortunate Events
The day started out so promising. We had an appointment to pick up hay at 10 a.m., and after a run to Hudson to pick up some long tie-down straps, we were in the truck with trailer attached and headed out the driveway. The last weather forecast we had looked at earlier indicated a likelihood for precipitation to begin later in the afternoon, but suddenly the sky looked ominous.
While Cyndie waited to load a view of the current radar on her phone, I practiced backing the trailer up using the side mirrors. There was no question we were about to be hit by a thunderstorm. Cyndie texted our plan to delay until after the rain and I parked the truck.
Then it hit. And hit, and hit. It rained for hours. Finally the radar revealed a break and we checked with the seller, receiving an okay to proceed. With our borrowed trailer and borrowed hay tester, we set off.
It was such a relief to have the reference of a moisture reading to assure us we were laboring over bales worth keeping. It also served to confirm the batch we already stacked in our hay shed was definitely too wet.
The bales on the first wagon we checked were all a little high, so the farmer gladly moved that batch out of the way and I backed the trailer up to the second wagon. The readings were frequently coming in at 14% moisture. Even when Cyndie felt a bale was a little heavy, the moisture reading was still 14%. These bales were just what we wanted.
It felt invigorating.
With the cargo strapped tight, we hit the road and began the trip home. Then Cyndie commented on the dark sky appearing on the horizon. I said it was probably hundreds of miles away. I was wrong.
About three-quarters of the way home, it became obvious a solid line of rain was between us and our hay shed. The dry hay that we were so thrilled to be bringing back with us was about get dowsed. We gritted our teeth and forged our way through varying levels of drenching rain to our driveway.
Cyndie jumped out and opened the barn doors while I did my best not to panic over trying to rush the backing of the trailer into the barn while the rain continued. With only a handful of correction maneuvers necessary, I got it between the doors when Cyndie stopped me.
Earlier in the day, while clearing out space in the shed for our new hay, I carefully stacked some bales on pallets in the barn. The trailer was just making contact with those and the wheels would never clear.
With the rain still coming down, we literally chucked those bales to the side, flopped the pallets out of the way, and backed the trailer in the rest of the way.
In hopes of demonstrating to Cyndie that only the outside of the bales had gotten wet, I suggested she re-test the moisture levels. That was a bad idea. They ALL came up more than double the moisture content!
We put some fans on it and let it sit. We’d had enough disappointment for one day.
Before I made it up to the house, the sun had come out and was shining brightly. How’s that for timing?
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Do Over
Seems like I will be getting some extra practice on trailering loads of hay. Cyndie has been noticing some mold already in the bales we most recently purchased. I noticed that some of the bales we grabbed were a bit heavy, indicating they were approaching problematic moisture content, but turns out even the light ones are high. I’m surprised.
George loaned us a hand-held moisture testing probe to give us a numerical reading on our bales. All of them are higher than we’d like, some being over twice the target range. Wet bales will not only grow mold, they can get hot enough to ignite.
The first time I searched for images of a hay shed when trying to decide what we were going to build, I was shocked that the majority of results were pictures of burning buildings. I guess hay fires are a common reason to take photos and post them. Apparently too common.
I’d prefer not to join that club.
We will be purchasing a moisture tester of our own so we can test bales before we buy. Thankfully, the farmer who sold us these assured us he would take any back that weren’t good, as he can feed them to his livestock. He obviously knew these were borderline high for moisture content.
This year it has been difficult to get a span of dry enough days to optimally cut, dry, and bale. It takes about 4 days in a row without rain. We have yet to cut our field, which is part of the reason the weeds have had a chance to flourish as they have.
So, now we get to re-stack a trailer with bales and drive them back to the farm from which we bought them. First, we have a plan today to drive to a different farm to pick up a new batch.
You can bet we will have the borrowed tester along to check the product before loading it up. Practice is helpful, but I’d rather not have it come as a result of doing things over again that we’ve already done once.
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Two Worlds
In the constant ebb and flow of change that has occurred for Cyndie and me in the almost 4 years since we moved from the suburbs to rural life on a horse hobby farm, there are waves of intensity that can be both invigorating and disorienting. I’m probably just tired from a pattern of not sleeping optimal hours every night, but lately things have been mostly disorienting.
Yesterday, while filling out the schedule of customer orders at the day-job, I received a new Purchase Order with a requested delivery date that I immediately perceived to be past due. Wondering how that could be, I checked the date it was sent and interpreted that as being a week old.
I marched up to the boss’s office to investigate how this could have happened, only to embarrass myself in discovering that my mind was off by a week. The order was sent and received with yesterday’s date and they were asking for delivery next Wednesday.
Never mind.
Obviously, I was not living in the moment. My calibration gets a little off when spending hours of intense mental energy trying to fit weeks of work into limited days of available labor, several months into the future. It gets compounded when trying to do so while simultaneously burdened with trying to self-teach lessons on how to properly (read that as “legally”) load and secure heavy cargo on a trailer.
My poor little brain is surfing on the crest of one of those waves of constant change with regard to the horse hobby farm gig. We have adjusted our hay plans this year to trying to purchase all of next season’s inventory and not use any of what we can cut and bale off our field. This year’s crop on our front field is growing more weeds than grass.
We are negotiating with two sources for small square bales and trying to work out movement of goods. Cyndie called the trailer dealership in town to inquire about short-term rental of a flat-bed. It just so happens that our next door neighbor, John, works there. He said they don’t rent equipment, but offered to loan us the use of one of his trailers. He’s got two of them.
Wednesday night, John stopped by the house to discuss details and I learned very quickly how out of my league I was. When we bought the truck, I didn’t know there was a difference between a trailer hitch and a ball mount. My rather narrow experience from years in industry is in electronics manufacturing. It was intimidating to learn the significance of details involved with trailering commercial-sized loads like the one I already moved last week, which I had done without proper knowledge.
Yesterday, Cyndie took our truck in to have the trailer dealer install a brake controller. Last night, our neighbor stopped by and dropped off his trailer in front of our hay shed.
I’m trying to shift mental gears from the day-job world to the hobby farm world, and reviewing the Wisconsin laws for securing and trailering heavy cargo. We are also trying to plot a course toward improving the crop of hay we hope to grow for ourselves.
Don’t ask me what day it is today. I’m feeling a little disoriented.
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Relative Something 