The weather has been perfect for making hay.
If you have animals to keep year-round, you need to feed them in the winter. Hence the need for hay.
Chris and his Dad put up more than 800 bales so far, which is about 3/4ths of what we estimate we will need to feed the sheep when the pastures are dormant.
Hot weather that drives most people inside to air conditioning is perfect weather for drying hay. There always seems to be a direct correlation between the hottest days of the summer and the amount of hay that needs to be baled.
Sometimes when people complain about the heat, I (Chris) ask them if they've ever worked in a hay mow when it's 95 degrees outside. I usually get a strange glance and people quickly shift the topic of conversation.
Mow, which rhymes with cow, is the place in the barn where the hay is stored. When you're getting close to the top of a metal roof with very little air movement, 95 degrees outside seems refreshing.
In the old days - for me, that's early 1970s - baling hay used to require one person driving the tractor and one or two people riding on the hay wagon to stack the bales as they came out of the baler. We used iron hooks to grab the bales and stack them. Sherry also grew up on a farm and had to stack bales or pick up them in the fields before putting them in the barn.
I still have a scar on the top of my head from the day when the load shifted and my brother's bale hook found my skull instead of a bale. There is speculation the injury went far deeper, which explains why I became a journalist.
We became a more modern farm in the mid-1970s when we got a kick-baler, which fired the bales into the wagon. Most farmers today use big round balers, requiring heavy equipment to move around the bales.
On a good day we'd put up about 1,200 to 1,500 bales of hay. My cousins sometimes helped out.
In the old days between loads my brother, cousins and I would head to the milk house and consume copious amounts of water, sticking our heads under the faucet to cool off. We'd sprawl out on our makeshift furniture - bags of feed - and contemplate how many more loads we'd have to do that day and argue about whose turn it was to wash up the milking equipment or who had to stick around to help milk the cows while others went swimming in the creek.
Baling also is a chance to cleanse my pores and stack hay bales rather than pushing around paperwork. It also gives me a sense of satisfaction that although summer has officially not yet started, we're already on track to feed our animals this winter.