Bear Grease - Ep. 129: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Hauling Hay

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

What do hay hauling, Sunday clothes, and bobwhite quail all have in common? You might not believe it if anyone else told you, but you can believe it when Brent does. It’s summertime in Arkansas and if those cows are gonna eat when it’s cold, someone’s got to be sweating when it’s hot. Well, at least they used too. Join Brent as he navigates hauling hay, the calamity of cooling off before the job is done, and his experiences with how the whole process affects wildlife. There’s some history and wildlife management stuff in this one, but no math. We promise. Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease Merch  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First Light's fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.com.

Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From Coon Hunting to Trotlining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and country skills that will help you beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the Airways have to offer. All right, friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I think I got a thing or two to teach you.

hauling hay The images that come to mind when someone mentions haul and hay, they're pretty diverse for me. They go from downright angst and dread to fond memories of hot summer spent with good friends and relatives and heartwarming instances of good times in nearly unbearable heat. I grew up hauling hay out of necessity and for summer work. I continue to work in the hay fields now, but only with the nostalgia of the menaceous. mission, not the methods. We're going to be talking about hay this week, how farming it has changed and its impact

on the landscape. Impact, it's just cutting grass for animals to eat, ain't it? What impact could it have? Well, if we're talking about quail, and we are, big ones. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. A square be able of hay, which should really be called a rectangle, can average anywhere from 40 to 75 pounds. It's held together with two strands of tightly tied haystring, and considering you're going to have to put your hands on it about six times before it's used, it may be the singular most labor-intensive item on the farm.

Now, people say fire of wood will warm you four times when you cut it, when you're splitting it, stacking it, and finally when you burn it. Well, old-school square bales of hay in the summer had to be loaded onto a trailer, stacked on the trailer, unloaded at the barn, stacked at the barn, loaded from the barn to a truck, and unloaded wherever you were feeding cows that winter. Now that makes about six times. You don't see many folks using square bells anymore, and that's one of the reasons, but in the early 80s, they were still very much in vogue. A friend of mine and his parents had cattle just like most of the folks where I grew up,

and they needed some help hauling hay. That summer was a bad one. It was beyond hot. was stifling, take your breath away crazy hot, but everybody knows that if your cows are going to eat in the winter, then there's work to be done in the summer. My friend's dad was paying 25 cents a bail, which would be split amongst the field hands, and that was more than I'd ever made per bail an incentive enough for me to be there as the dew finished drying in the heat of the morning to get started.

My cousin, whose dad was in the military, was staying in the summer with us, and he joined me that day. My friend, who still lived at home, wasn't getting a nickel of it, so the quarter per bail would be divided by two. That's 12.5 cents per bail instead of eight cents if we'd have had to split it three ways. We were going to be rich. If we lived, my cousin probably wished he'd been in the military too, rather than walking alongside that hay trailer chunking bells of hay and that humid, blistering Arkansas sun that weighed a third of what he did. Welcome to the Country Country, cousin, we're fixing to try and kill you. He did great, though, and he worked like he'd been doing it his whole life. Now, I don't remember how many bales we had hauled by noon when my friend's

mama brought our dinner to us, but it was several loads. We gathered in the shade of a huge oak that had been there longer than there had been tractors or even a farm in that area to eat dinner. The breeze was still hot, but it didn't feel like a hairdryer blowing on you while we sat in the shade. We were eating bacon and tomato sandwiches and washing them down with sweet tea that was so cold it would make your teeth feel like they were freezing out of your mouth when you took a drink. She brought two gallons and the four of us drank it up pretty quick. And we had a five-gallon keg of water with us too, but it was warm as dishwater and it couldn't cool your energy as fast as that tea could. I don't think that I've ever had a glass of tea before or since that was as good

as that first one was that day. After about 30 minutes, my dad's friends said, well, y'all about ready? We were not. But it wasn't as much a question as it was an announcement that work was fixing to start again because that hay wasn't about to put itself in the barn. Now, we've been taking turns or rotating chunking bells on the trailer and stacking. It went clockwise. You had two rounds walking on the ground beside the trailer and one on the trailer stacking.

You started out on the right side of the trailer for a load, then you went to the left side of the trailer for a load, and then on the trailer, stacking for a load. Being on the trailer saved you from walking, but you had to handle every bail, and you couldn't just stack square bales on top of one another like Legos. You had to stack them where they interlock, which helps keeping them from falling over as you move around the field into the barn. The only job that we didn't rotate out was driving the truck that pulled the trailer. That was his mama's gig, and his daddy only got off the tractor bailing more hay long enough for her to go home and fix our dinner. Once we got them to the barn, they had to be stacked very carefully, ensuring that air could flow and remove any moisture that was left in the hay.

Damp hay that's not finished curing in the field when it's bailed, gets rained on, heavy dew, anything that keeps it from dry can cause it to gentle. rate heat when it's all mashed up together, tight in a barn, and spontaneously combust. A fancy way of saying, catching fire. I always thought that term was kind of funny. It reminded me of the warning label I saw on a magnesium battery for an Army backpack radio. An ANPRC 77, you old vets will remember it. The warning label on that cardboard case that contained the replaceable battery said,

Do not submerge. Battery may vent. violently. I always wondering why they didn't just say blow up. That'll boost your confidence crossing the river toting the radio and spare batteries knowing that the parts that are all working together to keep your radio man from shooting out through the woods like a Roman candle was built on a government contract by the cheapest bidder. Anyway, the same goes for hay, water is your enemy, and in more ways than one in the hayfield. We had returned from the barn to the field for another load. We'd hauled a lot of

lot of hay and the end was in sight, but knowing that, it couldn't boost our energy. The sun and the heat had absolutely drained us. We'd all three given up wearing shirts not longer after we ate, and while only one of us got darker, my cousin and my friend were burnt and looked like a couple of boiled crawfish. We were about a third of the way into that load when we worked by a small farm pond in that pasture. I was on the trailer stacking, and I saw my friend walk past a hay bell that I he was fixing to load. He just kept marching, never missing a step or breaking stride as he walked down that pond levy and into that water until his head disappeared beneath that stagnant algae-colored film that sealed back up when he went under. And it was like he had never been born.

Other than a couple of tracks he made in the mud where he walked in the water, there was no trace of him. He was gone. I was fixing to holler for his mom to stop the truck, but she'd seen him literally walk off the deep end and was already getting out of the truck before I had a chance to say anything. She was halfway around the front of the truck before he popped up on the other side of the pond doing the backstroke and smiling like he was swimming on a beach in Hawaii. Get out of that pond! His mama was hollering at him and it made him nearly jerk a crick in his neck. It was like he had lost all sense of where he was.

And her voice had brought him back into the stark reality of floating in a festering pool of contaminated water that was only water warmer than what we've been drinking out of that jug. He walked back up the pond bank, grabbed that bail of hay he'd passed earlier, and went back to chunking hay like nothing had happened. His wet blue jeans commenced to rub it in the insides of his legs. The longer he walked, the worse it got. And he still had to finish out that load and then walk another one before it was his turn to ride and stack.

Now, my cousin I both tried to swap out with him, but he wouldn't have it. it. He was halfway through his round on the left side of the trailer, walking like he was trying to stay straddle of an electric fence when he told his mama to stop the truck. It was his truck, and he'd ask her to hand him a necktie he'd taken off after church and stuck in the glove box. Now, we all thought the heat had gotten to him again, so he had to ask her twice to hand it to him. She did, and he walked out of sight from her and dropped his wet breeches low enough to where my cousin and I could see how raw the inside of his legs were. from walking in those wet blue jeans.

His nether regions were as galled as anything I had ever seen in my life. The hide was gone from everywhere, and I don't know how he was walking. I also didn't have any idea what he was fixing to do with that necktie, but I wasn't about to turn away and miss it. He taken his pocket knife and cut his wet drawers off, and then took his Sunday necktie and fashioned himself an athletic supporter that defied human engineering. To this day, I have yet to see a more thoroughly thought out and functional field expedient answer to anything.

When he finished, he buttoned his breeches back up and we hauled two more trailer loads before we quit for the day. I know with every step, he was in continuous burning pain because he said, every step I take burns and hurts. He also knew he couldn't quit because there was no one. to take his place. He didn't have anywhere to quit to anyway. That was his family's farm, and unlike me and my cousin, he was working for room and board. He also knew that he had to do something to be able to continue. We finished and was settling up with his dad when he came out of the barn with that tie in his hand working on loosening up a knot he'd tied in it. I said, why are you working on that

knot? Just throw it away. He looked at me like I was crazy. Throw it away. That's one of my my good ties. And that's just how that happened. The advances in hauling hay in the past 40 years have turned a multiple man operation to that of only a few and theoretically just one. I still work in the hay field helping my good friend Jacob Wood put up hay for his cow-calf operation, but instead of walking and chunking square bells on a trailer to be stacked, we do it all with the tractor and implements. Big round bells of all but taking the place to the square ones and one round bell that we produce will average 15 square bales. Also, you don't have to leave the air-conditioned cab with

the tractor until it's time to refuel or go home. Regardless of whether it's square bales or round bales, the order in baling hay is this. You cut it, you let it cure in the field for up to three days, you rake it into rows, and then bail it up. One man with one tractor, and three attachment pieces of equipment can do that. Now, we'll have three tractors going when we're cutting hailage, and hailage is different from hay and that it's not allowed to cure. It's fresh-cut green grass that soon after its cut is bailed and completely wrapped in plastic, preserving the moisture content while keeping it airtight. Haleage that we bailed up in June will be just as green and fresh as the day we bailed it when we unwrap it and feed it in February with virtually no loss of

nutrients. Keeping air out is key. If air is allowed to get in, it can mold. It's a pretty cool system. Once it's cut, there's a narrow window of moisture content that we have to get it bailed and wrapped. One tractor is raking it into rows, the next tractor is coming behind it bailing it, and then the last one is picking up the round bales and completely wrapping them in that plastic. The hailedage is grown separate from the rest of what we cut. It's looked after like it was soy beans. That's not just grass growing in the field. That's meatloaf, steaks, and chili.

Among other places, we cut hay on a portion of the white river river. levee. Nearly nine miles of green grass that cows turn into groceries. It makes an interesting ride with a 16 degree angle in the cab of a tractor that's eight feet off the ground. Stayed in a straight line while watching behind you to make sure the equipment is operating correctly while trying to stay upright in the seat. Man, just a rough estimate in my head that comes out to about a pucker factor of 10 out of 10. Cutting hay affects the landscape and the wildlife it lives there. And according to the U.S. Department, agriculture, Arkansas cuts over a million acres per year. With fertilizer and regular rain, which usually never happens, anything over three and a half round bails per acre is a good average.

That's about 3,500 pounds of grass. The effects it has on wildlife can be immediate. I can't count the times that I've sat on a tractor, cutting hay, and watched hawks and coyotes have an absolute field day with rabbits and mice. Jacob told me that when he was a kid, he was sent to do some bush hogging along the edge of a creek on the back side of their farm. And my friend Isaac Neal, who hails from Missouri, would call that brush hogging. And there's no telling what it's called in the rest of the country, but regardless of the terminology or the number of ours found in the description, the end result is the same.

We're cutting bushes and brush with a tractor-powered mower, stout enough to turn an inattentive armadilla into an abstract work of farm art. Anyway, Jacob said he was going about his business, bush hogging, and was coming around for his second cut when he started seeing those big old wood rats hopping around back and forth through that fresh cut. He said the tractor must have been like ringing the dinner bell because all at once, hawks came from every direction and were wrecking that rat population. He told me he looked forward to that first bush hogging of the season every year and it was always the same. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a pool of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there. But he was. This season, we're going deeper.

From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Unfortunately, the occasional wavered Battlepossum isn't the only victim of modern hay farming or mowing. The first cutting of the season usually coincides with the arrival of whitetail fawns on their property and knowing something about where they like to hide while Mama's out doing her chores is essential in avoiding fawn, tractor accidents that will 100% of the time be a worse outcome for the deer. Here's how we avoid it. Since those like to leave their fonds on field edges, we'll cut inside those edges a full width of the haymower, watching for movement and looking for bedded fonds. Nine times out of ten, they're going to bolt out to safety of the woods, and we never see

them anyway. The other time, we're going to see them and either go around them on the next pass or shoe them off into the woods if they don't leave on their own. Now Brent, don't you feel bad about ruining their hiding place? No, I don't. I would if that was the only place to hide in the woods, but it ain't. On the other hand, cutting the hay exposes and stirs up the insects, and just like raptors and coyotes will work on the mice,

anything and everything that eats bugs will be out having a picnic. Hen turkeys with pokes, salkoons with kittens, bats, you name it. They're all out there reaping the rewards. And don't forget the deer. They'll be out in strength in a day or two to eat the tender regrowth of grass that was covered up before the hay got cut. It also allows them to be able to see other predators that would have been slipping around trying to make a meal out of them. Now down here where I grew up, or up here, depending on where you're listening from, the Bob White Quail was king. Quail hunting was something nearly every hunter did, and if they didn't have a good bird dog, they knew someone who did.

I remember a portrait of a black and white setter that hung in our living room for the majority of my childhood. It was a Christmas gift from us to my dad, and he loved it like dad's do, even though he was a 100% dyed in the wool pointer man. For you that don't know, the setters have long hair and pointers have short hair. Cocklebirds and briars here would wreck a setter's coat in the native grass understory of where birds like to be. And while the setters were good dogs, the aggravations. of combing or cutting burrs and broken knotted links of briars and bram alive of a dog's area, it ain't fun for either one of us. It was a culmination of time and the changes in farmland utilization that sent the Bobwhite

quail into a downward spiral here in the southeast. In an area known as the Fescue Belt that covers a large portion of the eastern half the United States, the propagation of fescue-type grass was beneficial to hay producers and detrimental to the ground nest in Bob White. Fescue grows like sod in your yard. It grows evenly across the landscape that produces more grass per acre, which is good. But if you picture in your mind your yard, if it had small bare runs that were almost void of grass

that crisscrossed over their property, like a diagram of the veins in your body, well, that's what the pastures look like when they just had native grass growing in them. The native grass grow in clumps and they're separated by a few inches between each clump, leaving little avenues of travel for the quail to get around in. I know that don't sound like much, but considering a fresh hatched baby quail is about the size of your thumbnail, the difference in that gap being there or not is the difference between life and death.

We're talking about a fragile creature that when they get up and start moving around, if they can't stay dry or avoid getting wet from the morning dew, they could get hypothermia and die. The native grasses also provided an overstory that hid the quail as they fed around and hit them from their predators. There's give and take in farming. Thankfully, there are some folks who recognize these issues

and are working hard to provide a suitable habitat solutions for a resurgence of Arkansas's quail population. Clint Johnson is a wildlife biologist and the Quail Program Coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. He says habitat and its diverse, are the critical factors in the healthy regrowth of quail. When I asked him about fire ants and described to him how I'd seen a turkey nest get overrun by him one time as soon as the egg started hatching,

he slapped me in the face with the dead squirrel of reality and explained it to me like I was five, which is my preferred method of learning. Clint had me picture a bucket of water, with the water being quail and the bottom of the bucket being habitat. Y'all with me? Of course you are. I'm the only five. year old here. Anyway, now here comes the fire ants, the wild hogs, nest predators, and every other possible bad actor in this scenario in the form of a drill bit poking holes in the side of the bucket. Clint said we can tape up the holes and stop them from leaking, but when the bottom falls out of the bucket, it's game over. I get it. No habitat, no quail. He also told me if he had a large farm with cattle on it, that he'd have fescue grass growing on it too, diversity of habitat.

That's the key if you want cows and quail. Now, I came along towards the end of the Arkansas quail hunting, at least in southeast Arkansas. And when it ended, man, it was like somebody walked out of the room and turned out the light. But before that happened, I remember going with my dad and a neighbor who had a good dog. I went with Tim, my older brother, and we always did pretty good. We'd be at the pond fishing in the spring of the year, and Tim would say, you hear that quail? He didn't whistle him up, and he taught me how to do it too. You just repeated the same sound you heard.

The real quail was whistling, and every time he answered you, he'd get a little closer. They whistled to defend their territory and attract a mate. Now, I don't know how many times a hot witness Tim doing it, or myself, after he taught me how to do it, but we'd be standing there, and all of a sudden, the flutter of wings, and you could see a Bob White comes sailing in close to where we were standing, ready to duke it out over who was running that part of the farm. We're going to talk a lot more about quail when it gets. It's closer to fall when maybe we can see a break coming in this sweaty wool sock of a summer we find ourselves in.

But I told Clint Johnson that same story about how they were quail when I was younger, and then they seemed like they started going downhill pretty fast. And he quoted a lot of reference material on how folks have been saying that, starting after the Civil War, pretty well coinciding with the advent of mechanized farm machinery. A steady decline over the past 160 years ago. Well, I remember there being what I thought were. a lot, dad gum. How many were here in the heyday? Here's an example, Clint shared with me. During the winter of 1818, a man by the name of Henry Schoolcraft was kicking around in North Arkansas, seeing the sights, making friends with Native Americans, and living off the fat of the land. He wrote a journal and talked about there being so many quail crawling around that they didn't

even shoot at them because there wasn't no sport in it. I think my conscience could stand a couple days of that, seeing as how my favorite breakfast, of all breakfast, is a fried quail, eggs, taters, biscuits, and gravy. Man, it don't get no better than that. I hope the quail come back. But old Clint and folks like him, they can't do it by themselves. It's like anything else. It takes a group of folks working toward a common goal to accomplish anything big.

There's lots of good stuff in the Arkansas Gaming Fish Commission website about quail and how to manage habitat for them. It's free and it's available to everyone. No kidding. It's really, really good. There's a whole team, private land biologist at the Arkansas Game of Fish Commission, that will come to your land and help draw up a plan to enhance the wildlife hunting and viewing opportunities on your property. I bet where you live, either through the county extension service or your state's Department of Natural Resources, that there's a similar group of people to help landowners too.

They can't help you if you don't ask, and the squeaky wheel will always get the greets. Now, I definitely prefer the style of hay haul and I do now as compared to what it was like when I was a kid. But I have no doubt that there's a farm boy somewhere riding around in his daddy's tractor, wishing he was somewhere else while listening to the satellite radio and controlling the temperature inside the tractor like he was sitting at home. It could always be worse, Jr. You could be out there hauling hay without a tie. Thank you so much for listening.

Appreciate it. If you have the opportunity, share this with someone that you think might like it. You folks be good to one another, and that's about as country as it gets. This is Brent Reeves, signing off. Y'all be careful. First Lights Fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. shortcuts, just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. FirstLight's new fieldware gear at firstlight.com.