One day last week when it was close to 40 degrees C, I went for a little tour to see what farmers were doing that day. The weather forecast said hot all week with a 40 percent chance of thundershowers on Thursday. I was astonished to see a farmer tedding a field of hay in that heat. On another farm, a farmer was raking hay and he had the cab door wide open. Obviously the air conditioner wasn’t working. Near Douglas, a Mennonite farmer was forking loose hay on a wagon pulled by two horses. Numerous farmers were hauling round bales home on wagons.
Tedding hay in a week when the ground is bone dry and the temperature is sizzling hot doesn’t make sense. Why fluff up hay scattering it and then having to go over it again with a rake before baling?
Tedders use a rotary motion to grab the hay with spinning tines and cast it out the back of the machine. It causes excessive leaf loss.
Some hay producers refrain from doing any type of manipulation, whether it be raking or tedding, to alfalfa because the real value of that crop is in the leaves, and they want to limit how many of those leaves fall off. And some beat the hay around until they have mostly stems.
The art of tedding originates in Europe, where the “cool-summer humid continental” climate has impeded hay dry down times for generations. It continues to be a popular practice in Europe, and has recently seen a rise in popularity in cooler regions of the United States.
The guy raking hay with the cab door open was also wasting his time and wasting money on expensive fuel. The best hay you can make is baling it right out of the windrow, not disturbed. You’ll get a tight leafy green bale of hay. I would never rake hay if I knew there was no rain in the forecast and if the ground was dry and the air was hot. I might fluff up some windrows to get an early start on baling, but the rest of the field would be baled just as the swather left it —the wide swath width of the baler pickup. And I’d leave the hay sit in the windrow an extra day if needed and then bale it.
The Weather Network didn’t predict this long, hot dry spell. This is what they said about summer temperatures on June 21, the first day of summer: “This summer looks to be a warmer version of the pattern we saw across Canada last year, with the hottest weather anchored over western Canada,” Chris Scott, Chief Meteorologist at The Weather Network explains. “Ontario and Quebec will once again escape the hottest weather, but this summer will bring more heat than last summer.”
We found out that prediction wasn’t true. Last week Tuesday, a Crop Insurance official from the Peterborough area toured some Renfrew area crop farms, including ours, and told us if we didn’t get rain in the next few days the corn crop would be a write-off. Like most areas of the county we got a few drops on Thursday when a thundershower went by. Our 300 acres of soybeans are still green and short, although the rows are filling in a little. They desperately need a good soaker or we’ll have no crop to harvest this fall. It looks like a really bad summer for farmers.
