More peasant toil

I went home last night with some trepidation, the weather looked threatening and so I knew the rest of the hay would have to come in; as much hay as yesterday but without Anna's help. I shooed the horses away from the paddock where the tractor would come, opened the gate and the hay store door, and sat waiting. It was hotter than the day before, more humid and there was no wind. The horsey neighbour came by, "think you'll get it in? I have tarps if you don't". He doesn't keep horses anymore because he's had shoulder operations and is no longer up to the work. He was wistful about no longer throwing hay bales, he wavered between wanting to help and knowing the risk of injuring himself. It wasn't just nostalgia for horse keeping, though that was palpable, he was once a military policeman and still his arms are huge, in times gone by he would have shown me how it's done. He had the air of someone feeling that he was once a somebody.

The horses heard the tractor first, they ran up on the hill to watch their future dinners arriving. They put me in mind of airline passengers watching food being loaded into the plane (back in the days when food was served on planes). I hoped the hay would be better than Air Canada's meals.



This is what 150 small square bales looks like (actually it's a few over 150, a bonus in terms of cost, a curse in terms of work)



The size of the tractor and the angle of the fence meant that the bales had to be thrown from the wagon, picked up and lifted into the store, then picked up again, carried to the back and stacked six high. We'll have a better arrangement next year. We got it done, sweating and grunting; at the end of that I was glad of a beer.

We sat with the farmer and chatted about rural stuff. I don't think I've ever been advised before not to get into the trouble of having cows; I've never needed that advice.

Darkness fell and in the distance the baling man turned on the tractor lights. The farmer hoped he'd go on "until it's done" but feared that he wouldn't.
Hay can be baled until "the dew comes on" or it rains. Rain threatened to stop the night's work and, at the same time, promised to make a second cut worthwhile. Always the dilemma, to pray for rain or to pray for no rain.

The baling man packed up and went home. He was, after all, the second choice baling man. The first choice baling man has a John Deere, it puts a mesh around the round bales so they hold together well, these bales will only be held with string "we'll sell them first, get rid of them".

Conversation ran over the usual country topic, the end of farming. Mysterious foreign corporations are buying up the land for quarries or subdivisions or who knows what but it won't be agriculture. It inevitably turned to animals and what to do about them. Local wildlife we haven't yet seen includes bobcats, cougars and the occasional bear. Wild turkeys are common enough to be considered a pest, not that I recall seeing any just where we are. I got the impression that deer are not highly thought of, a sentiment with which I momentarily concurred as I swerved around one on the highway this morning.

Anna mentioned her desire to add a goat to the menagerie. "Lowest form of agriculture, responsible for the Sahara". Goats, it seems, are not highly regarded in potato growing country. They are, however, an easy way to generate the income required to be a farm for tax purposes. The farmer had another suggestion, marijuana plants, apparently they grow extremely well when fertilized with the nitrates sold for potatoes. He didn't know that first hand, of course, nor the location of any weed patch. However his "hired man" had been pleased with the nitrates. Accounting for the weed revenue in a tax compliant format must be tricky.

A local eccentric we haven't yet seen is The Groundhog Man, he can be recognized by his shirt which has that written on it. Groundhogs are a problem because they dig holes which can easily lead to a horse breaking a leg, these holes also disrupt farm machinery. The Groundhog Man makes a fetish of dealing with them, he comes on the farm and shoots them with "all manner of scopes and whatnot, like he's in Afghanistan".

He seems a bit over the top but the Radio Controlled Hunters sound a more pathetic bunch. They go after coyotes and have eliminated all the fuss and bother of mounting horses and trying to keep track of the pack; their hounds have GPS transmitters. The hounds find the critter and the hunters drive up following the GPS signals. I chuckled at this, sailing daughter thinks using a GPS to navigate a tall ship is wimpy, never mind a 4x4 in a field. I'm not sure if they shoot the coyote or if the pleasure is in seeing it fight the hounds but either way it all sounds very video-gamey and not at all sporting. There's a lot of not very sporting hunting around, over Barrie way we stopped to buy elk at a place where you could shoot buffalo and the like; the buffalo being in a pen and the shooter outside. For what? I wonder.

Charlie growled and barked at something in the darkness, turning the chat to canines. Farmer Squirrell has a large dog, the one that "doesn't bite down hard". It seems that the dog is prejudiced against Italians, a problem as some itinerant farm workers are, or look, Italian. Less of a problem we think though than our dog's religious intolerance, Charlie don't like Mennonites, they often pass in the street, never without prompting snarling, gnashing and rushing out to devour them. It's the same reaction the neighbour gets when he wanders toward the manure pile with a recently shot raccoon. If there are Italian Mennonites they'd be well advised to stay away from our corner of the world.

On reflection this morning I shake my head at all of the above. I'm a Londoner, you know, I grew up liking my animals under puffed pastry and served with a pint. I didn't foresee enjoying an evening spent talking about animal husbandry and the Potato Council.