A Green Scene

Muddy green hay dust drifted on the breeze. The cut alfalfa in the foreground and the trees of course were green, too, but greenest of all was the smell. The whole sky was filled with fresh, sweet, strong alfalfa hay smell. It floated on the wind and settled the faintest green on your clothes and deep in your lungs. You could almost taste the living, growing, calf-feeding, horse-munching green. If you have never stood in the cool shade of a freshly-filled hayshed and breathed in alfalfa green, you must come to Farm Camp and try it. For farm-curious folk, the grapple fork alternates lifting bales off of two stacks of alfalfa, one on its right and the other on its left. It drops a bale, twines and all, into a great grinding tub that is hidden behind the stack in the center of this photo. Every time a bale drops, you hear a very loud grrrrummmm, grrrummmm, grrummmm as the tub grinder shreds the bale into small fluffiness. Alfalfa fluff travels up a conveyor belt (see the top of it next to the man in the back of the truck), and plops into the semi. That man climbs the spongy pile, tromping and packing so it won't blow down the gravel road. I guess big men are better at this job than wiry guys, but in the end, large or small, they all come out green.

My niece from the city wants to know why we used a machine for these bales, but made her lift them by hand when she came to Farm Camp. She doesn't know that these weigh between 1100 and 1500 lbs.; the ones we stacked when she was here weighed fifty.