Are you guys square or round bales?
One hay operation had some bales catch on fire when we were cutting wheat.
Two of the guys on our crew are fireman (one city and one township) and everyone was
they'd have to leave but it got contained quickly enough I guess.
Oh man FR_dad will have nothing to do with round bales. Those are for "farmers" who need something to do. Did you know some random but probably high percentage that I can't remember and may not be true of that hay goes to waste!?!
The Rexes are square balers. Prairie hay, baby. Untilled pure Kansas soil and native grasses or something. We can sell that crap like crack to those droughtery losers in texas. I don't know what FR_dad got, but he paid us 50 cents a bale just to load a semi-trailer to texas, which was twice as much as we got paid to load and barn them in the first place, once FR_dad deducted equipment costs for us using his truck (lol and hat tip to him on that looking back).
We barned an average of 10k bales a summer, because FR_grandpa always insisted we have enough for two summers (I'm assuming every Kansan family jokes about how their grandpa predicted 10 of the last 1 depressions).
One summer in high school, I had the equivalent of a wind-aided 100m and barned 8 loads/1000 bales in a day. Being at the pinnacle of both my strength and ignorance, I infamously boasted that I only needed "1,000 bales and a driver". Hence, the John Henry reference that has dogged me ever since.