Another strange day

Today I saw the bull checking out my fence repair.  I think he was testing my fix.  I had to first put more water in he cattle's water trough.  Once that was done I seen the bull was no longer checking out the fence repair.  I still have the gate closed on the driveway entrance to be on the safe side.

Today I was to start baling my hay.  I first had to move the hay out from under the power line towers as I didn't want to drive under them.  So that slowed my start.  Then I noticed a geyser in one of my irrigation lines.  On a rare occasion in the past a riser would unscrew and a geyser would happen.  Not this time.  The sprinkler popped off the riser.  That has never happened to me before.  I am still not sure why this happened as it didn't make sense.   I didn't have time to figure out the failure so I put a replacement sprinkler on the riser.  This one works.

So I didn't get started baling until 2 pm.   Things were going fine though slower than I predicted.  The hay is dry and in making a bale I get a bit of chaff.  Previous times I baled I would clear the baler of the chaff after every fourth or fifth bale.  Today I had to clear the chaff from the baler after every bale was made.  I don't trust chaff in the baler as I am concerned it would affect net wrapping the bale.

After a number of hours we had a rain shower.  Not predicted.  No rain cloud.  Just a thin cloud passed overhead the field and it began raining. What in the world?!  Oh yeah, I am trying to bale hay.  At the time I was clearing chaff after unloading a bale and I ended up staying under the baler's back gate door to stay dry.  It didn't last long but things were damp.  I had to wait five to ten minutes for the windrows to dry.  This rain is odd.  When cutting my hay no rain is forecasted.  After the hay is cut and I wait for it to dry suddenly rain enters the forecast at the last minute.  Yesterday morning it rained.  This morning it rained.  When I was baling another rain.  Now tomorrow rain is in the forecast.  I think rain will be a last minute concern until I finish baling.

After the rain was over my baling started to have issues.  At times the baler would jam up in processing hay.  So I would have to drive slower and not take hay as fast as before.   Then shortly after starting a new bale the baler froze up.  I had to dump the small bale as I saw that one of the belts had twisted around.  How that happened, who knows.  I worked and worked on trying to twist the belt back but since the belt shouldn't have ever twisted between the rollers as there is no room to twist, there was no easy way to twist the belt back.

I had to get my neighbor Curtis to help me.  Both of us tried this and that and eventually got the belt twisted back into the correct shape.  I was able to make one more bale before I had to go and move irrigation pipes.  That went well and I had a little light afterwards so I went to make another bale before dark.  Wouldn't you know it, the belt twisted again.   What is going on?!!!   I had to dump the small bale.  It was getting dark so I gave up and will get the belt twisted back into correct shape tomorrow.   I never had a belt twist on this baler before and it makes no sense on how the belt could twist.

So I only got 10 bales made.  In my first cutting in July when I had all those problems I was able to make 10 bales the first day.   At least today all the bales wrapped correctly.

So baling my hay will take longer than expected.

But that is how life is in this world.   Strange.