When God Gives Rain on Oat Hay - Make Oats and Straw

We've been so busy around the farm it is rediculous. We had expected to bale oat hay on 50 acres but when the rains hit at the time that the hay needed to be cut, we missed that window of opportunity. All was not lost. Oat hay is oat plants that are cut before the oats have matured. We let the oats mature and when it was ready we checked around to see who could swath our oats and combine them. One of our neighbors Dave was able to swath and another Wendell could combine. Swathing is cutting the plant down and laying them into windrows. Combining is the picking up of the cut down plant and passing them through the combine to remove the oat from rest of the plant. Everything went pretty well. During combining my brother and I pulled some gravity wagons full of oats out to a grain elevator about 20 miles away, but at the rate we could travel we couldn't keep up with the combine. When our neighbor who was combining had to leave for vacation to Alaska, he called in one of his neighbors Tim to take over. Tim also has a tractor-trailer and could haul the oats for us. We had some loads turned away because the moisture was too high, so some of the oats had to go into a bin for drying. It took two days to swath and about 4 days to combine. There was some heavy storms during combining caused some mad dashes to get all of the gravity wagons into buildings to keep them from getting wet. These wagons aren't small. Loaded the wagons weigh around thirteen thousand pounds. Since most people don't pull large loads its hard to know what that means. Your midsized car probably only weighs around thirty-five hundred pounds. So moving these full wagons is no easy task. Anyway, once we got the oats done we were left with straw. Yes, there is a difference between hay and straw. Straw is usually used for animal bedding and hay is animal feed. When you see politicians stumping in farm country with those golden colored bales around - that's straw. Hay is usually green even in bales. The straw left behind from our oat crop is literally tons. We have been small squaring it and putting it into large round bales. My brother has been doing a lot of work on the straw small squares. Good thing he's family! I hope to get all of the straw up by Saturday.