The machine age has changed many things in our lives, including the size of bales of hay. When I was younger, bales of hay were small rectangles that varied in weight from approximately 55 – 100 pounds. In those days you would haul the hay from the field by hand-tossing the bales onto a tractor-drawn wagon. Labor saving devices such as the bale wagon were developed, and my father started a custom hay hauling operation with one of these bale wagons. Not many years later the size of bales would increase by hundreds of pounds. Instead of the small bales hauled by hand or by mechanical means built around that smaller size of bale, tractors with bale forks and flatbed trucks are required to move the large bales from field to barn. There are still farmers in the valley who use the small bales, and the equipment that was engineered to haul them. Recently I took a short drive around town and headed up the reservoir road was a bale wagon owned by a local farmer, on his way for a load of those small bales of hay:
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