noise."Worldbuilding XII: Farming part 5: Harvesting · 11:11pm Oct 5th, 2018
Really, this is the culmination of planting things: harvesting them.
And, since plants grow in all shapes and sizes, this is where the largest variety of equipment exists, and I couldn't possibly hope to cover it all.
As I mentioned before with planters, a pony is only likely to have specialty equipment for things that she plants a lot of. There are, for example, industrial-scale tomato harvesters, but you need a pretty big tomato field to justify such a piece of equipment. Enough for any one family—even Apple Leaves' family—is too big for a hobby-sized garden.
For the ponies, hay is going to be a big crop. There's a reason that horses are affectionately known as hay burners.
It's also one of the few crops which is harvested multiple times in one year.
The first thing to do it to cut it. Historically, this could be done with a scythe (and a person who knows what they're doing can do it pretty quick).
For larger fields, a hay cutter is more practical. Early types were basically a sickle on wheels, and those gave way to a shear arrangement. Typically, they only cut on one side of the operator.
Such a device could probably be pulled by a single horse, especially if it were small. Cutting a wider swath would, of course, require more horsepower.
After the hay has dried a little bit, that gets followed along with by a hay rake or a windrower. Hay needs to be dried before it can be stored, and there's an ideal moisture content. Too much, and there was a chance of it catching fire (yes, that is not a mistake; if the hay has too much moisture, it can catch fire in the barn). Too little, and you lose a lot of the nutrients it has to offer. And if it rains on the hay, it needs to be dried again, or it will get moldy.
A hay rake was generally just like a giant comb between two large wheels. It would comb up the cut hay until the pile got to the right size, and then pushing a foot-operated lever caused it to dump that hay. Ultimately, the goal is to put the hay in rows.
Windrowers (or wheel rakes) generally use spinning wheels arranged either on an angle or in a v-shape, and they drive the hay into a row that way. They don't require you to dump the hay at all; they just get pulled along and make neat lines behind themselves.
Both these machines could be operated by one or two ponies. The windrower is probably harder to pull, but has the advantage of requiring no other operations besides just pulling it. A hay rake needs to be dumped regularly, but is lighter and simpler, since the only moving part is the mechanism which makes the rake release and then re-latch. A hay rake could be tripped remotely by some arrangement along the shaft, or it could have a seat for a foal to ride along on.
[Traditionally, hay was then piled into haystacks, or hayscocks, which were arranged in such a way that they'd shed water if it rained. This allowed them to continue to dry (see above). From there, it was loaded loose onto wagons, and it was also transferred to the hayloft in the barn loose.
There are probably still some ponies who do it this way.]
We've seen haybales repeatedly in canon, which of course implies a baler.
Early hay balers were called hay presses. The haystacks were brought to the machine, which used a horse-powered sweep* to press the loose hay into bales. Early machines could produce five 250 pound bales per hour.
More modern hay balers are towed along the windrows, which eliminates the need for making haystacks. Such a machine can be pulled behind horses, although historically they rarely were (one notable exception being the Amish). That would be followed by a flatbed wagon, either hitched to the hay baler, or else towed along by another team of horses.
As the bales came out of the chute on the baler, they had to be stacked on the flatbed wagon, and while I have no personal experience loading a hay wagon, I imagine it's less fun than unloading one (which I have done).
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*a sweep is an arm arrangement that horses pull on, making a rotational motion. Capstans are conceptually the same thing, although typically smaller.
From the pony perspective, this is going to be a very labor-intensive process. The baler itself is going to take a gang of ponies to pull, because not only do they have to pull the weight of the machine itself, but its wheels turning provide the force to run the press and the conveyor at the back that spits the bales out. If they're towing the hay wagon with the baler, that's even more weight to pull along . . . I personally think that they'd pull the hay wagons separate).
Unlike several previous examples, unless they have a bale thrower, there has to be at least one pony riding the hay wagon to stack the bales as the machine spits them out. While it's presumably possible to make a machine that automatically stacks bales, I've never seen one and it seems like it would be hellishly complex.
My own rough estimate is that to bale hay you'd probably have four ponies pulling the baler, two pulling the hay wagon, and one or two more riding it . . . in other words, your minimum crew size would be seven.
Other grains (wheat, for example) are cut similarly to hay. Once it was cut—either by scythe or horse-drawn mower—it would be bundled into sheaves to dry. Much like the haystacks, but not as big.
Just as balers improved the haying process, reapers were improved, ultimately being capable of cutting the grain and then tying it into bundles that just had to be stood up by the farmer.
Such a machine would probably require four ponies to operate (just like the hay baler, they're not only pulling the weight of the machine, but also driving the mechanism that makes it work) and at least one additional pony following along and stacking the sheaves. Odds are that that job would fall to a foal, if one were available.
Corn was harvested essentially the same way, historically. A corn binder would gather it one or sometimes two rows at a time, and when the bundle got big enough, the machine would tie it off and then drop the bundle. I showed a video of one in action in my announcement blog, but for anyone who missed it, here it is again:
Both corn and grain require further processing once it's out of the field. For grains, that's where the thresher came into play: a giant machine that went around from farm to farm. The crop was brought to the machine, which in early days was horse-powered. Threshers were one of the first farm machines commonly powered by tractor.
[As an aside, nowadays we use combines—which is short for combination harvester—which combines the cutting and threshing processes into one operation].
I know of two ways to harvest potatoes. The simplest potato harvester is a special type of plow, which turns over the soil and the potatoes with it.
The other type attaches the plow to a conveyor mechanism, which carries the potatoes up and lets the dirt fall off through the open slats of the conveyor. It can then dump the potatoes in a wagon which is towed behind the harvester . . . or else you still pick them up off the ground.
As with the balers and binders, a full-featured potato harvester is going to take a lot of ponies to pull; the plow has to dig through the soil, and the wheels turning is what powers the conveyor. That is also likely to be a four pony job.
The simpler plow only could be done by two ponies, with a number of other ponies following along, picking up the freshly uprooted potatoes and putting them in a cart. Such a job would once again be a great job for foals.
Other crops required other harvesting methods. Many still are harvested the old-fashioned way, since there are no practical machines that can perform the tasks adequately.
Applejack isn’t a silly pony after all.
Clu? Clumination?
No. No, she is not.
Not much to add on horse powered machinery, except that when we're talking loading those magically precise Earth Pony kicks are going to get a lot of use.
But man, the muscles on that reaper...he's like a scarecrow made of rope and beef jerky. Which sounds much less complimentary than I mean it as.
You could have all the things going at once, but usually if you only have the one tractor, heavy haul, youd go round with the sweeper, then the bailer, almost always locally the equipment is dragged out of the barn and left in a corner of a field while theyre used one after the other. A lot of times the hay trailers are left out overwinter because the hay is literally filing the barn to the point of stressing the doors.
One barn on the moors tends to burn down every few years because this is a wet place and they likely tried pulling it too early, still damp, instead of letting it be totally sodden waste in the field. Of course, they not only lose the crop, but the barn as well.
Collecting the bales was impressive as the field at the top of the hill was moor side, so was sparsely covered and as such for a given yield covered a far larger area than the near meadow fields below the spring line. Freinds and family from three hamlets turned up one year I thought I remember. It might have occured multiple years but the hay doesnt grow since silage became big harvest. Maybe 20 people acting as bale sweepers, picking them up from ahead of the slowly moving tractor and trailer, droping them or handing them to the biggest adults to throw up onto the moving trailer, on top of which were three or four men who lifted passed and stacked the bales. They had one simple measure of how much hay. It could fit through the 15 foot high arch of the barn. Occasionally a bad approach lead to the bales catching on the entrance, and shifting. The best case scenario was that the person driving heard the yells, stopped, backed out a little Very slowly, then managed to ajust enough that the now teetering trailer got in the barn. The worst was when I think everyone managed to get out of the way when the pile collapsed outside the barn. the tractor had to drag the trailer from out under the pile, and the guys spent a long while late into the night moving random piled bales from outside the barn, to inside. Being young, like all the other kids. We headed home for food and sleep.
The less said about the only time I drove the hay collect tractor, on idle walking speed, and used the mechinically correct steering method to thread between a trash bunker and a powerline where the farmer darnt take the wheel because he left it too late, the better. I think I was 12. Couldnt remember where the brake or clutch was.
A somewhat more impressive exhibition Woman wielding scythes. Those sickle bar mowers caused a lot of dogs to lose legs. As for unloading the hay wagon vs. stacking in the field, they both can be miserable. Stacking in the wagon the kicker launches the bale as well as chaff and it gets ALL over you, and I mean ALL over you. In your ears. Down your pants and in your boots. While you bake in the sun and sweat gallons. Unloading the wagon in the barn. It's usually hotter in the barn than in the field. I've drank a gallon or more of tea doing that and never urinated once the entire day.
Neat stuff!
Reminds me of a strange bit of Medieval mythology: Human souls were considered to be treated exactly like a grain crop. That's why Death cuts them down with a scythe, the Devil harvests them with a pitchfork, and the demons in hell winnow them with iron flails. I don't know what sort of bread or beer is the result, but I bet it's yummy!
One thing you're consistently getting incorrect is the spelling. Hay bales are baled by a hay baler with baling wire. Bailing is what you do to leaky boats.
All that work...
Farmers should just order their hay bales online and get them delivered to the barn via Amazon quadcopter.
And was that a real life Applejack ?
Ah, one of the reasons I decided on the career I've got now. Bailing prairie hay is a process: Cut, dry (sometimes involving raking two windrows together because the swather leaves them a little thin at times), bale, pickup bales with the wagon, take them to the barn, put them away, repeat.
Yes, there *are* machines that pick up the individual bales, stack them onto the wagon it is towing along, then let you stack the whole block into the barn. We had one of those in the *last* half of my time at the farm. The *first* half, we had a two-man process with a tractor pulling a 'pick up the bale and send it up the ramp' widget, then a guy on the top of the wagon who took the bales and stacked them. Fill the wagon, get another one, repeat. Take the wagons to the barn, use a hay elevator (it's a long metal frame with a toothed chain that takes the baled up, up, up...) and some poor schmuck at each end to put the bale/pick up the bale and stack them. Hay hooks for the win.
https://www.ruralking.com/loyal-roth-hayrite-bale-elevator-8-foot-extension-with-chain
That last video was epic. Horses can be very clever when they want to be.
And then comes the harvest festivals and fairs at the end of the season. (Are meat raffles really unknown outside Minnesota? I thought everyone did them.)
At the fair a little over a month ago, I caught the end of the horsemanship competitions. "Skittles" was quite a speed demon and could have finished the jumping figure 8 in 14 seconds, but bumped the bar on the second jump.
i.imgur.com/m9iQ134.jpg
Also saw a couple nasty spills during the Ribbon Race when the inside horse tried to take it too fast and pretty much toppled over. Impressive when they can lean almost 35-40 degrees into a turn and pull it off.
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I blame my keybnoard.
(correction made; thank you!)
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Yes, I was remarkably consistent in misspelling that, wasn’t I? Especially since not only do I know the difference, but so does Google, and it helpfully underlined all the misspellings for me.
And I rather foolishly ignored that.
Ah well, they’re all fixed now (I think).
It's horrifyingly beautiful to watch a haybale go up.
It does the thing because mold makes it heat up in the middle to the flash point of the hay.
Only Biscuit could convince all of us that watching videos of an old-timey hay bailing team would be entertaining...
Also, that's a fun, smart horse you've got on the bottom there.
This one was pretty interesting. A lot of crops near where i'm at are hand harvested (as far as I know) so it was interesting to see some of the machines.
i'm not super familiar with horses, but hay might not end up being as popular as something like alfalfa. It was with the goats I had growing up. They also might not end up baling it as much as we do because it's so hard for them. They might do it in smaller packages that are more house friendly. How it's prepared also might have some influence on how it's packaged as well.
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I’ve gotten lucky and never seen that.
I do know that compost can catch fire, too, and I’ve seen a wet woodchip pile smouldering. I also have heard of people that put pipes in the compost to use the heat generated during the process to heat greenhouses.
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You’re darn right it’s entertaining.
That horse has figured out where apples come from.
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A lot of produce still has to be, as far as I know, anyway. Things like lettuce and tomatoes and pumpkins and squash and melons and other fruits and vegetables that don’t grow all neatly on a plant or can’t easily be separated from the plant with machines.
I probably should have specified when I said ‘hay’ that I meant pasture grasses in general (alfalfa, timothy grass, etc.). Also as I recall, a lot of grains (like wheat) kind of fall into that category, as well. Not sure if the stalks can be used for silage, but they probably are.
From what I’ve heard, bailing hay or leaving it loose is about the same amount of work, it’s just that the work is different. Bales are nice though because they’re more compact than loose hay.
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So a quick google search revealed that i've been using the term wrong. I always used hay and straw interchangeably but apparently that's wrong.
that's true for humans, but it might be easier for ponies to leave it loose. and while bales are more compact, i'm also thinking about the end product that's being consumed. bales might work for some dishes, but they might not work for others.
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Like I said it's horrifyingly beautiful.
Like the hay feels hot and you're puzzled for a moment.
Then later it starts smoking/smoldering.
Then enough of it dries / the heat gets high enough that it just fucking explodes.
(Turns out flammable particles like chaff ignite explosively like flour and non-dairy creamer)
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I also did more googling and found out that I was using ‘hay’ right; it’s a general term for various plants cut for animal feed.
We used to put straw on our garden . . . totally not the same as hay. Tasted terrible, too.
I don’t think that there’s a huge difference, so long as you don’t compact it down too hard. Although I would imagine that there’s a lot of pony cuisine where they do want the fresh-cut stuff, as fresh as possible (and there are probably some small-batch farms in Ponyville--I bet if the staggered their planting, throughout hay season they could have stuff ready to harvest and be eaten right away practically every day).
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And sawdust, sugar, and cheese. Really, any fine dust will.
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You haven't lived until you see a tractor trailer loaded with bales pull off onto the shoulder of the highway because its load went pyrotechnic.
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I’ve seen that on Top Gear (which admittedly, is not the same, and also there was a space heater helping).
Still beautiful, though. <wipes away tear>