Farm Equipment Fridays: Raking hay

After the hay has been tedded and dried, it needs to be raked into big piles. 
The rake does exactly what it sounds like it should do.  It gets pulled behind the tractor...

It has these tines that spin around and grab the hay...

And the tines pull the hay into a pile just to the left of the tractor/rake combination.

So after the rake passes by, there’s a long line of a pile of hay left behind.  This long pile is called a windrow.  Depending on the thickness of hay in the field, sometimes one windrow gets raked again with more flat hay to form an even bigger windrow.

Once the windrow of hay is thick enough, another windrow is started.

And on and on, around the field it goes.

Here’s a close-up of the rake coming…

Here it is!!

And there it goes…

Here is our lower field, partly raked into windrows.  I think this looks pretty neat from the birds-eye view.

I would have loved to give you a shot of the whole lower field raked and ready to bale.  But, before the raking was finished…

The baling had started!

More on the round baler next week…  That is by far the coolest part!


Step 1 - Mower/conditioner
Step 2 - Tedder
Step 3 - Rake
Step 4 - Baler
Step 5 - Bale Spear