The Day Our Hay Stack Started Smoking

The wet cutting

I should tell you how we got there, because I am not going to pretend we did nothing wrong.

My name is Shelby Okerlund. I am 41. During the school year I drive a bus route for the district, sixty-two miles a day, out past the gravel pits and back.

In summer I run the hay side of our place, because my husband runs a harvest crew.

We farm in Pipestone County, down in the southwest corner of Minnesota, where the land runs flat and open toward South Dakota and the wind never stops. We have 160 acres, about half in alfalfa, and forty head of cows.

The ground came from Brock’s dad. When he passed, it went to Brock. Arlo is his dad’s younger brother, and Arlo had always figured that ground should have come back to him and been folded in with his 2,000 acres.

He never said it mean. He said it the way men like him say things, plain and reasonable over coffee. He offered to buy it twice.

Fair money, he said. A family that can’t keep up its own hay ground ought to sell it to somebody who can.

Brock told him no both times. Brock grew up on that ground. His dad is buried in the cemetery you can see from our north fence line. We were not selling it.

So every summer Brock goes out with a custom harvest crew, three combines and the trucks, following the wheat north from Kansas. That money is what keeps us. This August he was cutting near Havre, Montana, about 800 miles from home.

And every summer I put up the hay with our girls.

Kenna is 16. She has driven the loader tractor since she was twelve, on the straight pulls in the open, where there is nothing to hit.

She has a long blonde braid she will not cut, and she is steadier than I was at her age.

Paisley is 13. She is freckled all over from the sun, and she talks to the cows like they are her cousins.

She runs the hose, the gates and the water tanks, and she runs her mouth, and I would not trade one minute of it.

We do not own a baler. We hire our big squares done by a neighbor who custom bales, and we stack them ourselves in our pole shed with our old blue Ford tractor and a set of pallet forks on the loader.

The second cutting that summer was heavy and beautiful. Then the forecast turned. Rain was coming in two days, a big system, an inch and a half or more.

The hay was close but not dry. The baler man stuck his moisture probe in a windrow and frowned and said 22, maybe 23 percent in the heavy spots.

He said he could wait or he could bale. He said he would bale it if it were his.

I made the call. If that rain had come down on it, the whole cutting would have laid in the field and gone black.

So we baled it a touch wet, ahead of the rain, and we stacked it in the shed three weeks before that afternoon.

Wet hay heats. Everybody knows that. Most of the time it heats and then it cools and you lose a little color and a little feed value and that is all.

Once in a while, in a hot August, the middle of the stack keeps climbing.

I had checked it. I want that understood too. I had a length of pipe with a thermometer dropped down inside it, and I had pushed it into the stack every few days. It had been warm. It had not been bad.

I had not checked it since Saturday. Sunday was church and a potluck, Monday was a dentist appointment in town, and the weather had gone hot and still. That was on me.