🚜 Farming with Matt: Today’s Episode is Less Green Acres, More Agricultural Chaos
Welcome back to the farm, everyone! For those of you tuning in, this is “Farming with Matt,” the show where I promise to teach you everything about sustainable agriculture, efficient machinery, and the tranquil joy of working the land. And then, five minutes later, I usually end up yelling at a tractor. Today? Today is definitely the yelling-at-a-tractor kind of day. 🙄
The goal this morning was simple, so simple it should have been boring: bale the last two rows of hay in the lower field. It’s a field I’ve worked a thousand times, and the hay baler is a machine I know intimately, for better or worse. It’s supposed to be a graceful, rhythmic process: cut hay goes in, neat, rectangular bales tied perfectly with twine come out. Easy.
The Baler Battles Back
I started strong. The sun was out, the air was crisp, and I was feeling confident. I was maybe two laps into the field when the symphony of agricultural progress abruptly turned into a sputtering, wheezing cacophony. The baler, sensing my momentary joy, decided it was time to stage a protest.
First, it started “eating” the twine. Instead of wrapping neatly around the bale, the twine mechanism decided it preferred to tangle itself into a massive, industrial-strength bird’s nest inside the machine’s knotters. This, of course, means the bales come out untied, tumbling into the field as loose, useless piles of grass.
I spent a good forty-five minutes with the hood up, sweating in the morning sun, trying to perform delicate surgical maneuvers on rusty machinery. Tools slipped. My knuckles got barked. And when I finally managed to clear the wad of twine—a wad so thick and tangled it looked like a prehistoric creature—I felt a huge wave of triumph.
I got back on the tractor, started her up, and drove approximately three tractor lengths before the second, even more irritating problem started.
The Ejection Crisis
The second problem was a classic: the bales, now theoretically tied, refused to eject properly. The machine was spitting them out like a toddler refusing a vegetable. They would half-eject, get stuck in the chute, and then the next bale would start pushing the first one, causing a massive, pressurized jam inside the machine.
Stopping every fifty feet to manually kick a dense, 60-pound bale of hay out of a metal chute is not relaxing. It is, in fact, an excellent way to work up the kind of frustration that makes you question your life choices—like why you decided to pursue a career that involves mechanical breakdowns on a daily basis.
I eventually found the culprit: a slightly bent metal finger inside the ejection mechanism. A slightly bent metal finger that required an enormous wrench and a great deal of grunting to persuade it back into submission. I swear, farming is 10% agriculture and 90% amateur mechanics.
By the time I finished the last two rows—a job that should have taken an hour and a half—three hours had passed, I was covered in grease and hay dust, and the idyllic peace I started the morning with was long gone. The final bale popped out beautifully, landing with a perfect thud. I stared at it, too tired to feel happy, just intensely relieved.
So, on today’s episode of “Farming with Matt,” we didn’t learn about soil rotation or market prices. We learned that hay balers are agents of chaos, and that sometimes, the only thing you can do is laugh (or sigh dramatically) when your equipment decides to fight back. 🙄 #farming #farmlife #fyp #comedy
