to all. been in the woods 37 years. please tote more water than you think you need. just do it. load will get lighter as the day progresses.?ÿ i have loved this career, you gotta get home to those you care for and who care for our crazy selves.
PLEASE ALL BE SAFE. 97 IN CAMDEN SOUTH CAROLINA TODAY
Stood in the shade for nearly an hour around 7:00 p.m. yesterday chatting with my farm worker about his 30 years of Army, National Guard, contract worker for Lockheed-Martin experiences in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Germany, Korea and other assorted locations.?ÿ There was almost no breeze.?ÿ Comfortable or we wouldn't have been having the chat.?ÿ Checked in to find it was 106 F.
You just can't do that if you spend two-thirds of your time in air-conditioned environments.
You just can't do that if you spend two-thirds of your time in air-conditioned environments.
Great point.?ÿ The same is true at the other end of the thermometer as well.?ÿ Our bodies really will acclimate to the environment with sufficient water, food, rest, and periodic shelter.?ÿ In Interior Alaska, part of the acclimation is that your skin seems to dry out a bit (not carrying as much water) and is therefore able to handle the cold substantially better.
Kind of like lifting weights:?ÿ If you want to lift heavier, you gotta...lift heavier.?ÿ If you want to be able to work in the heat, you gotta...work in the heat.
I feel fortunate to live in a place where we don't have excessive heat, plenty of water resources (no drought), plenty of electrical power (although they have closed a number of coal fired plants, but we also don't have the steel mills anymore), plenty of gas resources (Marcellus Shale) , no wildfires, no earthquakes...
I have worked at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas in the summer, brutal. But we were very careful about hydration, etc.?ÿ
When schools begin their Fall preseason sports practices it is extremely easy to separate them into two groups.?ÿ Farm kids and everyone else.
Fifty-plus years ago it was even easier.?ÿ That was prior to the invention of the big, round hay baler that is seen almost everywhere today.?ÿ Riding wagons and trucks out in the hayfield half of the day. spending the other half of the day plus half of the night handling the small, square bales that ranged from 50 pounds to over 100 pounds each was WORK,?ÿ Sometimes loading and storing up to 1500 per day in whatever the conditions were built muscles, dark tans and character.?ÿ You quickly learned how to get the most productivity with the least effort by handling each bale correctly, every time.?ÿ Every bale was handled at least twice, once in the field and once into final storage.
Every bale was handled at least twice, once in the field and once into final storage.
Plus the easy step of putting it in the long elevator to get it into the barn for careful stacking (in crosswise layers so they wouldn't put too much strain on the side of the barn).
That was after we switched from using the "4-tined octopus" fork that pulled up to trolley at the peak of the barn. We had to re-stack the bales in a certain pattern in the wagon so the fork could grab a group of them properly.
There's more than one reason I went to engineering school.
When schools begin their Fall preseason sports practices it is extremely easy to separate them into two groups.?ÿ Farm kids and everyone else.
Fifty-plus years ago it was even easier.?ÿ That was prior to the invention of the big, round hay baler that is seen almost everywhere today.?ÿ Riding wagons and trucks out in the hayfield half of the day. spending the other half of the day plus half of the night handling the small, square bales that ranged from 50 pounds to over 100 pounds each was WORK,?ÿ Sometimes loading and storing up to 1500 per day in whatever the conditions were built muscles, dark tans and character.?ÿ You quickly learned how to get the most productivity with the least effort by handling each bale correctly, every time.?ÿ Every bale was handled at least twice, once in the field and once into final storage.
AMEN.?ÿ It's even worse if it's peanut hay.?ÿ Those vines are still dusty from the inverters and the harvesters don't know much of it off.?ÿ At the end of the day you can only see skin where the rivulets of sweat washed it off.?ÿ I DO NOT miss those days at all.
I did have one concession to the heat that I did enjoy.?ÿ A doctor from town had a swimming pool at this cabin next to our farm.?ÿ It was fed by an artesian well.?ÿ 65 degrees year round.?ÿ This time of year I'd drop a couple of just picked watermelons in the pool first thing in the morning and by lunch they were a cool welcome treat.?ÿ Jumping in the pool to retrieve those melons would cause quite a shock to the system, but I loved it.
Andy
I stacked hay with my cousin running the farmhand, I was 14 the first year I did it, I do believe my back issues are related to that work.?ÿ
I worked on a project in Pueblo, Colorado one summer and it was so brutally hot down there they'd pour concrete between 7 PM and 7 AM some days.?ÿ I talked with the contractors a bit and one guy said Pueblo was a relief-- he had come from Arizona where they had to keep their tools in buckets of water so they wouldn't burn their hands on them.?ÿ When I heard that I was like you have got to be kidding me...
My first survey job as a teen was in Saudi as a helper, in summer. Routinely over 120 during peak sun. We??d start working 5 am and break around 10:30 am. Try and sleep with a wet towel for a blanket until around 3:30 and go back it until it was too dark to see. Too much sun and heat stroke was a serious risk and it can kill. Drank lot of water and ate salt tablets. End of the day I??d look like a frosted corn flake from salt on my skin and clothes. I do not miss it. Alaska is much more to my liking.
to all. been in the woods 37 years. please tote more water than you think you need. just do it. load will get lighter as the day progresses.?ÿ i have loved this career, you gotta get home to those you care for and who care for our crazy selves.
PLEASE ALL BE SAFE. 97 IN CAMDEN SOUTH CAROLINA TODAY
Camden gets hot!?ÿ ?ÿLovely place.?ÿ Spent some time there as a kid.?ÿ Fishing in the Wateree river is the best!
@holy-cow Like this. Well my bales are not the 100 pound ones. The horse people (mostly ladies here) like them around 50#s tops. But my 11 and 7 year old girls love to help.?ÿ
@williwaw I did a job in Djioubiti Africa There were days it hit over 130 F . Had a Trimble 5601 that bit the dust. So hot the oil and grease just ran out of that sucker. Did not stop a wild T-3 though. Lol . I had early mornings and late afternoons to run levels. We had about an hour in the a.m. and about the same in the afternoon we could run the dini level with invar rods to achieve the results we needed. Ended up having about 7 miles worth of levels ran over the project. So hot some bird that looked like a pigeon a few would just kill over while flying. Looked like a dove shoot on some days. Dry heat. You could just drink water constantly from camel baks. All day and not go to the bathroom but once in morning and once at night. ?ÿBut I would take that heat over the humidity of Mississippi Tennessee South Carolina or North Carolina and sometimes Virginia any day. ?ÿ
@bill93?ÿ
Every once in awhile we had the luxury of an elevator to get them from a truck/trailer bed to a hay loft.?ÿ Most of the time we had to buck them up to the opening.?ÿ That bottom layer was the killer.?ÿ Sometimes they went down off the truck to start building up from ground level, then somewhat level, then buck them all up to each higher level.?ÿ When that was more than head high, you ate a lot of hay whether you wanted to or not.?ÿ Regular barns, old sheds, old houses, a couple of old school buildings, box cars and open stacks out in a proper location for drainage piled as high as possible and then covered over with long slough grass mowed off, gathered by pitch fork and placed by pitch fork (worked fairly well at shedding rain).
Our farm always produced more hay than we needed for our own use.?ÿ That meant reloading, hauling to a buyer and then putting the hay in their storage space, whatever that happened to be.?ÿ I was guaranteed to touch every bale four times.?ÿ Twice in Summer and twice in Winter.
