Hay carting    chaff

                                                                                                        Brian stooking hay

                                            Grandpa Kane on the left

Plough on Pierces flat 2004

John:  “I’ve just swapped over the tapes and we need to repeat a few things.  The last tape you were just talking about the modern presses.  Just give me a summary of the round bales again”.

Of course the big advantage of the round bales now is that it cuts down on the number of the workforce.  Carting them in and where you had perhaps 15 perhaps 20 of the smaller bales, well that now is all put into one big roll.  And as far as carting them in is concerned.  Well if you’ve got the right equipment and the right sized tractor, it’s only a matter of carting them along the fenceline or suitable areas where you feed them out from.  It means that you haven’t got to have haysheds.  They stand up well to the weather.  I know some people who have had them here for three years or more and when they’re gone to use them the quality of the hay is still very good.  There’s also the big squares too.  They seem to fit on the semis a lot better with the cartage and neater loads.  You see very few small squares now around mainly because of the costs of carting them in and then having to cart them out.  I’d say it’s definitely an improvement as far as the overall cost of harvesting.

John “I’m still fascinated with the way that oats used to be harvested back in the old days.  Can you tell me about stack building please.  I remember as a kid coming up here mainly to Tommy Eveston’s and building oat stacks was a work of art.  I remember coming up on the Ansett bus through Rockbank and those sort of places they used to build beautiful stacks.  They used to look like ships in the ocean.  Can you tell me how many people you needed to build a stack and basically how you did it.  A very difficult job it seems to me.”

Well, John, the art of stack building, you have to have a good man on the binder to be able to turn out a sheaf that was nice and tight and well tied.  A lot of them if they didn’t know how to work the binder properly (would cause problems).   There’s five levers on a binder and three of these are for when the sheaf is being tied and unless you keep an eye on the height of your crop which varies according to your type of ground.  Sometimes it might be over six feet tall and other areas where it is a bit dryer, it may even get down to 2 feet 6 or 3 feet.  So you had to work your platform and make sure that when you tied the sheaf it was tied almost in the middle of the overall height of the crop.

But getting right back to the basis of building a sheaf stack.  I was very fortunate that I was taught by one of the best stack builders here in the district, a man by the name of Watty Moore.  He could turn his hand to anything.  He was a marvellous shearer and he shore for many years.  He lived till he was over 90.  I can recall we had over 50 or 60 acres one year, it might have even been more and it would have gone about 3 ton to the acre.  So you’re looking at something like 200 ton or more of sheafed hay and he put all that into one enormous stack.  On that stack there would have been about 6 to 8 people working because of the size of it.

Getting back to the art of building.  You’ve got to estimate the tonnage you have – what you’re going to put into it.  And it’s done by measurement and you start off by crowning it in the middle.  You arrange the sheaves so from the very first instance the centre is always a lot higher.  Put it this way, we’d term it as a pitch.  The pitch of the whole stack has got to be such that to weather proof it, you’ve got to keep your centre, I would say, even as much as 10 feet as the stack gets up; higher than the outside of the width of the stack..  When you start at the base it is very narrow.  But what they call is springing as you gradually taper it out to where you come up to the eave. That is the highest point of your width.  Now on a big stack that would be about 10 feet.  That means that the base of your stack might only be about 8 feet wide but when you get up to the eave it could be as much as 30 feet in width overall.  So that’s how much you come out as you’re putting your sheaves on.  The art is that when you put the outside sheaf on.  Now when they come out of the binder there is a tapered side which means that one side of the sheaf is longer than the other which means that it has a tapered base on it.  Now as you’re coming up prior to the stage prior to the stage when you’re going to put a top on it you have what you call the knots down.  This means that the tapered end; the longest point of it is turned down.  Now when you do your outside row, the second row is a binder.  That’s got to be put in a certain place which holds the outside sheaf.  That is continued right round.  Right round the perimeter of your stack.  The third sheaf again, you’re continuing another row and that is like a second binder.  If the stack is big you’ve got up to 15 or 20 rows of sheaves until you come to the centre of your stack.  Now being pitched, that means that at that stage from the outside of your stack to the centre would be a pitch of almost a one in one.  Very steep.  Well, once you get up to the stage where you’re going to put your top on it and this is where the essential part of it is to.  Because this is where you’ve got to waterproof your stack.  You turn your sheaf the other way that has the short end, the tapered end is faced up.  Now when you looked at your sheaf, you could see that itself was allowing you to come in and that’s when you narrowed your stack.  You sprung it out to the width that you wanted it and then you brought it back in again.  And as John said, it looks like a big ship – a battleship.  It came right out, then it came in to a point.  To create that finish, each time you went round, you came in a round about 6 to 8 inches which meant that you had to keep narrowing down  the outside area.  In the finish you had one sheaf was sufficient to do the last row which meant that it was like the roof of a house with that pitch.  Well that is how you brought your stacks in so that they would shed the water.  Now if built properly and tight, each sheaf as you put it in, you put your foot on it.  One of the most important persons was the sheaf turner. Now a sheaf turner was like a good rover to a ruckmen in football.  He had to anticipate and work in unison with the ruckman and that stackbuilder if he was given the sheaf properly, hardly had to touch it because the turner had already put it in the right position.  (That was Brian his nephew).  The builder then tightened it in with his foot.  A lot of the old builders did it on their hands and knees.  They crawled around and tightened them in.  The stack builder very seldom went out to load the wagons or trucks.  He had what was like a beater – a flat type of board with a handle on it and to get the right spring, when you came down on the ground after you took the load off, you could see exactly whether a sheaf wasn’t in its right position.  So with the beater you could hit it back into position that made the whole thing as perfect  as if it was done in a mould.  But as I said before, you had to have very good sheaves and a good type of hay.  Another thing was if you were doing it on a very hot day the hay got what they called very glassy and slippery.  This made it a lot harder to build a good stack but you could overcome this problem with your binding.  You might have to put in extra binding.  To see a completed well built stack it was without a shadow of doubt, a masterpiece because to get them to balance.  To get the right balance on them.  If you don’t get the bind, if you don’t realise that you’ve done something wrong, you can go so far and the whole side of the stack will slip out and you can loose the lot.  And you’ve got to go right back then to where the fault was created.  But you’ve got to be able to know by the firmness as you’re walking around on them that there’s no movement.  One of the biggest problems was when a wind was blowing from the one direction for four or five days.  Back in those days you could get an east wind that may blow for a week, well that created a big problem because you had to go around your stack evenly.  As you brought your load in from one side and throw off a load on the other side, it kept it in true balance.  But if you were throwing off all from the one side, it was like ramming it.  One side would have more pressure put on it.  Some of those good sheaves could weigh 12 or 15 pound.  If you’re throwing off on the one side, it unbalances the who stack.   So that in itself had a big effect on the success of whether your stack was going to be perfect or not.

John “That explanation on stack building was a complicated as I expected and as I’m having more and more of this rum, it’s getting more and more complicated.  Now still on oats, can you tell me about chaff making.  You got a chaff house there with an old machine, when did you start making chaff and what was it used for?”

Well of course, as I said before, Dad would have had at least 6 draft horses here and they were fed 95% of their food on chaff.  That’s why it was so essential.  These horses were used for wood carting and road works and making dams.  They were the most important animal on the farm..  Whatever you wanted to shift you went and yoked the horses up and they ate an enormous amount of food because they were such big animals.  Most people had chaff cutters but if you didn’t have one there was always a mill in the local town.  What you did you loaded your wagon up with hay from your stack and you took it down to the town and the chaff miller would cut it up and then you’d bring it back in bags.  Everybody had chaff houses and they kept the chaff loose because if you left it in bags, rats and mice would eat the bags.  But if you put it loose in your chaff houses you never had any problems.  I was taught to cut chaff by an expert, name of Jock Beaton, but it was very essential that you never attempted to cut chaff on a hot dry day because it was brittle and it would break up.  If you did it on a day when there was a little bit of moisture around it came out lovely and blocky.  Most of them had the three blade chaff cutters and if you had them properly sharpened and set you could cut some of the best chaff that you could ever get.  Lovely and blocky and not broken up into dust.  Of course you fed them with the head.  There were the rollers of the chaff cutter – terrible dangerous things.  Most of the operators that were professional chaff cutters always had two or three fingers gone.  You could always tell what they did for a living by the number of fingers they had on their hands.  But fortunate enough I’ve still got mine and as I say, I was taught by an expert.  Now the art of chaff cutting John, is when you start feeding the chaff cutter it’s got to be continuous.  You might have noticed over there there’s a weight that keeps the rollers tight.  Unless the hay is going in evenly all the time; if you allow it to become empty, the weight then, the pressure comes off the rollers and until you start again you can always tell if you’ve made a mistake and you walk into the shed and you’ll see long straws because it off sets the pressure of the hay going onto the knives.  A good operator should have every sheaf  cut when it comes out about a quarter of an inch – cut up into little blocks of hay.  Properly operated it was magnificent fodder for whatever you wanted to use it for because it also had the oat content amongst it.  They were marvellous things – well they were essential to have good chaff cutters.

John “What’s the history of that chaff cutter that’s installed over in that shed now?”

I was very fortunate there John.  I got that from out at Tahara at Doleys who had trotters.  I don’t think they had any racehorses.  It was always well housed but unfortunately I used to cut up 4 or 500 hundred bales of lucerne for Jim Cerchi who had come up to Coleraine here as a horse trainer.  Of course he was a marvellous man.  He had success all over Australia.  And to get the lucerne, that good quality of lucerne, you dampened down the bales.  One lot must have had a little too much moisture and they clogged and when I was feeding them in, there must have been a tuft with too much dampness in it and it broke the mechanism there and I haven’t had it repaired since.  I cut up hundreds of tons, cause there was good demand.  You could always sell chaff because there were pony clubs and back in those days too there were always people who had hacks.  There were no motor bikes as there are now on the farms.  Then there were school ponies and everything like that.  So you could always sell a bag of chaff.  Since we’ve gone out of the sheaved hay and that, well there’s been no demand for it.  I’d still like to get it going again especially if we went back into a bit of sheaved hay again.

John “What’s wrong with it – do you know?”

Where they break, attached to the rollers, where the mouth goes in, there’s a caste mechanism there.  If extra pressure comes on well it breaks.  And of course if anything breaks and then hits the knives well you break your knives a well.  The trouble is there so dangerous it doesn’t pay to weld broken parts.  You’ve got to get the proper part itself because of the safety of it.

John “Another story I’ve heard from you is your contract work.  You used to cart quite a bit of hay at Clines.  Can you tell me what sort of work you used to do over there especially that stinking hot day?”

Oh, John, now we’re going right back to the old pitch fork well before presses or anything.  It was all manual.  Once you cut your hay, you put them into win rows.  What they called the old dump rakes, horse drawn rake, then you cocked it up and as I say, you swept them in with a sweep.  But that all had to be pitched.  Every bit of it had to be pitched manually with a pitch fork.  Without being racist, blackfellas wouldn’t even attempt to do it.  I must have been in a different category to even them.  But anyway I used to go over there and in the middle of summer in those hot gullies and you can just imagine against a grass hay stack with no draught.  The temperature would have been absolutely enormous because I know Jimmy’s wife Sheila would come down there with afternoon tea and on many occasions she’d say, “do you know it’s 104 degrees in the kitchen at home.  Well it must have been 150 or 60 down where we were working.  Well that went on for weeks.  He was also dairying at the time so he’d have to knock off at four o’clock.  I’d still continue and sweep a lot of hay around the stack for the next morning.  It would make it more continuous as far as the pitching of it went.  I don’t know who many weeks it went on.  The most payment I got was 30 pound.  30 pound – that would have been $60 for about, it might have been about a month’s work or more.  Still in all I think it toughened a fella up a bit.  That’s more or less why I’m alive today.  I don’t think it did me any harm.  Nobody would do it now.  No way in the world, they’d sooner go to gaol.  Oh God, it was terrible hard work out in the boiling sun and down in hot valleys and gullies in January and 104 in the kitchen.  Well you can just imagine what it would have been like out in the middle of a paddock.

John “To put that in perspective, Ballie just said he got 30 quid or $60 for a months work, I’ve got spend $35 on rum and two bottles of coke and that’s an interesting comparison.  Another thing I want to talk about is silage.  Out at Tommy Eveston’s he used to put a bit of grass hay into silage.  Did you ever do this over on this farm.”

It wasn’t very popular John.  Back in those days well most of them pitted it but when you had to feed it out and its something you’ve got to have a lot of, cause all the dairy farms were around here.  Well most of them would be milking their 50 or 60 cows.  To have the equivalent of silage to be able to get the full benefit out of it to feed the cows properly you had to have tons and tons of it.  There were only a very few people went in for it.  I don’t think they benefited very much from it when it was all said and done.  The only advantage of it, if it was a good year and you wanted to take advantage of the extra feed.  You could put all types of grass in and the weather didn’t’ have too much effect on it whereas if you put it all into hay well then you might have more than you needed.  The silage kept well because they used to cover it in those days with soil and if made properly if you didn’t use  it one year you could use it the following year.  I only made it in one year and I didn’t go to the pit stage.  If the paddock was overgrown with shore thistles or cape weed and that, I used to just cut an area without paddock being cut up or anything.  When there was excessive feed about and it tidied the paddock up.  I used to just put it into a surface heap and when it cured enough the stock would help themselves to it.  That was an advantage, more so just tidying the paddock up and getting rid of extra darn grass and that.  There was very little of it done John.

Ballie 2004