Published September 2005 The Advocate
“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.” Unknown
Lenox - “It all depends on the weather, and you can’t depend on the weather,” Phil Rennie said at a recent interview as he got ready to complete his haymaking for the summer.
Phil Rennie and Paul Cella, of Lenox, start their three-day competition not with a waving green flag, but with a field of waving green grass. They race, not against each other, but against a much stronger and more unpredictable adversary – the weather. Enough rain to make the field of Timothy grass grow high enough for haying is needed throughout the spring and summer. Three dry days and nights in a row are then needed to cut, dry and bale the hay to be stored in the barn for the coming winter.
In June and August almost every year for the past 15 years, Rennie and Cella have driven in circles over a 4 acre field owned by a neighbor on Holmes Road in Pittsfield. The field is one of the few undeveloped pieces of property left on that road.
Their maximum speed is less than five miles an hour. They don’t wear helmets or seatbelts, but they do make sure their boots are tied, and their sleeves are buttoned so nothing can be sucked into the machinery, causing injury.
“I’ve heard of farmers who have lost arms or legs because their shirt sleeves were too loose,” Rennie said.
Rennie and Cella don’t have wealthy sponsors or screaming fans. Their only audience is of the winged and four-legged variety - hawks, field mice and moles, and sometimes, Rennie’s 15-year-old terrier mix, Benji, who likes to play in the field.
“The moles come out because they hate the vibration of the tractors, and the hawks sit in the treetops and wait for lunch,” Rennie said.
On the first day, Cella, driving a 1948 white Oliver tractor and Rennie, driving a green 1966 Oliver tractor, both tow sickle haybines around the field. The blades of the haybine cut the grass and the circular motion pulls it through large black rollers to squeeze some of the moisture out. It then lays in the field overnight.
Tedding, the process where a tedder towed behind the tractor spreads and shakes up the grass to help it dry, usually done on the second day, wasn’t necessary this time because there had been so little rain in the month of August. Rennie said they usually get the tractors stuck in the far end of the field because it’s so swampy, but that wasn’t a problem this year.
The third day, at about 11:00 a.m., after the dew had dried, Cella towed a hay rake and windrowed the cut grass into circular rows about ten feet apart. This allows the cut grass to “catch the wind” and dry more quickly. If the grass was at least three feet high, he would have driven in a clockwise circle and pushed the rows to the outside of the field. Since the grass was only a foot high before this August cut, he drove in counterclockwise circles and pushed the grass to the inside of the field. Double “windrowing” works well to make larger piles when the grass is sparser. Larger rows mean fewer passes and less work for the baler, which will follow.
Once all the grass in the field has been piled into rows, Rennie drives his tractor, towing the baler, kicker, and hay wagon from his house on East Street in Lenox around the corner to Holmes Road and down into the field. The length from the front of the tractor to the back end of the wagon is 54 feet long. Turning the corner, Rennie is on both streets at once, while oncoming traffic in both directions on Holmes Road patiently waits.
Once Rennie reaches the field, he drives the tractor over the rows of hay, where it is sucked up into the baler, compressed into square bales and tied, by the machine, with twine. A plunger pushes each tied bale to a stainless steel square plate, called a kicker, which tosses the bales high into the air and into the back of the hay wagon. The kicker can be adjusted as the back of the wagon becomes full, to kick the bales to the front of the wagon. A counter keeps track of the number of bales kicked into the wagon.
Rennie, who has owned and run a lawn care and fertilizing business, The Lawn Doctor, for the past 17 years, does no fertilizing of the Holmes Road field, allowing Mother Nature to determine the height of the grass.
“Sometimes we bale a few weeds too, but a little roughage won’t hurt the horses. They won’t touch the goldenrod though, so you have to stay away from that,” he said, pointing out a large patch of bright yellow weeds growing at the far end of the field.
The grass, after a rainy spring, was about four feet tall for their first cut in June, which produced about four hundred 35 pound bales of hay. The second cut, at the end of August, after a summer of little rain, was only a foot high and produced only 110 bales of hay. Their “winnings” at the end of this race will be enough to feed Rennie’s three “pet” horses, Willie, Misty and Laura Lou and Cella’s horse, Gold Man when the grass stops growing in November. The hay supplements their diet of grain and occasional treats of apples and carrots.
Rennie, who bought his mother’s house, adjacent to the Holmes Road field and just over the town line in Lenox, in 1981, has lived most of his life in Lenox. Married for 34 years on October 23, 2005, to Hania Gardner of Pittsfield, he has two daughters, Kristin, a veterinarian who lives in New Hampshire and Kendra, a federal probation officer in NY. Kristin’s ten month old son, Theo, is Rennie’s first grandchild. He has owned horses all his life and first learned to cut hay with his grandfather, when he was just five years old.
“It was a lot more work back then,” he said, “In the old days, we cut it with a sickle and it would just plop on the ground. We would pitch fork it into piles and load it by hand into a wagon pulled by a horse. Then you’d pay somebody about a $1.00 an hour to jump up and down on the hay to pack it down. What used to take 15 people three days to do, can now be done in the same amount of time with just two or three people.”
“Before we had the hay wagon and the kicker, I used to buy beer for the neighborhood guys, and they’d go around the field and throw the bales onto the back of pickup trucks and help us load it into the barn. It was cheaper [for them] than joining a health club,” he said, “One guy even got mad at me for buying the kicker. He liked the workout,” Rennie said with a laugh.
The process of making haying, in addition to being ruled by the weather, can be disappointing or even dangerous. The hay cannot be cut, baled and stored in the same day because hay that is too damp will grow toxic mold, which makes it useless as livestock feed since it could kill or cripple a horse. Worse, hay packed into bales and stored too wet can spontaneously combust, which has, according to Rennie, caused most of the barn fires he’s seen.
The best feeling in the world, Rennie said, is when the hay’s all in. For him, it’s three days of peace and quiet in a sunny field where the only sounds are the drone of the tractor engine and the occasional scolding of crows. “I just like being outside,” he said.
Rennie prefers the square bales to round. He said the equipment needed to roll the hay into those big “marshmallow” shapes, is too expensive for him to justify the cost.
“The round ones are heavier and harder to handle. I think there’s more waste in the round, and I don’t think the horses like them as well. If you don’t have any help, though, round is the way to go because you can pick them up and move them with a tractor.”
Though no one applauds or sprays them with champagne when they both cross the hay making finish line at the same time, Rennie has had a corn roast the Sunday before Labor Day every year for the past 34 years. Attended by 200 people, (some of whom the Rennies don’t know, but welcome nonetheless), they buy 400 ears of corn from Whitney’s Farm in Cheshire, Massachusetts.
“It gets bigger every year. Everybody brings a dish, and we can cook 40 ears of husked corn at a time in a rack over an open fire. It takes two guys to flip the rack, and you’ve never tasted corn as good,” he said.
It wouldn’t be a real Rennie picnic, of course, without hayrides. Throughout the day, the hay serves double duty as seating for all the Rennie’s guests. From the oldest to the youngest, no one misses the chance to climb up on the hay wagon for a ride as Rennie puts his tractor to use one last time, celebrating another successful hay making season, family, friends, and the official end of summer.
“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.” Unknown
Lenox - “It all depends on the weather, and you can’t depend on the weather,” Phil Rennie said at a recent interview as he got ready to complete his haymaking for the summer.
Phil Rennie and Paul Cella, of Lenox, start their three-day competition not with a waving green flag, but with a field of waving green grass. They race, not against each other, but against a much stronger and more unpredictable adversary – the weather. Enough rain to make the field of Timothy grass grow high enough for haying is needed throughout the spring and summer. Three dry days and nights in a row are then needed to cut, dry and bale the hay to be stored in the barn for the coming winter.
In June and August almost every year for the past 15 years, Rennie and Cella have driven in circles over a 4 acre field owned by a neighbor on Holmes Road in Pittsfield. The field is one of the few undeveloped pieces of property left on that road.
Their maximum speed is less than five miles an hour. They don’t wear helmets or seatbelts, but they do make sure their boots are tied, and their sleeves are buttoned so nothing can be sucked into the machinery, causing injury.
“I’ve heard of farmers who have lost arms or legs because their shirt sleeves were too loose,” Rennie said.
Rennie and Cella don’t have wealthy sponsors or screaming fans. Their only audience is of the winged and four-legged variety - hawks, field mice and moles, and sometimes, Rennie’s 15-year-old terrier mix, Benji, who likes to play in the field.
“The moles come out because they hate the vibration of the tractors, and the hawks sit in the treetops and wait for lunch,” Rennie said.
On the first day, Cella, driving a 1948 white Oliver tractor and Rennie, driving a green 1966 Oliver tractor, both tow sickle haybines around the field. The blades of the haybine cut the grass and the circular motion pulls it through large black rollers to squeeze some of the moisture out. It then lays in the field overnight.
Tedding, the process where a tedder towed behind the tractor spreads and shakes up the grass to help it dry, usually done on the second day, wasn’t necessary this time because there had been so little rain in the month of August. Rennie said they usually get the tractors stuck in the far end of the field because it’s so swampy, but that wasn’t a problem this year.
The third day, at about 11:00 a.m., after the dew had dried, Cella towed a hay rake and windrowed the cut grass into circular rows about ten feet apart. This allows the cut grass to “catch the wind” and dry more quickly. If the grass was at least three feet high, he would have driven in a clockwise circle and pushed the rows to the outside of the field. Since the grass was only a foot high before this August cut, he drove in counterclockwise circles and pushed the grass to the inside of the field. Double “windrowing” works well to make larger piles when the grass is sparser. Larger rows mean fewer passes and less work for the baler, which will follow.
Once all the grass in the field has been piled into rows, Rennie drives his tractor, towing the baler, kicker, and hay wagon from his house on East Street in Lenox around the corner to Holmes Road and down into the field. The length from the front of the tractor to the back end of the wagon is 54 feet long. Turning the corner, Rennie is on both streets at once, while oncoming traffic in both directions on Holmes Road patiently waits.
Once Rennie reaches the field, he drives the tractor over the rows of hay, where it is sucked up into the baler, compressed into square bales and tied, by the machine, with twine. A plunger pushes each tied bale to a stainless steel square plate, called a kicker, which tosses the bales high into the air and into the back of the hay wagon. The kicker can be adjusted as the back of the wagon becomes full, to kick the bales to the front of the wagon. A counter keeps track of the number of bales kicked into the wagon.
Rennie, who has owned and run a lawn care and fertilizing business, The Lawn Doctor, for the past 17 years, does no fertilizing of the Holmes Road field, allowing Mother Nature to determine the height of the grass.
“Sometimes we bale a few weeds too, but a little roughage won’t hurt the horses. They won’t touch the goldenrod though, so you have to stay away from that,” he said, pointing out a large patch of bright yellow weeds growing at the far end of the field.
The grass, after a rainy spring, was about four feet tall for their first cut in June, which produced about four hundred 35 pound bales of hay. The second cut, at the end of August, after a summer of little rain, was only a foot high and produced only 110 bales of hay. Their “winnings” at the end of this race will be enough to feed Rennie’s three “pet” horses, Willie, Misty and Laura Lou and Cella’s horse, Gold Man when the grass stops growing in November. The hay supplements their diet of grain and occasional treats of apples and carrots.
Rennie, who bought his mother’s house, adjacent to the Holmes Road field and just over the town line in Lenox, in 1981, has lived most of his life in Lenox. Married for 34 years on October 23, 2005, to Hania Gardner of Pittsfield, he has two daughters, Kristin, a veterinarian who lives in New Hampshire and Kendra, a federal probation officer in NY. Kristin’s ten month old son, Theo, is Rennie’s first grandchild. He has owned horses all his life and first learned to cut hay with his grandfather, when he was just five years old.
“It was a lot more work back then,” he said, “In the old days, we cut it with a sickle and it would just plop on the ground. We would pitch fork it into piles and load it by hand into a wagon pulled by a horse. Then you’d pay somebody about a $1.00 an hour to jump up and down on the hay to pack it down. What used to take 15 people three days to do, can now be done in the same amount of time with just two or three people.”
“Before we had the hay wagon and the kicker, I used to buy beer for the neighborhood guys, and they’d go around the field and throw the bales onto the back of pickup trucks and help us load it into the barn. It was cheaper [for them] than joining a health club,” he said, “One guy even got mad at me for buying the kicker. He liked the workout,” Rennie said with a laugh.
The process of making haying, in addition to being ruled by the weather, can be disappointing or even dangerous. The hay cannot be cut, baled and stored in the same day because hay that is too damp will grow toxic mold, which makes it useless as livestock feed since it could kill or cripple a horse. Worse, hay packed into bales and stored too wet can spontaneously combust, which has, according to Rennie, caused most of the barn fires he’s seen.
The best feeling in the world, Rennie said, is when the hay’s all in. For him, it’s three days of peace and quiet in a sunny field where the only sounds are the drone of the tractor engine and the occasional scolding of crows. “I just like being outside,” he said.
Rennie prefers the square bales to round. He said the equipment needed to roll the hay into those big “marshmallow” shapes, is too expensive for him to justify the cost.
“The round ones are heavier and harder to handle. I think there’s more waste in the round, and I don’t think the horses like them as well. If you don’t have any help, though, round is the way to go because you can pick them up and move them with a tractor.”
Though no one applauds or sprays them with champagne when they both cross the hay making finish line at the same time, Rennie has had a corn roast the Sunday before Labor Day every year for the past 34 years. Attended by 200 people, (some of whom the Rennies don’t know, but welcome nonetheless), they buy 400 ears of corn from Whitney’s Farm in Cheshire, Massachusetts.
“It gets bigger every year. Everybody brings a dish, and we can cook 40 ears of husked corn at a time in a rack over an open fire. It takes two guys to flip the rack, and you’ve never tasted corn as good,” he said.
It wouldn’t be a real Rennie picnic, of course, without hayrides. Throughout the day, the hay serves double duty as seating for all the Rennie’s guests. From the oldest to the youngest, no one misses the chance to climb up on the hay wagon for a ride as Rennie puts his tractor to use one last time, celebrating another successful hay making season, family, friends, and the official end of summer.
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