Swathing Silage

My father used to say "the problem with this country is, there is 6 months of winter and 6 months of getting ready for winter". Sometimes I wonder if maybe there was some merit in what he was saying. For the last week or two we have been putting up silage (a form of cattle feed) for ourselves and other neighbors around here. This is a picture taken on the 2nd. day of swathing silage for our neighbor who farms just east of Innisfail. He had a great crop of barley and silage peas. It was some of the worst cutting I have done in a while, but I did persevere and did finally get it finished. We also had to drive this swather down the Cottonwood Road to Innisfail, across the overpass and down a gravel road to his place. The problem is that this unit is approximately 27 feet wide, so it does take up the whole road. Fortunately I can pull over, put two of the wheels in the ditch, stop and wait for the traffic to pass, although it does seem like you're stopped a lot of the time. After we moved home from these fields we did some of our own, and it went extremely easy compared to the peas and barley mix of our neighbors.