Making hay has always been hard work, just about the hardest work on a farm. Spanning 150 years, Steven R. Hoffbeck's
The Haymakers tells a story of the labor and heartbreak suffered by five families in five different eras struggling
to make the hay that fed their livestock, a story not just about grass, alfalfa and clover, but also about sweat
and fears, toil and loss. The Haymakers is an epic--the history of man's struggle with nature as well as man's
struggle against machines. It relates the story of farmers and their obligations to their families, to the animals
they fed, and to the land they tended. But The Haymakers is also an elegy--to a way of life fast disappearing from
our landscape. In the most heartfelt essays, Hoffbeck chronicles his own family's struggle to hold onto their family
farm and his personal struggle in deciding to leave farming for another way of life.
Hoffbeck also seeks to document and preserve the commonplace methods of haymaking, information about haying that
might otherwise be lost to posterity. He describes the tools and the methods of haymaking as well as the relentless
demands of the farm. Using diaries, agricultural guidebooks and personal interviews, the folkways of cutting, raking,
and harvesting hay have been recorded in these chapters. In the end, this book is not so much about agricultural
history as it is about family history, personal history--how farm families survive, even persevere.
Table of Contents
A Hope and a Future
Haying with Scythe and Oxen
Andrew Peterson, Swede
Waconiam Carver County, 1862
A Yorker's Sojourn in Minnesota
Haying with Horses
Oliver Perry Kysor, Old Stock American
Maine Township, Otter Tail County, 1883
Farming Forever
Haying with Horses, Hay Loaders, & Slings
Gilbert Marthaler, German American
Meire Grove, Stearns County, 1924
Tradition and Change
Tractor-Powered Haying with a Hay Baler
Arthur and Douglas Rongen, Norwegian American
Fertile, Minnesota, Polk County, 1959
Blue Silos on the Prairie
Haying with Swather, Tractor, and Chopper
Larry Hoffbeck, Danish American
Morgan, Redwood County, 1984
