An Almost Lost Art......

In our backyard, sits a very strange looking machine.  Occasionally, it is loaded on to our flatbed pick-up truck and this always gets plenty of strange looks and questions.  It is something that was once a commnly used tool in our area and in so many others that are surrounded with hay fields.  It is a 'Hay Boom.' Technically speaking, it is a Luden Boom, built in 1984, and ran by a Briggs and Stratton 18 horsepower engine.  It was used by my father-in-law and brother-in-laws for years, as my husband was growing up watching them.   ( I really wanted to upload the videos, but couldn't figure it out--so maybe someday you'll actually be able to see it in action!)

They owned Perkins Feed in Las Vegas for many years, and my father-in-law bought hay from farmers and loaded and hauled it himself, my husband was his little side-kick until he was in school and then when his year-round school was on break he was right back with him.  In fact, buying hay from farmers in Lincoln County is what actually led them to retiring here.  But, before that happened, my father-in-law retired from the Fire Department in Las vegas, leased the Feed Store and headed to the year-round hay fields of Blythe, California and Ehrenberg, Arizona. Here they spent a couple of years trying to support a couple of kids who were in college and serving church missions.   I can't imagine how many loads they boomed during those years--my brother-in-law told me that they averaged 13-19 cuttings a year in the various kinds of hayfields there. They worked the evenings when it was cooler--but if you've ever been there, you realize that means that it might have been around a 100 degrees after dark, still. 

Our family spent a couple of days there at the end of our summer vacation two years ago.  It was amazing to see--the canal system is incredible and the stackyards sometimes go on for a mile, while the hayfields, the orchards, and the cottonfields stretch as far as the water will support them before turning into dry, bare, desert.After leaving the heat, they settled in Dry valley, where they still used the oom to load for wuite a few farmers around the are, by this time my husband was getting old enough to start stacking and loading, learning the trade from his dad and the truckers who had worked with hay booms for years.  So, through the years and the passing of my father-in-law, the boom came to reside with us, and over the last ten years, there are still those who have yet to upgrade to squeezes and fork lifts to load, who occasionally need someone to boom hay for them.  This summer Grant has already loaded six sets of doubles and had several other people call to say that if they get some of their next crop sold could they get him to come and load for them, too?  Many of the truck drivers are ones that knew his dad and brothers well, some are even the ones that Grant first learned to boom or load with.  And, though he may be a little rusty at first, with each bale, he gets a little smoother and a little more comfortable and starts to place them just right.  It is a tradition that has been passed down, from generation to generation, like so many in agriculture,which are slowly being reaplaced by most innovative technology, by changes in farming.  Yet, listening to the hum of the motor and watching the bale lift and swing in to place kind of has a rhythm and magic that cannot be replaced by even the quickest and easiest of squeezes.  I guess that is the way it is with so many of the changes that we often face in agriculture.

Did I mentuion that the hay boom also makes for a great swing at the local warm spring we use as the community swimming hole?

****I have had a couple of people asks questions about this post--in answer, I have no idea where you would get a boom these days.  And in response to another comment, my husband was a little boy when his brothers and dad were loading in Blythe, so if you would most likely not have known him, but if you knew any other Perkins' that was probably them!*****