Using Utensils

Grass and Wire

6 May 2007 – 12:09 am

My cousin Fred recently blogged about our grandfather donating his old Minneapolis-Moline wire baler. The baler is an antique now, but it’s the same baler that my grandpa, father, uncle, and cousins use to bale hay and straw on the family farm.

Since it used wire to hold the bales together, this mechanical beast had enough power to easily create bales of hay that weighed well over 200 lbs.

Thank god we switched to a newer string baler when I was growing up on the farm (however, we did bring this old beast out of retirement a couple of time when I was a teenager).

Here are some of the pictures Fred took:

I haven’t see this machine in years… seeing Fred’s pictures definitely gave me flashbacks to when I was a kid and saw this beast in service compressing grass into neat rectangular blocks.

Here’s Fred’s originally blog posting Deus Ex Machina