I spent most of my young life baling hay. My dairy farmer father would have a hundred acres laying on the ground on our last day of school ‒ and he thought that every day was a good day for hay. We’d still be baling hay on Labour Day Weekend, and in the unlikely event that we actually got caught up on our own farm, he’d send the three of us to help somebody else. All of it was small square bales.
When two of us left for university, suddenly there was a shiny new round baler sitting in the yard. I found out later that he would have bought the round baler years earlier, but he thought that having us in the field (and off the beach) would ‘keep us out of trouble.’
My point is: I’ve baled a lot of hay, stacked a lot of hay, mowed a lot of hay, breathed in a lot of hay dust, and the last of the scratches on my forearms finally healed up in my late forties. I still have hay in my socks from the 1980s.