Who else did this?

[J.D. Daily]

As a teenager there was a couple times I assisted my cousin with haying operations while I, my mother & sisters spent a week on my great aunt & uncles cattle ranch east of Redding CA.  A couple of times we loaded bales on a wooden skid.  That was a ball buster.  The bales were loaded into the loft of a barn that was used to feed their cows in the winter.   The barn had a hoist rail suspended from the ridge beam that ran the length of the barn.  While I never was involved in hoisting & stacking bales in the loft I assume that the bales were picked up with a large tong & when hoisted to the top of the stack pulled to the desired row then bucked to desired resting spot.  The worst job we were ever given was to muck out the urine soaked foot deep manure that was deposited the previous winter.  The week couldn't end soon enough for me.