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Comment by rosetremiere | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen anything like it in Switzerland (and neighboring countries). From what I saw, the process here seems to be: first, let the hay dry on the ground by itself for a bit, then group it along "rows" that make essentially a stripe pattern on the field, and then make hay "balls" or "bricks" out of that. But maybe that's only because I've never seen anyone do it the old way?

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In Norway "hesjing" was common until I grew up but of course I grew up in the 60ies and 70ies although I am born in 1980 ;-)

Hesjing means to create long temporary fence-like structures and then lifting the gross onto it.

If done correctly so the water can easily run off it can then survive a rainfall or two unlike what happens if you dry it flat.

This was actually important ant least in costal climates back before motorized fans made drying it indoors an alternative.

(Brings me back, woke up from the huge fan many days in the summer holiday. I also remember learning to start it, there was a delta/y switcher on it but I have now forgotten which configuration was for spinning it up and which was for steady state.)

Flat drying and then rows is what we used to do for stacking too. But baling, that needs a machine, right?

Wikimedia seems to have a list of haystack images by country at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Haystacks_by_cou... and what do you know, Swiss actually do it differently! Building around a central pole, rather than a more elaborate frame https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Haystacks_in_Swi...

> But baling, that needs a machine, right?

Probably. Guess I'm not old enough to have ever witnessed manual baling then! That's a TIL for me :)

> But baling, that needs a machine, right?

More importantly, a bale won't stay dry inside if it's rained on. So you need to store them in barns.

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