Wall of Hay

Wall of Hay

You see these out where I grew up. Great towering walls of hay, feed for the next hard times, and times are a changin’...

When I grew up, hay bales were picked up by one man, theown up to another man (or boy), and stacked on the back of a ute. Now 2 ton blocks of fodder are formed in the belly of an immense beast (our beast was smaller, manageable, man-sized), spat out and stacked by tractor in 20 ft walls along country roads, waiting to be photographed by passing amateurs. Then they’re loaded on the forks of other tractors and distributed to massive mobs of sheep on feedlot properties owned by corporations or banks.

To me, this wall represents one of the reasons our rural communities are dying without anyone seeming to care. Once was a time that this amount of feed was not only unheard of, but unnecessary. Once upon a time, a small community of men, talking, laughing, listening to crackly radio on beaten up old trucks, would get together to move and stack bales by hand, during what we called a season. Now one contractor using two massive machines can create and transport a mountain such as this in a day.

Where I grew up is becoming more and more lonely because of great walls of hay like this one…

Wall of Hay belongs to the following groups:

Black & White Photographers Showcase, Black and White Photography and ImageWriting (2/24) Available for sale as

Greeting Cards, Matted Prints, Laminated Prints, Mounted Prints, Canvas Prints and Framed Prints