Making Hay for Dummies

harvesting hay

A few of the staffers are country kids, having grown up in small towns and even on farms or ranches. Some of them have even worked at such jobs as detasseling corn and baling hay, neither of which is likely to appear on the resume of most j-school grads turned freelancer. An even more unlikely ag expert, however, is a "social science" student from Lahore, one like Nida Rasheed. Her unfamiliarity with farming is pretty obvious, at least based on the post "Types of Hay Cutting Machinery," which Leaf Group niched at CareerTrend.com.

Rasheed spit out some freelance boilerplate to open her list of three "types of machinery," verbiage in which she explained that,

"Selecting the appropriate designs, capacity and sizes of the machines for cutting hay is instrumental in ensuring a clean and trouble-free forage cut. Hay cutting machines can be used for both grasses and legumes."

You gotta love it when someone who has no idea what the words mean parrots them just the same. That's pretty clearly the case here: Nida just found a Pennsylvania Ag Extension Service article about making hay and reworded it. Somewhat. Her ignorance of even the meaning of hay, however, is obvious. As far as the machines are concerned, Rasheed reiterated what the Penn State guys had to say, changing words to prevent charges of plagiarism. That's why she says,

• "Conditioner-Mowers: A conditioner mower cuts the hay and at the same time allows it to dry its underside." — The hay's "underside"? No, conditioners crush and split the stalks to speed evaporation. Where Nida got the bushwa about "underside" remains a mystery.
• "Sickle Bar Mower: The forage, whether alfalfa, grass or legume, is cut according to the speed of the sickle bar mower." — First, alfalfa is a legume; and second, it's not the "speed of the sickle bar mower," it's the speed of the tractor.
• "Disc or Rotary Mower: Keep in mind that the disc type mower has a high power requirement and therefore will not run on small tractors..." — An interesting rewording of, "One drawback however [sic] is that it has a higher power requirement than the sickle bar type mower."

Rasheed has zero to say about hay rakes, balers, or tedders; just a slapdash job of rewording something that, to be honest, wasn't all that well written in the first place... not that our Dumbass of the Day would have known the difference!

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