It's hay cutting day in Switzerland! (Farming The Alps #8)

I miss spoke, we will be cutting the hay in the upper pasture starting in July.

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Eric is finishing up the very last little bit of this field so we are done up above is actually part of this field as well but it's kind of a different land classification so we won't be cutting that until August I'll explain that in a future video there's several other fields that we're going to be cutting today as well so we're going to move to the next one in the U.S and especially Central us a lot of hay is cut on Wide Open Fields almost all of the work can be done from inside of a tractor you can cut the hay with a tractor you can Ted the hay with a tractor you can rake the hay with a tractor bail it with a tractor and then with these big hay bales you also pick them up with the tractor oftentimes you don't even need to get out of your tractor but for the majority of Switzerland it's not like that at all this one's next I think it's dry enough that we can run the Abbey on it so I think it's going to go a lot faster

so I just went around the edge with the Euro here um just cut all of the heart to get to places and then afterwards the machine will come through and just cut everything that's wide open so that's a little bit more difficult to get to the um like up against the posts and stuff with the big machine so this is a little bit easier with the walk behind so the next field is this one here we gotta cut this whole flat area and then this whole Bank as well like I've talked about in previous episodes Swiss fields are relatively small and there's not a lot of flat ground the flat ground that there is is often reserved for making hay in salads but that's not enough to get enough hay for the animals to be fed through the winter we've also got to make hay on the steeper terrain a lot of big farming equipment just doesn't work on steeper trains it's really designed for flatter Fields so a lot of the work is still done on foot this is one of those things that makes farming in Switzerland so difficult and time consuming when working on a steep hill it can take hours to do the same job that a tractor could do in minutes on flat ground now that being said the technology that's developed around this Alpine farming is pretty impressive so there are other companies that make similar machines but all three of these machines are made by a company called rabid this one is the oldest of the three I think it came out in 1992. they all have a hydrostatic transmission so if you twist left you go backwards and then right to go forwards the further you twist the faster it goes the type of mower in English is called a sickle bar this works very similarly to like a pair of hair clippers where the grass goes in between these teeth and the teeth that rub back and forth cutting the grass if you're an American watching what was your reaction when you first saw these mowers for me I was like what in the world is that are those tires what's up with the big spikes why is it so funny looking I at least had never seen anything like this in America or heard that anything like this existed I had known that Sickle bar mowers had been used in the past like when they were pulled behind a horse but I thought that they had all been abandoned were sitting behind somebody's bar and rusting I didn't know that they were still used today nowadays you most commonly see these drum and disc style mowers similar to what's on the Abbey this is Abby by the way really that's the company name it's a Swiss company and this machine is made in Switzerland normally they're red but this one's custom green really deep down inside it just wants to be a John Deere nothing runs like a deer the problem with mowers like this is that they're kind of heavy now when you're working on flat ground it doesn't really matter but when you're working on steep terrain gravity is always trying to pull you down and the more weight you add the harder it is to keep yourself from being pulled down weight really matters to be able to work on terrain like this these machines have to be as light as possible and a sickle bar is much lighter the massive spikes in the wheels help keep the machine from sliding and the wide wheelbase and very low center of gravity make it very stable so it can cut grass on very steep terrain before these Banks would all be cut by hand with a sigh this would probably take all day to do the same job that we do in just an hour or so it's still quite a bit e