SOUTH DEERFIELD — Walter Kownacki just turned 90, but he has no intention of bailing on baling.
“What am I supposed to do? Sit in the house all day?” he said nonchalantly while sitting on a pile of hay on his wagon Monday.
Kownacki hails from a generation that revered the value of a hard day’s work. He was born to Polish immigrant parents on June 22, 1929, and has spent his entire life at the farm on North Hillside Road. He still bales hay and straw, and he said he sells to a farmer in Athol and to Amherst Farmers Supply.
“He does all of this pretty much himself,” said his daughter, Christine Thorington. “He will hook up … the tractor to the baler, then from the baler he has to hook it up to this wagon over here.
“And these are tandem wheels — these aren’t easy to back up. He pulls them in the hay barn himself, he backs them out himself,” she continued. “He loads them himself. At 90, he’s still doing all of this.”
Kownacki said his father settled on the farm in 1914. The farm grew onions and tobacco until demand decreased. From around 1953 to 1989, it was a dairy farm with 45 to 50 cows. Kownacki then started boarding cows and sheep for clients that had more livestock than they had room.
His father’s farm was 50 acres. Kownacki bought more for the operation and eventually sold about 40 acres. He now has about 100 acres.
He has a few machines — which his agricultural forefathers likely would have been champing at the bit for — that cut, rake and bale hay and straw. One of those machines is a 30-year-old Massey Ferguson baler.
Kownacki said he used to produce 5,000 bales a year. That number is now around 3,000. Kownacki stores the baled material in a rustic, high-ceiling hay barn Thorington estimates to be about 200 years old. She said she remembers when tobacco was stored in there.
She said it will take a lot to get her father to stop working the fields that carry the legacy of his parents and siblings.
“They drank water out of a lead pipe, siphoned gas … from one tractor to the next one,” she said with a laugh. “All the things that you’re not supposed to do, he’s done it — and he’s still here.”