What the Hay!!!

Well, this time of year brings, well.....a lot of hay!  We round bale and we also square bale.  I usually do the square baling and my husband does the round baling.  There was once talk of him teaching me how to round bale, but I was once told by a very wise elderly woman not to learn how to do everything, or I will be doing everything!!  So, I turned on my selective hearing at that time!  The boys and my husband and a lot of neighborhood kids get the pleasure of unloading the square bales into the hay barn.  Oh the joys of summer!  As the days go on, we need to haul the round bales off of the field.  As the boys and I drive around the field as Scott loads the trailer, I told the boys, "Just think how long this would take us if these were all square bales and we had to pick them up by hand??"  Then I thought, "Teaching moment!!!"
 
So, now we need to figure out how many square bales are in a round bale, Oh boy!!  The boys wanted to do some estimation on the weights of the bales. Evan guessed 600 lbs for the round bales and 20 lbs for the square bales.  Brooks guessed 200 lbs for the rounds and 50 lbs for the squares.  I had no idea!!  So, Scott clued us in.  The round bales vary between 800 lbs-850 lbs and the squares between 40lbs-45 lbs.

Now, for the math part.  To find out how many square bales would be equal to one round bale, we had to do a little figuring.  We decided to go with the weights 40 and 800.  To figure this equation out we took 800 and divided by 40, which gave us 20.  The answer to the question is there are approximately 20 square bales to each round bale.  Now, to take it one step further, there were 269 round bales on the field, how many square bales would that be??  This was a chance where lattice multiplication could came in.  We took 269 multiplied it by 20 and came up with 5380!!  That also made us appreciate our round baler!!!