This is a picture of exactly the type of trailer to which I referred. It’s a hayrack, which was pulled behind a hay baler. One or two guys would be on the rack, grabbing and stacking the bales as they were dispensed by the baler. The front axle pivots so the hayrack can be turned.
These damn things (of which I was intimately familiar when I was a farm kid) are damn near impossible to back up.
Exactly.
Pushing back on the tongue of the trailer with the tongue attached to the drawbar on a tractor or a hitch on the the back bumper of a pickup is an incredibly unstable arrangement. Kind of like trying to impel a ball upwards to stop on the top of an upside down bowl as in another thread here.
And it didn’t matter how many times you tried, it never worked.
It can definitely be done, though I don’t know I ever tried for long distances. The trick is to first push these wagons backward by hand a lot. You get a feel for how the hitch needs to move to steer the wagon.
Then, when you’re attempting to back the tractor with the wagon attached, keep your eyes on the hitch where it connects to the tractor. Now as you back up steer the hitch. Definitely not easy, but not completely impossible either.