Imagine waking up and seeing your haystack on fire. It happened this morning in Durand.

Fire fighters say, when water and hay are tightly packed together, they can spontaneously combust, making some big fires.

It's something farmer Joe Auth knows all too well. He lost more than 130 hay bales to a fire early this morning.

Joe Auth says it was unlike anything he's ever seen before.

"It was a pretty impressive fire. I would guess it was 75 to 80 feet tall, the flames, and it was pretty impressive,” he says.

At 2:30 Wednesday morning, Auth says he saw his 138 hay bales on fire, so he called 9-1-1 right away.

"We're just really, really fortunate that we moved it out of there,” Auth says.

Auth moved his hay from the machine shed to an open area outside just a few days ago, because he says it just didn't look right.

"They were slumping. The stalks were getting crooked and I just knew, I just wasn't comfortable with them being inside the building with the machinery and stuff,” he says.

Durand Fire Chief Pit Plumer says spontaneous combustion caused the fire, a common problem for farmers.

"It's just how much moisture we get while we're making the hay that’s really the problem,” he says.

Jerry Clark from the UW-Extension says when wet hay is baled and sits, it starts fermenting. He says heat caused by that fermenting builds, making a fire.

Both Clark and Plumer say 180 degrees is the magic number.

"If it gets to 180 you better start moving cause it's going to start flaming," Plumer says.

He says most fire departments have either a hay probe or thermal imaging gear that can test hay's temperature, something he says firefighters are more than willing to do.

"We're nice enough to come out and do it instead of coming out to your house and fighting it,” says Plumer.

Fire fighters say it took nearly 5 hours to put out the fire at the Auth farm.

Joe Auth says he's not sure exactly how much the fire cost him yet, and he says he has more hay on reserve he can use until he grows more.