Kind of late in this post but here goes. We do 25 acres of hay, mostly other peoples land. We do not pay for use of the land, in this area there are a lot of people with 2 to 10 acres that are happy to find someone to keep it mowed down for the hay. We the following equipment. Made a little over 2000 bales last year, and sold enough to cover fuel twine and repairs for the year. We use about 1200 to 1500 bales a year ourselves.
1941 Farmall H with 7' JD #5 sickle mower. Traded a rifle for the tractor, it does need rear tires, looking at $800 for that, otherwise works good. Gave $500 for the mower and have put very little into it.
1953 Ford NAA. Paid $1000, put another $500 into it. A finer tedding and raking tractor was never made, but too high geared for comfortable baling, although I did it for 3 years.
1970 Massey Fergusen 135 Diesel. Gave $3000 for it and was my wife mad, but. With live PTO and 2 gear ranges this is a nice small scale hay tractor.
Tontutti 4 basket tedder. Should have been $2500, I traded some work for it. We did hay for several years without a tedder but I consider it necisary for good hay, at least in my region.
International #14 4 bar rake. Paid $400 and put another $100 into teeth. Works real well.
New Holland #67 Baler. Paid $100 for scrap, put another $700 into it. It is a nice baler and does a great job but I have a lot of time tied up in it and I wish I had spent a little more $ for a good baler.
3 old hay wagon frames hauled out of a field. No cost but a lot of welding and fabricating with scrap material so no real cost but a lot of time. As it is I do not use them much. I prefer to haul hay on my equipment trailer and 1 ton. Our fields are several miles away and It is much faster to load onto a real trailer and drive 50 home than haul wagons around.
I also have a New Holland 33 crop chopper and a forage wagon, and up until snow flies I chop grass and feed it, that saves a lot of time drying and baleing for no reason.
Hay conveyor is pretty important to us, I paid $300 for mine
John Deere ground drive manure spreader. We paid $500
I am fairly handy around the shop and I like to buy equipment. I like to buy stuff around scrap price, fix it up. If it turns out better than what I have I keep it and use it, otherwise I sell it. All told we have made 5000+ bales with about $6300 in equipment, just for hay. I consider this pretty good and all of the equipment is ready for another 2000 bales this year. Thats cheap hay any way you look at it. Even more important to me is I find it very rewarding to make our own hay. I love the feeling of knowing I provided for my animals. We have made good hay, and bad. I learned a lot more from the bad hay than the good. I think it builds character as well.