Cutting, Raking, and Baling this week - YouTube Videos

[chetlenox]

All,

Cutting, raking and baling the winter grasses in North Texas this week. We live about 20 miles south of Ft. Worth. The equipment used is:

JD 4520 (our tractor)
Rebuilt 70s era New Holland 256 hay rake (finished rebuilding ~3 days before)
Frontier sickle-bar mower
Case tractor (sorry, don't know model) w/~12 year old baler (neighbors)

We were most excited to see the sickle bar (which we bought new this year) run as well as the hay rake, which we bought off craigslist last year and spent significant time rebuilding and repainting.

The grass is mostly winter rye with some clover and wildflowers mixed in for good measure. Not too bad for horses and good for cows. We baled 505 40-50 lb bales off our 14 acre pasture, which is pretty typical. Our 2nd and 3rd cutting will be good clean Coastal Bermuda (which just started growing). It's my wife on the tractor in all the videos, which is actually pretty representative. We've got ~180 hours on the tractor, and I'll bet more than half are hers.

The new sickle-bar in action

Night Raking

Re-raking (for bigger windrows) and baling

This is our 2nd year baling hay on our place, and we are really enjoying ourselves. Next year the final big purchase, the baler, is planned.

Just figured ya'll might enjoy the videos. I am a casual browser of tractorbynet, but I always enjoy the farming-related threads. Especially when they are just little farms like me...

Take care,

Chet

[RobS]

Very cool, thanks for posting!

[sandman2234]

Great videos!
Just wondering, do you have a market for the bales, or are you just doing it for the fun of driving the tractors?
David from jax

[jsboening]

That looks like fun. I helped my neighbor do that once. It was fun. Of course i wasn't the one who was fixing the old equipment. I'd like to use my 3720 for that some day! Thanks for sharing.

[chetlenox]

Originally Posted by sandman2234

Great videos!
Just wondering, do you have a market for the bales, or are you just doing it for the fun of driving the tractors?
David from jax

Sure, I definitely have a market. Many of my neighbors are horse folks who need the hay and like the small squares for handle-ability (is that a word?). Around here a good quality grass hay bale goes for $4/bale, with good Coastal Bermuda it's more like $6 or $7/bale. Granted, that varies a lot with the weather (ie, supply).

Chet.

[Egon]

Does you wife also compete in the local stock car races??

[L4400]

Originally Posted by Egon

Does you wife also compete in the local stock car races??

LOL, I was thinking that too. She looks like she's flying out there!

[chetlenox]

Originally Posted by Egon

Does you wife also compete in the local stock car races??

Ha! That's funny.

Yeah, she was really haulin' the mail that morning. We needed to turn two windrows into one to help feed the baler. She only had about a 15 minute head start and I think she felt like she had to hurry (even though the baler was doing, what, 2 mph?). I was running the rake at 6-7 mph on my field, and I'm guessing she was closer to 8 or 9 in that daytime video...

Chet.

[kbuegel]

Would like to see some details on your rake. Maybe some close-ups of the work you did. I was very impressed to see your wife racing through the fields and the rake was able to keep up with the volume of hay with no problem. I also have a NH side-delivery rake, but much older, and it gets overwhelmed easily with large clumps of hay. In fact, last weekend it got completely covered and clogged with hay that you could not tell it was running, it was just a quivering pile of hay on wheels.

Your hay operation looks great. I'm sure you'll be very successful. The small square bales are going for almost $10 each out here in Northern California because so many fields are growing cow silage hay and not horse hay, plus there are just a lot more horses now with all the rescues from the PMU industry and racetracks. So baling and selling horse hay should be very lucrative for the next few years at least.

[warhammer]

Thanks for posting the videos. They were very cool!

Warhammer