Haying with 26 HP or less.

[quicksandfarmer]

What would you consider to be the appropriate ground speed.

I bale at about 1 mph. I set the engine speed so that the baler is doing one plunge per second and drive in my lowest gear. Even at that speed I sometimes have to stop and let the baler digest a big lump or I run the risk of breaking a shear bolt. With a nice windrow I get a bale every 15 seconds, 15 plunges and 15 flakes. I figure on about 5,000 lbs per acre, my bales are about 40 lbs and I rake 12 feet into a windrow, so 240 bales per hour calculates out to 1.32 mph. For me the limiting factor is how much hay the baler can swallow so going faster wouldn't save any time, I'd just have to do smaller windrows. Mowing and raking I go as fast as I can and still stay in my seat, which is about 6 mph on my rough fields. If the grass is really thick I might have to slow down a bit.

This is with a Deere 24T baler, a wheel rake and a 4' drum mower.

 

[spoofrider]

Thanks for the breakdown.

 

[Turbys_1700]

Picking up and stacking the small rectangular bales is really for young guys. I don't know if you can find any teens to do that now. A couple of my buddies (brothers) and I used to haul hay for spending money for $.10 per bale hauled and stacked in a barn when we were teens. My brothers Dad had a GMC truck with 4 speed manual transmission that we used to pull a 40 foot long flat bed wagon (actually a cotton hauler with the sides removed). We could put the old truck in 1st (granny gear) and it would crawl along at an idle while one person was on the wagon stacking and the other two of us loaded. One of the ground crew would occasionally have to get in the truck to straighten the steering but we managed to do it and load out a couple hundred bales of hay on the wagon and about 60-70 on the pickup (we could get two sections of 6 bales in the bottom plus 4 on the tailgate for total of 16 on the bottom layer and add a couple more on the subsequent layers till it got so tall we could no longer throw them up (usually about 7 layers high). We would load that truck till the bumper was almost dragging the ground and all we could put on the trailer and then head to the barn to unload.

No way could I do that today, not even 2 layers high, I would be lucky if I could get a 50-60 lb. bale over the edge of a truck bed now, and following the truck loading was a jogging from bale to bale to get there.

Man they say those were the good ole days.

As for haying now, I prefer to have someone use a round baler to bale our hay for $25 per bale and then use a tractor to haul and stack it while sitting in an air conditioned cab.

It's almost verbatim my same childhood and teen years Gary. My father and grandfather would pay us around $1 per hour. Usually just gave us $5 a day to haul hay. Those were the good old days.

 

[scons]

To give some input, we started haying ourselves for our 2 horses 2 years ago. Bought a old mower, wheel rake, ans an old baler. The reason why we started was simple, with bought hay you never know what you are feeding, period. It might look good but you just don't know what is in it (nutritional wise). We used to buy big bales 500-600 kgs (1100-1300lbs). Sometimes it was reasonable, sometimes the amount of hay that goes in in the front, is the same amount that leaves at the end, then something is not right. The mower is still going strong, but it needs to get some minor maintenance this spring (belts, knives, oil), the wheel rake got a set of new teeth last summer, the baler was out after the first run we used it. There was a knotter issue we could not get right (timing was off). To make a long story short, propably in time we could have found a guy who could fix this, but an estimation of labour, materials ended up higher then the machine was worth anyway. Most farmers do not get rid of a baler when it is still in good shape. Because of the (very) small surface we do we took a shot a the small round baler (mentioned in a post above) and so far we are happy with it. No it is not as fast as bigger balers, maybe it will not last as long but you get what you pay for. We have bought it for around 5700 usd, new. We baled over 100 bales in 1 run with it last summer (1st cut) and over 80 bales the summer before (2nd cut). No issues so far. It is really small and does take little space to store. Grass is at least knee high when cut. And the whole process is fun to also, don't forget that. So it is up to you what you want to spend and/or if you are handy enough to get fixes done yourself.

 

[spoofrider]

Yeah that's the same problem down here. You are always buying your hay from a 3rd party. There's not that much hay being grown locally so they truck most of and in from other areas.

 

[prof fate]

Yeah that's the same problem down here. You are always buying your hay from a 3rd party. There's not that much hay being grown locally so they truck most of and in from other areas.

Why?

Generally if that's true then there's no way to grow it profitably where yo are - trucking it in is pricey. Seems there is a market...without the trucking costs it should be profitable...so is there something else that is more profitable?

 

[spoofrider]

Why?

Generally if that's true then there's no way to grow it profitably where yo are - trucking it in is pricey. Seems there is a market...without the trucking costs it should be profitable...so is there something else that is more profitable?

The land around here cost too much to using it for a hay field.

 

[flusher]

Here's a guy running a small square baler like a Deere 14T with a Farmall Super A. The baling starts at the 5 minute 40 second mark in the video.

FARMALL Super A - YouTube


Good luck

 

[Tx Jim]

For grins years back I pulled a JD 214 baler with my JD BO(16 HP) baling hay with no problems.

 

[HarryVanderpool]

What would you consider to be the appropriate ground speed.

Balers have a range of charges per bale that should be observed.
For the JD 24T the manual suggests 12 - 19 charges per bale.
So, with the tractor set at 540rpm one would chose the gear that would make bales at that rate.
Windrow size often varies so gears will change within field at times.
I count strokes between knots tied at times and shoot for 16 charges per bale.
I run as high as 4th gear and as low as 1st, sometimes stopping for clumps.

The small tractor wile bale just fine if the operator thinks about "smoothness'.
For fun, we baled our front field with a Ford 9N one year.
THE WRONG tractor for the job due to tall gears and non-live pto.
But as far as power goes it worked just fine at 23 hp.