First time round baler purchase

jerry shannon · Jun 18, 2014

I am new to haying. I have a 22 acre field planted in grass and alfalfa. Field is one year old. Cannot get anyone in my area to mow, rake and bale it for me. I will have to buy my hay this year for my horses and get into doing it myself. My question is this. For a low use used round baler other than JD and NH units, are there any other brands that any of you could suggest. I use about 70 4x4 round bales per year. I know my field will produce much more than that but I have horse folks looking for hay.

Is a Hesston a good unit. I would like to keep costs down on a baler to under 10 grand.

ksbrdmkr · Jun 18, 2014

If you can use the 5x6 bales there will more used balers available. My old JD 510 was a $1000 five years ago and works for me on
about 30 to 40 bales per year.

Kittum · Jun 18, 2014

Heston is a good bailer. I am running a Massey Ferguson/Heston 1746 right now 4x6. It is OK and has about 7500 bale through it without any bad problems. For what we want to do it is a bit too slow. 150 bale a day is tops even with net wrap. But I think a bailer from this series may be a good choice for you. As far as bailers go they are very simple, have a relatively low horse power requirement, and they should be a few used ones available cheap. They were originally sold as an economy bailer and were striped to the bare essential yet they make a good bale and still have both net wrap and twine tie options. Youtube has a few professional videos of them.

A Vermere Rebel may be right up your alley also. It is a well built and simple little rig. It would be my top pick for your application.

Case made a very good bailer and had many similarities to the John Deere bailers.

Vermere, Vicon (also sold as Kuhn), Claas Variant, are great bailers in my opinion.

The Claas Rollant is an ok bailer but the bales from it are almot impossible to handel with a single point bale speer due to the large soft core.

I did not like the old NH bar/chain balers.

I have ran more JD's than anything else. Out of 4 – 3 were very good – The third one we could not trade off fast enough.