Lets talk about round balers

[cjk]

It looks like I will have more hay than shed space so I want to round bale some hay, stack it and maybe tarp it over winter. I also dont want to unload all the kicker wagons if I have to use my SSB.

So Ive been looking at round balers. Vermeer seems to have a good name and I am partial to JD equipment. Ive decided on a 4x5' with net wrap so between a Vermeer 504, 5410 rebel or JD 458. The JD dealer is a lot closer. I looked at both the 458 and the 504, 504 seems better built. Havent seen a rebel in person but have read very good things about them.

How necessary is a monitor? It seems it would be nice but $$$$.

Are gathering wheels needed or just nice to have?

Does anyone know if you have to dis-engage the pto on the JD to drop a bale? Vermeer does not require that step.

Help me pick and spec a baler please. Any other tips for a new round bale owner are appreciated.

 

[scorpian5]

We have a vermeer 5400 it has twine only. Have had it for a few years and love it. We had a old gehl that was probably a piece of junk when it was new and we just got tired of fixing it.

 

[Grrrr]

Does anyone know if you have to dis-engage the pto on the JD to drop a bale? Vermeer does not require that step.

Not on any of the ones I've driven.

 

[Mike120]

I've used a friend's 5410 and it's a great baler. His has netwrap as well. I rarely do rounds, but if I was going to buy a round baler the Vermeer 5410 is probably as far as I'd look.

 

[Dill]

We bought a Krone KR 125 last year brand new. I love it. It will take anything I've tried to bale so far. Dry bales in heavy thick windrows, silage anything. Starts a bale easier than any other baler I've used. Yes the centers are little looser than a belt baler but the outside is tighter. I've used New Holland and Vicon belt balers and a Duetz Fhar roller baler. The main complaint I've heard about the vicons is that they have too many sensors. As long as you good with a multimeter you'll be fine.

 

[dav-lyn farm]

You are wise to get the net wrap. Net wrapped bales last longer when stored outside. I don't have net wrap on my International 8455 and wish I did. Dealer tells me I can't add it. Have to buy a new baler. Hmmm! Wonder if he has an ulterior motive there!

I would recommend the monitor. I had a baler without it before the 8455 and it's really hard to make a good bale without the monitor. Even with the monitor they sometimes get bullet nosed or humpbacked, but in general they come out better. This is especially true when your windrows are light or vary a lot from light to heavy.

I've never heard of Rebel, but Vermeer and John Deere both make good equipment. Around here (north Texas) the John Deere's seem to make tighter bales. I can drive by a field of baled hay and tell you if the baler was a John Deere by how they stand up in a nice tight circle. The tighter the bale, the longer they last. I have never been a fan of soft core balers, but others (like another reply above) seem to like them. Since they don't have belts, there's one less maintenance concern, but I would rather have to mess with the belts now and then to get good tight bales.

The gathering wheels are a good thing to have because no matter how hard you try, you will rake some ragged windrows and will need a little extra help getting it all in the baler. Also, it's difficult to get the ends of the bale as tight as the middle. Gathering wheels let you "crowd" more hay to the ends. That helps make nice square topped bales that keep the strings from falling off the ends. However, I will have to say that in my experience the gathering wheels don't work as well as I would like them to. It's easy for hay to get by them. I think they need some design improvements.

Many balers today have 6 or 7 foot wide pick ups for a 4 foot baler. That's a very good idea. You might not need the gathering wheels when the pick up is that wide unless you go to sleep at the wheel of the tractor when baling!

 

[jimg]

Just curious as to how much netwrap costs + operational costs for the wrapper. I don't own a round baler but use my neighbors and its twine. The mechanism is pretty simple and twine is cheap. However, it takes a fair amt of time for it to run its tie cycle. I've heard netwrap is fast but do the pluses outweigh the minuses? Also do netwrap equipped balers generally come w/ electronics (process automation for baling/wrapping)?

 

[dav-lyn farm]

There are net wrap cost calculators on some websites like John Deere. I have never used one of them, but I'm sure they will tell you that net is less expensive than string because it makes the bale more weather resistant. They have to base it on something like that because a roll of net costs $2-300. I don't know how many rolls it will wrap, but I'm sure it's not as many as the 20 or so balls of twine you could buy for that amount of money.

Although I firmly believe that net does make the bale more weather resistant, I don't have net wrap on my baler. I wish I did because most of the hay I bale is oat hay baled in the Spring when the oat seed is in the dough stage. That means there is lots of grain in the hay. When I store it outside the birds like to pick around on the tops of the bales for the grain. When they do that, they mess up the water shedding ability of the bale a little. If the bales were net wrapped, I believe the bird damage would be a lot less. Bird damage aside, the smooth surface of net wrapped bales makes them more weather resistant no matter what kind of hay you put in the bale.

Net is much faster to tie off. Two or three revs and you dump the bale as compared to many many revs with string. Also, if your hay is really dry, those many many revs will cause you to leave a small pile of shattered hay everywhere you tie off.

Another advantage of net: If you get some bales where the ends are not packed tight enough, strings can fall off. Net won't.

Finally, net is a mess to clean up. I don't like to leave string etc. in my feeding areas. In the few times that I have had net bales around here. I have had some trouble getting the net off the bale when I feed it. It's a really big wad of stuff and it doesn't pull off the bale very easily.

 

[chh]

JD and Vermeer both make good balers. I currently run a MF 2746A and it will bale with either one of them and will make as tight or a tighter bale. I would hate to go back to baling without a monitor.

Cost wise on net vs twine works out to about $.50 to put twine on a bale and about $2.00 to put net on the way I have my baler programmed. Time wise it takes 1 and 1/2 minutes to run a full wrap and ejection cycle on my automatic baler with twine and 32 seconds for net. On an average day baling I can save 1 1/2 to 2 hours running time by using net. That is the main reason I do not discount on custom jobs that want twine instead of net(it does not happen much) like some other operators do.

Some of the university studies I have seen do not give much of an advantage weather wise to net over twine, but I baled some bales last year as close to identical as I could with both. They have been sitting out for about 11 months now and the net bales are currently standing taller than the twined and the weathering does not appear to be as deep(your results may vary).

 

[HayDR]

Bales stored outside on the ground spoil more from the ground up than the top down. The netwrap just holds the spoiled hay together better than twine. Net wrap is a big time-saver for the bale operator. If the hay is stored outside and then fed from a hay lot you will realize the time saved while baling will be spent out in the cold and mud wrestling the net off the bale. In much of the country we have a freeze thaw cycle during the day. Most of the guys feeding hay do so in the mornings before work off the farm. Go look at their hay-lots and they will have hay frozen to the netwrap and have a large pile of net and hay in the corner of their hay lots. If netwrap bales are stored inside they are much easier to handle. 50% of the 95 million head of cattle are in herds of 100 or less. These producers work off the farm and feeding time is a important aspect to consider.
Netwrap adds $3,000-8,000 to the baler's cost up front. Netwrap is a good option for some producers and other operators hate the notion of having to get out of a warm cab in the winter and have to cut the netwrap off a roundbale.
The Hay DR