What equipment for small scale hay?

[EHR]

Here is a blended approach, I have a BCS walk behind tractor and a 45" sickle mower with it. I can mow about 3/4 an hour. $3k for the unit with the mower, $50 for a hand hay rake. Perfect...definitely not but it worked. I usually mow 4-5 acres of 2-30 degree slopes. Last year when the guy who begged to bale my large field did a no show I did an extra 11 acres with this set up. Ideal, definitely not. Used equipment when avaikablle runs about 50 percent less.

In Italy where walk behinds are more popular this would be a common setup.

 

[flusher]

I have about 2-3 acres of hay pasture at my new house. I also have a Kubota L39 with 3-point hitch and ~30hp pto. What is my best course of action to attack the hay? I do keep goats, so "using" it would be nice.

ac

Unless you really, really like rebuilding/restoring old equipment, your acreage is too small to justify investing in haying equipment (sicklebar mower, rake, baler).

For example, I like working with old iron and I grow oat hay on 6 of my 10 acres (flat pasture) using the following equipment:

Minneapolis Moline P3-6 grain drill (10-ft wide, 20 hoes, $275 for two units and about $200 parts to make one good drill)

Massey Ferguson 31 sicklebar mower ($550 at auction plus $200 parts)

Deere 350 3pt side delivery rake ($800)

Massey Ferguson 124 baler (two twine, small squares, $2000)

 

[avc8130]

I have thoroughly enjoyed this thread. I greatly appreciate all of the advice and commentary.

I am not 100% sure where I am at. I do know that I have goats and hay fields. My current herd cannot eat my hay field as quickly as it is growing. I also realize they will get hungry come fall/winter when there is no hay in the fields.

My fields are currently 24-36" tall.

It is true no one is coming to hay it for me. Square bales around these parts are ~$4-5 each. That means ~1000 bales to pay off the equipment if I buy from Ken Sweet.

I think I am going to watch the local craigslist for some equipment. I have this tractor, I might as well put it to use. I also plan to prioritize the equipment. I need SOMETHING to mow around my property as a bunch of stuff is overgrowing fast anyways. A sickle bar or rotary is a new discussion.

Hay Rake:
I found a Ford 14-72 rake for $400 locally. Is that something I should go look at?
Baler:
I found a John Deere 14T locally for $550. I am going to check it out and talk to the seller. I know the 14T has some obsolete parts that require 24T parts to be modded to work. It looks big and heavy and this guy might just want to get it off his lawn. It looks like about $100 worth of scrap at the worst

ac

 

[westbrooklawn]

Don't know where you are located, but the Raleigh, NC Craigslist has a sickle bar mower for $500 and two balers for $3000, or $1800 each. Balers are advertised as field ready... seems like a good price.

 

[MMagis]

Someone absolutely WILL came bale it for you. I'm not talkng about a customer hay operation, or full time farmer. I'm talking about a small cattle or horse farmer or similar. Around here there are plenty of them, and most of them will bale a few acres for a price.
I still don't know if you even want it baled. You don't give your location so all of what we're all saying is just speculation. But, though your goats aren't keeping up with it now, wait until August when you haven't had rain for a month. You'll be wishing you had more grass. I don't mean to offend anyone, but to be perfectly honest, buying equipment to bale 2-3 acres is absolutely foolish unless you have a lot of extra time and money. I enjoy doing things myself more than most, but put a pencil to paper and figure out how much hay you can buy with the money you'll spend on equipment. Then, go ahead and factor in yearly upkeep, parts, string, etc. Buying hay will start looking a lot better.

 

[avc8130]

I must apologize, all this time I thought my location was showing under my user name!

Either way, I am having great difficulty finding someone to hay my acres. At this rate I am just going to keep letting the goats roam through it...even though the babies disappear and it results in great panic from the mamas. It is quite comical.

In NJ, EVERYTHING is expensive. Hay is $5/bale. So for every $1k spent, I need 200 bales.

I didn't realize how costly the equipment was when I posted. However, it looks like there are some possibilities while I possibly acquire equipment over the years. If I had a mower of some type I could already cut and make piles.

ac

 

[tessiers]

As I mentioned earlier you may want to do a few extra acres to pay for the fuel and equipment. If no one in your area is willing to do small acerage I am sure ther are others in your area that would hire you for an acre or 2, not enough to make a living but help pay the bills. I agree a sickle is the way to go for hay, bushhogs are a cross between mowers and choppers, not good for either but OK for both. Just my 2 cents

 

[ustmd]

In NJ, EVERYTHING is expensive. Hay is $5/bale. So for every $1k spent, I need 200 bales.

It is all relative. I wish we could get hay at $5/bale here in Central Texas. Right now, my wife is excited about getting 100 bales at $8.25/bale--that is delivered and stacked

 

[charleyfarmall]

1. Ken's price is excellent to get you going in hay. You will be hard pressed to do better.
2. The minimum acreage for buying equipment would be 5. Even at that....
3. I would be charging $4 a bale this year if i was baling. That's out of the field. Some of my neighbors would still be charging $3 and one, maybe 1/2 of that. If you wanted to get it after I got it out of the field, I would be charging $5.
4. use portable fence and intensely graze 1/4 acre at a time then move them. Mow occasionally if it's really out of control.
5. buy hay for the winter. The break even point on equipment and mtc is a lot.

 

[rankrank1]

Another thing to keep in mind is you can not simply cut and bale where the goats have been free range grazing. They will need to be off of that pasture a bit before you cut it so a few rains can wash away all the goat poop - otherwise that goat poop and goat pee saturated grass ends up inside your bales.

 

[Egon]

Just out of interest I have seen hay being made with hand tools on side hill acreage that a tractor would never see.

A case where small wasn't in the equation and it wasn't third world either.

 

[EHR]

YouTube - ‪BCS Model 853 walk-behind tractor with CAEB mini-haybaler‬‏ BCS with a baler. Check out earthtoolsbcs.com

 

[zing]

I have a 40 acre hobby farm and I have some of the same issues that you have. We bring our three horses out most weekends but they can't eat down the areas that we have fenced off as pasture, let alone the whole thing. I use my tractor with the bushhog to regularly knock down the grass in the pastures, and also to knock down the goldenrod before it goes to seed, since the horses just eat around that stuff.
I can't hay my fields because it simply isn't possible to hay that amount of field on the weekends, even if you do it a few acres at a time. What works for me is to have a local cattle farmer come and hay my fields. He takes the hay, and I get my fields kept in good shape for free.

I agree with the tessiers, that you could probably find other small places that would let you do their fields and take the hay, just to help keep their fields in shape.

 

[ultrarunner]

Interesting Discussion...

Reminds me of my Grandparents 40 acre dairy farm...

Most of the hay was cut with a sickle bar mower and a 15 hp tractor... the hay was loaded onto the hay wagon by pitchfork and then stored in the hay loft with a blower driven from the tractor pto...

 

[smstonypoint]

This link provides archival film footage of hand harvesting of hay.
Hay Harvesting in the 1940's.

Steve

 

[tessiers]

I wanted to add that being handy definately helps. I have $1700 in 2 tractors, mower, rake and baler. I bought most of it for scrap price, where even if it didn't work I could get my money back. After a few hours and busted knuckles I have a motley assortment of equipment. We have gone from 3 acres of hay on friends property to 20 acres of hay, all of which we keep and do not pay for land lease. All of this was word of mouth and we turn down fields every year now. We do not hay any of our own property, all that is pasture. I do agree pasture rotation is critical, especially with small acerage.

This topic is of great interest to me so if I am rambling I appologize.

 

[wolc123]

If you are not "handy", the first item you should cross off your list is the baler. Any that you find for close to scrap price ($200-$500) is going to require some mid to high-level mechanical skills. The knotters, in particular, often require a very experienced touch to keep in shape. Also, for the 364-1/2 days a year that you are not using it, it will require inside storage if you want it to keep serving you well on the 1/2 day you will use it. Folks got by fine with loose hay for 10's of thousands of years and you should not have any trouble at all with just a few goats. You could even use the inside space where you were thinking of keeping the baler to store the piled up hay. As mentioned earlier, another big advantage of the loose hay is it eliminates the need to deal with twine. The second most labor intensive item, from a maintenence standpoint, is the sickle bar mower. While not as bad as a baler, they do require more than 10X the maintenence of a bush-hog and that dont seem to be worth the price for only limited improvement on mowing couple acres of hay. Also,they are no where near as good for pasture maintenance since they dont chop up the cuttings, leading to matting down and killing of what is below, if not harvested. Scrape together a few hundred bucks for a 5-foot, light duty bush-hog and you will be off to a pretty good start. Next, you shouldnt have to look around real hard for an old side-delivery or dump rake for a few hundred bucks. $450 sounds a bit steep to me. As far as rotation goes, you would be ok pasturing the goats on an acre for a season (depending on how many you got?), keeping that acre bushhogged but not harvested the next year, then harvesting it on the third year. For your first year right now, harvest the best looking acre and pasture the goats there next season. Good luck.

 

[rankrank1]

As mentioned in my first post a bushhog (or rotary type cutter) can work for hay. It is actually what I have used the past few years. It is not the ideal tool, but maintenace costs are next to none and I already had one anyway.

That said, you do not currently have a bushog or rotary cutter so why buy something you apparantly have not needed for other chores unless it is a tool you have wanted anyway?

A $20 dollar hand scythe and you could proably cut 1 acre in an hour (I have attached a video demo of a hand scythe comparison to a bladed engine trimmer which would be another option for cutting). You could litterally rake by hand to0 with $10 hand rake. $10 pitchfork to load or (since you already have a tractor with loader make a hay fork for the loader)and you will have an acre done before you could even think about hooking up to implements, greasing them, doing repairs, fussing with an old worn out baler, etc. I would shock the hay and store outside for goats but would store hay loose inside for horses.

Rotate your pastures: One acre for clean hay while keeping the goats and all their poop and pee on the other acre. Rotate pastures as required.

Cutting

YouTube - ‪Scythe vs Brushcutter 1 - South West Annual Scythe Festival - June 2010‬‏


YouTube - ‪How to Mow with a Scythe: Field Mowing Technique‬‏


The whole haying by hand process combined (cutting, raking, and stacking)

YouTube - ‪How to Make Hay with a Scythe‬‏

Yes, I realize this looks like a lot of work, but haying small square bales with machines is a lot of work too - even more work doing it with old junk like I use but I enjoy tinkering with old junk as a hobby. If I had to pay a mechanic then it would not be cost effective at all. Buying expensive modern machinery is not a cost effective option either for 2 acres. The way I justify it is many people pay to go to a gym to lift weights and workout. I hate the thought of going to a gym , but have no problem doing equivalent work like this that actually accomplishes something in the process. This is not nearly as boring as repetitive weight lifting in a gym and if you can make it work on a tight budget then it will save you a little money in the process since you will not have to buy hay anymore.

 

[SPYDERLK]

If you are not "handy", the first item you should cross off your list is the baler. Any that you find for close to scrap price ($200-$500) is going to require some mid to high-level mechanical skills. The knotters, in particular, often require a very experienced touch to keep in shape. Also, for the 364-1/2 days a year that you are not using it, it will require inside storage if you want it to keep serving you well on the 1/2 day you will use it.

In that case I would definitely recommend the IH 37 baler from experience. Bought for $500 10 yrs ago. Capable of 4 or 5 bales per minute on a 30HP tractor. Weve put a few thousand bales thru it. All its needed is cover, grease and a couple shear bolts for when the needle-ram sequence misses and the safety stops the ram [BAM].
larry

 

[Farmwithjunk]

Set a budget.....THEN decide how to equip this project. You will PROBABLY find that owning equipment for such a small plot is impractical (at best...)

That said, if you're bound and determined to bale your own hay, here's my $.02 worth. (routed in 40+ years of farming with all sorts of brands, models, and concepts of hay equipment)

There are good SOLID reasons behind staying with well respected, known brands and models. The more obscure the equipment, the less likely you are to have access to parts, and available "knowledge" no farther away than your keyboard.

Cutting....

Discard any thoughts of cutting hay with a rotary mower UNLESS you want ruined hay that is chopped into mulch. It's especially bad if you have any alfalfa. Rotary cutter will beat ALL the leaves off the stem, leaving you with junk hay. It's POSSIBLE to cut and bale with a rotary cutter, just pathetic results under the best of conditions.

Sickle Bar mowers do a decent job, but aren't as fast as some of the newer methods. Personally, for 2 or 3 acres, I'd go this route though....Simple, low cost (relatively...) , low hp requirements, and small space required to store. Best choices? New Holland 451 or Deere 350. Again, parts and available "advice".....

Mower/conditioners are essentially a sickle bar mower with a built in conditioner. One step ahead of a plain sickle bar, but still old technology. You could EASILY handle a smaller (7') New Holland, ect, Moco...

Keep in mind, the sickle bar has been around for more than 100 years. (all the way back to horse drawn days) There is a reason why it stuck around.....They WORK, they don't require tons of HP, and they're easy to work on. Newer technology is great, but at a price.

Disc mowers and drum mowers. They're all that AND a bag of chips, just a lot more $$$$ than I'd be willing to shell out for 3 acres. Also, you're a little short on HP for any disc mowers I know of.

Raking/tedding. I like New Holland roll-a-bar rakes....Couldn't give me a wheel rake. (Tend to pick up too many rocks) Get a tedder. They take a lot of the risk out of working hay in marginally damp weather among other things.

Baler...Go with either a John Deere or New Holland baler. Every one else spent their days chasing those two brands. Again, personally, I'd go looking for a 336 Deere baler. Also, with NH or Deere, you're more apt to be able to get good advice from others with those brands, not to mention parts being more easily located. (Advantage of numbers) After owning a couple IH balers over the ages, I'd avoid them at all cost. Never saw one yet that I was impressed with. MF balers are a "fair" option, but nowhere near the class of the NH/Deere models.


LOOSE HAY? PLEASE....Shoot me first.... WAY too little return on labor invested...


My hayin' equipment roster..

NH451 sickle bar
NH 489 Moco
Kuhn tedder
two (rigged in tandem) NH 258 Roll-A-Bar
Balers JD336, Vermeer 5410 Rebel
9 wagons, a Little Giant elevator, and a tired back....