Keep it up. Thanks so much for the pictures! Very inspirational. We only use a half dozen of so bales of grass hay a year for our goats, so my children and I should have no problem putting up enough from our own property for next winter.
We're doing our hay by hand this year, too and we're using scythes from Scythesupply. GREAT tools! My question is, "How do I know when the hay is dry enough to bale? Anyone have a basic rule of thumb? Pony, you didn't leave an email address so that I could write to you directly.
I hope you come back and read the comments so you'll see this. We don't use a scientific method. We wait till it looks dry, doesn't smell or feel wet, and is still slightly green if possible. In an Oklahoma summer it usually just takes one day to dry it; that's how long the "big guys" wait here. You might have to turn it to dry all sides, especially if you live in a more humid climate.
Happy haying! I love your answer to the amount of hay produced with this bailer. It reminds me of an old joke A guy goes into a pizza parlour and the owner asks "how many pieces do you want your pizza cut in, 6 or 8"?
The customer replies "6 I don't think I could eat 8"! Thanks for a wonderfull idea, it will save us a lot of money! Are you still Baling by hand? How is it going? About how many acres do you bale? Hi Will. We've been in a serious drought for two years here and there hasn't been enough to cut.
We have approximately 12 acres that we use for hay. Two years ago we fixed the holes in the fence and have let the horses in the field to graze it, but the goats still require hay, which is hard to find and expensive right now. Praying for a better year! I have roughly an acre of Bahia grass planted for hay. I had a neighbor cut the first growth, proceeded to flip the hay manually.
I then took 3 of us to load and truck the hay to a neighbors. I am sure this baler will work wonders. Recently I used a riding mower to mow a 10ft by ft section of the field and it produced 8 lawn bags stuffed with hay. Each bag should fill the box roughly half full once compressed, so I am spit balling an output of say 4 bales of hay.
Hope this helps those trying to guess how much hay a field will produce. Locally growers are getting lb round bales from what appear to be acre field. This is judged by my 4 acre home lot. Great idea for doing it ourselves! We used to when we were much younger but now convenience is easier than hard work ; Thanks for sharing this!
We did this same thing this year. Found this interesting if we build one ill link back here! I need one of those hay ballers real bad. I love to decorate for Fall with hay bells but I have to go buy them myself. I just wanted to say I'm so glad I found this post.
I'm impressed! Qw have about almost 4 acres of pasture land and my sheep can never keep up so I have an acre field that I wanted to cut with my mower and use for hay after it dries. Thanks so much for sharing this! Yes, it's hard work, and the summer temperatures in Oklahoma often top degrees, but you do what you have to do, right?
I'm closing comments on this post due to spammers. That depreciating investment would probably be best spent on improving the grazing efficiency of the farm or on fertility.
While they really could have gotten away from using very little hay, they have spent their money on iron and then often mine their soils to help pay for that equipment…can you really sell that hay for enough to replace the nutrients and pay for labor and equipment?
Not likely. This is true even if you are not selling it and utilizing it yourself. You are just removing and moving needed nutrients — especially phosphorus. So my question is, do you still want to cut hay off that field? Smaller operations are almost always better off buying what hay they need.
Except for some drought years, there is usually hay around to be bought. Plan ahead if you are going to be buying and if possible, visit the hayfield from which your hay will come ahead of time so you have a better idea of the quality.
Most tall cool-season grasses like tall fescues and orchardgrass would ideally be clipped right at leaf height removing present or emerging seed stems. If these have been grazed in a manner where the stand is very uneven, then mowing slightly lower might in order to help to even out the stand and encourage under-grazed areas. Always figure your livestock nutritional needs on a dry basis for calculation purposes. Diverging from the animal requirements, we will return to the issues of making hay.
What equipment do you need to make hay? If you can afford to buy new or newer equipment, more power to you! Just be careful about accumulating too much debt. Various equipment needed to complete the process. At least one good tractor. You will probably need this tractor for a myriad of other purposes on the farm, so the debate over having a tractor is moot, unless you are a draft animal powered farm.
Generally, most people that make hay have two or three to handle all of the different operations in haying. An older style mower-conditioner , commonly called a haybine , or a more recent discbine, to mow the hay with. Haybines take considerably less horsepower to run; you can get by with about 50 horsepower. You need about 80 horsepower to run the typical 10 foot wide discbine.
You will need a tedder to ted hay, soon after its mown, to spread it out, and to help it dry. Making dry hay in the northeast can be all but impossible in June, and in a year like this past one, really impossible, where it was dryer earlier on, and then it became quite wet and rainy through August. A rake to rake your hay: non-negotiable, you have to have one of these. A baler to bale the hay. Will you go with small square bales, or large round bales, or even large square bales?
I would recommend that you go with a round baler, as your labor requirements are much less. It never ceased to amaze me, back when I made small square bales as to how few friends I had during haying season, paid or not, that were available to help unload hay wagons. However, on the farm I always seemed to have enormous numbers of friends during deer season.
The moral: labor can be an onerous issue in making hay. If you are making large round bales, you will need a tractor with a loader and a spear to handle the bales, and maybe a three-point-hitch one as well.
Hopefully said tractor is a 4-wheel drive model, as 2-wheel drive tractors notoriously get stuck in muddy, snowy, mucky conditions, and usually only on Sundays or holidays when you have other plans.
I almost forgot about the baleage wrapper , to wrap those wet bales in plastic. So, there you have it: and if you do all of the math, you may want to be sitting down from sticker shock if you add up all of the prices needed to procure haying machinery. What are we going to do? Shall we buy all of our hay? Oh, the plot thickens, because not only do we need all of this machinery, we need to know how to maintain and repair it? Your machinery will break down, sooner, or later.
Then, you might become like what many of us have become, a collector of multiple pieces of older machinery; two rakes, two balers, etc.
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