lesson learned: putting up square bales
 

As we are always looking for ways to work smarter we tried a new scheme this year for putting up square bales. We had a three person team (again) and the person running the baler had two on tractors, one driving a truck, and six stacking on trucks. The three of us were able to stack as quickly as the six person team with less effort.

We were able to acquire a large quantity of pallets for the very reasonable price of "come and get them and they are yours!".

Pallets were staged in stacks throughout the field after baling operations started.

One person drove the tractor with pallet forks on the front and a pallet on the forks. We discovered that three bales per layer and three layers (nine bales per pallet) worked best on the uneven ground. Could go four layers if the ground is even.

Move pallet to location of people and they do not have to lift high.

Drop pallet for loaders to finish final layer and tractor goes to get new pallet.

Areas with good density of bales the pallets can be left on the ground.

At the end it was one person on the tractor moving bales to the barn and stacking them still on the pallets. Easiest we have EVER done it!

If we had to stack on a trailer we could have loaded the pallets directly on a flatbed and kept going. None of us were too terribly worn out at the end of the day.

Kept track of fuel consumption this time, 60HP tractor used .5 gallons of diesel per hour. Not too shabby!

That sounds very ingenious. Did you take pictures, David?

Paul,

We DO need to take photos. I have pallets stacked in front of one row and round bales in front of the other row. Scared of theft as hay appears to be going up in value right now....


Nota,

We paid our helper a rate per hour, provided all drinks (gateraid, tea, water), and paid for lunch but not breakfast or supper. But you are very correct, know what you are getting before getting involved! Hard work is what it really is!!! We have been lucky in having repeat helpers over the past three years. Always had trouble with getting good help in the years before. Paid them at the end of the day and never saw them again. Same way then as well, we provided one meal plus pay.

Also, treat workers as independant contractors, they are NOT employees and they understand that going in.

that's awesome....is good to see cows are going to get a square meal :D

A friend of mine with a ranch bought a square baler that was almost new real cheap at an auction. After one use he figured out why it was cheap. He went out and bought a round bailer and it is easy to move those round bales with his truck and the spike. He has a few dozen longhorn cattle and 6 horses to keep fed in the winter.

Hmmm.
Still sounds like a lot of work.
We have an extra bale chute on the baler and tow a wagon behind as we bale. The wife drives the tractor, I load the wagon with the bales as they come off the chute. We load two wagons and haul them to the barn, where we use a conveyor to get them into the mow.

I suspect your storage area is ground level and more spacious than ours. We put about 300 in our barn for the horses and do up another few hundred for some friends. I like those ones, I don't have to unload the wagons. :D

Yeah, I'm a lazy SOB.

Best
Les

[img]http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploads20/pot1340039501.jpg[/img I was going to use my profits for a sweet slantnose cabriolet!

Glen,

Does he still have the square baler, selling at a cheap price???? :-)

Round bales are easier to pull out and drop. Per tonne they are cheaper to feed, people will not pay as much money for them by weight as they will for square bales. Horse people prefer square bales as most do not have any equipment to handle the round bales. Round bales can get moldy and make your horses sick. Not as big an issue when you are feeding cows and other slaughter animals that you do not expect to live for more than a few months to a year. Not as big a deal when you are keeping Angus and such overbred breeds who will not be abel to live and produce for more than five or six years, as a generalized statement.

Our horses go up to 30, the cows are still producing up to about 20. Square bales are easier on their health.

Also, round balers require higher horsepower tractors which translates into more cost to buy and run. I'm on the shoestring end of the scale....


Les,

I hear ya! Still, that is tough work and you are handling them twice even with a thrower if you were to invest in one. Conveyor is definately the way to go! Our main hay barn has no electricity and is about 1/2 mile from the house. I can get about 2,160 bales in the barn using this stacking method or close to 3,000 using the method you are using. Yes, ground stack (on pallets to raise the hay up) and clear run to the roof. Only purpose of the barn is for storage.

I agree completely with you!!! I prefer the bales sold as they come out of the chute and loaded by someone else!


Jim,

Wrong type of bale but I bet they bring more money!!!!!

Square grouper!
 

Square grouper!

This is how we do it.
Most are going to round bales though.
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YeUeR6VbyZg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

re putting up hay, I've found it's best to be the guy on the tractor.
But the palletts sound like a great idea; use what works for you.
Jim

Pallets sound good. I lifted hay bales onto trucks/trailers a few times 40 years ago. Brutal work.

You are definitely doing it the best way, but....

I wonder if you were able to build a sled which could be pulled behind the baler and would allow someone to load a pallet with 9 bales then release it and drop another pallet onto the sled to be loaded as you moved around the field?
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1340104014.jpg


Sorry for the quality of the quick sketch. This would allow you to get your hay onto the pallets with one person on the tractor and one other person stacking on the pallets. No walking around the field to pick up hay.

I told you I was lazy!
Best
Les

Lesson I learned on handling bales of hay, wear a long sleeve shirt. Wish I could remember what I was paid fifty year ago to do this kind of work. Hot dirty work!

all that then ya gotta stack in in the barn too.

i spent a couple of summers bucking and hauling green pea hay in the dayton washington area in the summer of 1959 and 1960. it was used for dairy cattle feed at that time. bales were bound with wire and weighed in the 100 t0 125 pound range. it was really hot and dusty work and we were paid 15 dollars per day..6 a.m. til 6 p.m.. had to wear leather chaps..jeans would not last a day before wearing holes in the knees and thigh areas..literally would spit mud when working inside due to the dust!

Sorry, I'm getting hay fever just reading this.

We need more cow bell.

I remember being on my grandmothers farm as a young kid and watching my father and uncles loading trailers full of square bales. That was in Frankfort, Indiana.

I haven't been back on a farm since she died in the late 70s. I miss that place.

Having never been near a farm, I find this stuff fascinating! I love learning about big doin's that I know nothing about.

I took these pictures a couple of years ago. We have a 50% population of Amish in little Switzerland Indiana.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1340115712.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1340115800.jpg

Les,

That is PURE GENIUS :):):) I LOVE IT!!!!

I'm going to check into doing this, if the sled is low enough then the hay comes off at waist level, pallets on other side of sled. How does one go about releasing the pallet off the sled? This would be the break point. I'm working on this!

lin,

Pea hay, if I remember or know what I am talking about, has stems and prickly things. Yep, would really tear up a person!

Safety gear: Long heavy jeans, long sleeve shirt, heavy leather (cotton does not work) gloves, steel toe (or composite) boots, safety glasses, wide brim hat or hardhat (things fall from above all the time), and I wear a respirator.

You also have to work in the heat as grass only grows then... Yep, hard work! Glad this round is over, hope I have many more rounds to go before I get planted myself.

Frankfort is about two hours due north of us!

It is alot of work and I've seen many a body builder fold in the first fifteen minutes while the skinny kid could go all day. Every year my wife embarasses one or more football players. It takes a different kind of strength to lift and drop 60 - 100 pounds (average 75 - 90) a few hundred times in a matter of a few short hours. Believe me, the men (for they were obviously men!) in your family did more than a full day's labour in that time.

You are racing the weather and the sun! Cannot leave the square bales out in the night air and cannot bale while the dew is still out.

I lost about an inch on Saturday alone.

Doug,

VERY nice! That is ALOT of work! My mother did this in the fields with the hands in 1938-40. It requires specific knowledge and a good skill set. I do not possess it and she does not wish to remember it! Looks like very old school methods of farming just on a general glance. Looks to be a horse paddock on the side of the barn and the barn designed to hold animals and equipment. Do not see power/phone poles and lines, but those can be buried as well.

There are alot of Amish south of us. They have nicer homes than us, newer and higher level cars and tractors, i-phones and android phones, laptops, etc. Nothing like I was lead to believe through the years.

Our Amish still come over to use the phone, so they aren't too progressive. I have seen a few solar panels and windmills in the Woodburn area. But
they are more advanced up there. Some even have bikes!

I would think a set of parallel arms (kind of like a miniature version of the 3 point hitch arms on the back of the tractor) supporting a set of pallet forks (facing the rear) behind the axle. The forks are raised and locked into place with a lever, a pallet is dropped onto the forks and the hay is placed on the pallet. When the pallet is full, the lever is released, dropping the forks to slide along the ground, which allows the pallet to remain behind. The operator then raises the forks and throws on another pallet from the supply to the right.

You would have to use pallets with no bottom boards, to allow them to be dropped over the forks.
I would think a 6" vertical travel would be sufficient.

Best
Les

The last year we used a square baler exclusively on our relatively small farm, we made 17,000 bales. How many pallets would that take? :)
The "crew" consisted of my father, my mother and myself.
The good old days. Seriously.

Les,

I do not like losing the bottom boards as they give stability and would aid in locking in the stacks but that might be a price to pay? Wonder if a slide would work where it kicks down and the bale slides off? That could cause it to dump the load, very bad!


Max,

1,889, the last one would not be full. I would have a 10% buffer though as you just never know what pallets are going to break...

17,000 bales? THAT is farming! (and hard work!!!!) Man, that is about 7/8 days of baling? What type of equipment did you find worked best? My little IH Farmall 60 2010 model was the smallest tractor on our place this weekend. JD 4020 and MF 185 (used to be mine but I sold it) were the other two tractors. Those older machines were fabulous and worked like noones business!

How did yall manage it? What type of storage or were you loading directly into 18 wheelers for transport? Elevators? Man, I cannot imagine that type of work!!! Next year we are expecting to have ~80 acres to cut and bale. Looking at ~7,200 square bales. Will likely cut over three or four weeks. Using the IH 60 and a JD 6420 (hate the JD). Might try to pick-up an older machine for some of the work. Put my FIL in the a/c cab of the JD (agent orange has taken a terrible toll on him) and let him just run the machine, MIL on the IH, Wife and I on the ground and anyone else we can con into working.


Got our pallets for the high price of: Sure, please take them away! Got many times what our 18 acre patch will load down. Working to get more!

When I bailed hay as a kid, the hay sled (The one you road on) had a slot in it. You took a iron bar with a round handle out of a tube on the bailing machine and drove the pointy end of the bar into the ground ahead of the stack of bails. As the sled was pulled forward the bar caused the bails to slide off the sled and you pulled the iron bar out and put it back into the tube on the bailer.

I was thinking of another linkage which would allow the forks to be rotated vertically after the pallet was released. That would, in theory, allow the operator to slip a pallet over the ends of the fork, then rotate it down to the 'Load' position.
Given the weight and cumbersome nature of handling a pallet on a moving platform, I think the idea has gone beyond practical means.

Another option would be to place about a dozen pallets on a wagon body, tow the wagon behind the baler and load the pallets. When the wagon is 'full' unhitch and connect to another wagon, geared up the same way. A third operator could use a forklift equipped tractor to haul that to the barn and unload the pallets and return to swap wagons again.

I will go to amazing lengths to avoid what I consider "work".

Have fun!
Les