Making hay without a rake

lastcowboy32

Well-known Member
Am I the only person that has regularly made hay without a rake?

I used to borrow a friend's equipment. The deal was that I performed and paid for the maintenance and he got some of the hay. All he had was a 467 haybine and a 269 baler. After a while, I learned that the 467 could be set to make a swath exactly as wide as the pickup.

Right now, I've only been able to afford the same two pieces of our own equipment: A Hesston 1070 and a NH 276 with no kicker.

Doing this, I've made some very nice hay with a few tricks:

1. Setting the mower shoes high enough to have a little stubble under the hay.

2. Cutting young hay when it's very young, so that there isn't enough of it to make a very deep swath.

3. Extra drying time (usually about a half day) as compared to tedding/raking.

4. Usually baling no earlier than about 2-3PM to ensure that the effects of dew are dried off.

5. If the hay is older, I have to let it get very old before cutting. There seems to be a certain state of vegetation where they yield is heavy enough and the hay is still young/damp enough that the swaths will never dry out this way. Around here...that equates to no baling of first cutting between about June 15th and July 15th.

I haven't put numbers to it, but I've made a few observations and was looking for comments:

-Pro...Second cut clover done like this about mid-July makes a bale of hay that cows will fight you for. Just about every leaf is there.

-Con...There is definitely more travel time with the baler and more plunger strokes/wear per bale made.

-Pro...If the swath width is set correctly, the hay is never driven on and mushed into the ground.

-Pro...I'm also saving between one and three passes of the field (depending on how many times you would typically tedd the hay before raking)

-Con...If it DOES get rained on after cutting, I either have to leave it a very, very long time (until the regrowth lifts it up and dries it) before baling, or just leave it, or bush hog it into mulch, or rent/borrow a tedder and/or rake.

Don't get me wrong. If I had the extra cash laying around, I'd probably have a tedder/rake. But, for our small group of dairy cows, it seems to work just fine this way. We get very young/tender hay with all of its leaves for fodder and then very old/stemmy hay to put through the bedding chopper for bedding or feed to yearlings.

If I was selling hay for horses, no way.
 
Making dry hay without a rake of some type very seldom happens especially early in the season. You might luck out this time of year if the ground is dry plus no rain while the hay is down. In any event a person would benefit from having more than one type of rake or merger. Tedder, rotary rake, wheel rake, inverter, and right down the line. Still nothing wrong with a side delivery rake for straw.
 

I should also add, that I have a "poor man's hay dryer."

Our haybarn is much bigger than what we need. If we have to "push" hay a little bit to avoid rain, we have enough room to put 200-300 bales on the floor of the haybarn spaced out with air gaps on edge for about a week. We then pile them after they've sweat out.
 
Shoot I do not see why you do not have a rake. I payed $25 for my first hay rake and used it for well over a decade. I see rakes sell form $100-3000 all day long and many of the lower priced ones work just fine
 
Watch Craig's list and auctions. I see many sell for a good price but also see many sell for way to high. I have picked up a few that needed TLC pretty cheap over the years
 
It all depends where you are. Pretty common practice on the Western plains. Most
places further east, it wouldn't work.
 
Where you located? I'm in Connecticut and
have an older JD rake I been thinking about
selling, really don't use anymore as
haven't made hay in 6 years now, email me
and we can discuss if interested
 
I bale without raking now and then. I run my hay thru a crimper which puts in a wide windrow. When I get home from work and it is dry enough I will lose leaves raking I just bale it from the flatter row made by the crimper. The baler picks it up fine. Most of the time I do need to rake to get the alfalfa stems dry.
 
(quoted from post at 13:52:24 08/03/15) I bale without raking now and then. I run my hay thru a crimper which puts in a wide windrow. When I get home from work and it is dry enough I will lose leaves raking I just bale it from the flatter row made by the crimper. The baler picks it up fine. Most of the time I do need to rake to get the alfalfa stems dry.

That's kind of what I'm saying.

We don't do that much hay, just two or three thousand bales.

My friend did have a rake when we started, it was a ford, rollabar style, PTO driven, three point hitch mounted...mechanical nightmare....threw belts every five minutes, took forever to hookup...

He also had one of those old rollabar rake/tedder rigs on steel wheels. That was really old and worn. About every other week, some piece of it would wear out and fail that I couldn't get a replacement for. We did manage to cobble together a couple of patches, but it just wasn't to be.

After constantly working on both of them, one day I went out to feel the swath. It was crispy. I baled the hay from the swath and finished what we had down. It came out just fine.

He scrapped both of those old rakes with my blessing.

Right now, buying the haybine and baler for this year has used up my budget, and we're past any need for a rake/tedder for this season. Only horse people would need to tedd first cutting in August.

I will, however be on the lookout over the winter.
 
I found it harder to find a tedder than a rake for a reasonable price.

I've told this story before, but last summer when I blew the head gasket on my MF50 diesel, what was left of my unbaled hay got rain. I wanted
to get it off the field and basically sell it for mulch hay - but it needed turned and dried out. My 3pt rake would fit my brother's Ferguson TO-20,
so I ran the hay through the baler with no twine. It worked great - got the hay turned, fluffed and dumped back into a windrow via the exit of the
bale chute.

A guy stopped for directions and after I helped him, I guess he wanted to set and watch me bale hay from his car window seat. I just tooled
along, hay going in the baler and untied out the back - LOL! Finally the guy left - thinking I was crazy and likely asking someone else for
directions down the road....

So in a round and about way, you've got a rake with your baler.
 
(quoted from post at 15:38:22 08/03/15) I found it harder to find a tedder than a rake for a reasonable price.

I've told this story before, but last summer when I blew the head gasket on my MF50 diesel, what was left of my unbaled hay got rain. I wanted
to get it off the field and basically sell it for mulch hay - but it needed turned and dried out. My 3pt rake would fit my brother's Ferguson TO-20,
so I ran the hay through the baler with no twine. It worked great - got the hay turned, fluffed and dumped back into a windrow via the exit of the
bale chute.

A guy stopped for directions and after I helped him, I guess he wanted to set and watch me bale hay from his car window seat. I just tooled
along, hay going in the baler and untied out the back - LOL! Finally the guy left - thinking I was crazy and likely asking someone else for
directions down the road....

So in a round and about way, you've got a rake with your baler.

I love it when a plan comes together. I'm jealous of your ingenuity.
 
Now, if I really wanted to make this a productive question, I should turn it to....if you had a seven foot haybine, what one piece of equipment would you want that would help you to make dry hay with a minimum of leaf loss? Remember...just one piece of equipment...

A rollabar rake?
A one row rotary tedder/rake?
 
If that works, and it does once in a while, great. Real hard to get hay to dry with a rake in my area, and weathermen are not reliable here, so
would be tough to do here.

Paul
 
I don't even own a rake, i have not found one yet that does a good job
I cut 14" wide and throw a 5 1/2' wide swath and bale(round baler) straight from the swath. i start baling at 17 % moisture.
There have been times the hay laid for 14 days and was still green underneath. I use a combine pickup behind the tractor to fluff the swath up but leaves it intact and dries just as well as with turning it over
My experience is once you rake and it get rained on again before baling cause the swath rolls in a rope it will never dry again and if it does there will be no green left.
 
(quoted from post at 18:33:49 08/03/15) Now, if I really wanted to make this a productive question, I should turn it to....if you had a seven foot haybine, what one piece of equipment would you want that would help you to make dry hay[b:6d08291389] with a minimum of leaf loss[/b:6d08291389]? Remember...just one piece of equipment...

A rollabar rake?
A one row rotary tedder/rake?
A chopper to make haylage
 
Interesting discussion. We are all creatures of habit. I can see how the no rake idea could work in some cases. Actual trips across the field might be about the same, less tedder or raking, but more baling. But I am making horse hay and pushing crop density with lots of fertilizer. Weather windows have been few and short this year. Horse hay has to be very dry and consistent.

Speaking of habit. nh256 bar rake will bring $2000 and a NI belt drive bar rake will bring $400. Windrow looks the same and I think the belt may be more reliable than the gearbox. 3 pt tedders are much cheaper than pull tedders.
 
I can't imagine not having a rake.I cut some heavy hay Sunday temperatures in the 90's and the wind blowing,Monday about 1PM I raked the hay with my NH 256 rake which tends to fluff up the hay so the air can get thru the windrow to dry. I let it dry for a couple hours and baled it in just about perfect condition.I have a hay conditioner and a tedder but rarely use either one because of the extra trip and both will beat the leaves off of hay.
 
Don't think that would ever work around here.
Especially clover. Maybe thin grass hay and a very
warm and dry stretch in August. A older rolla bar
rake is the cheapest of the hay tools around here.
Can buy an older ugly one that works for around
1k. Seems like cheap insurance. Mid-michigan
here.
 
(quoted from post at 10:07:59 08/04/15) Don't think that would ever work around here.
Especially clover. Maybe thin grass hay and a very
warm and dry stretch in August. A older rolla bar
rake is the cheapest of the hay tools around here.
Can buy an older ugly one that works for around
1k. Seems like cheap insurance. Mid-michigan
here.

My friend's old steel wheel rollabar rake/tedder was promising to me. It was sad that it had deep-seated mechanical problems that I couldn't fix at the time. Such as one of the main drive gears in the gear box being cracked.

I have seen these types of rakes/tedders retro-fitted with rubber tires for under a thousand dollars.

They seemed like a fairly versatile idea for a small scale hay producer. There was a lever on the front, in one position, the rollabar rolled forward (at the bottom), so that it worked like a traditional NH 256 rollabar rake. If you moved the lever the other way, the rollabar mechanisim rolled backward, so that it sort of would kick the hay up backwards and fluff it.

This one didn't work well enough for me to really evaluate how well it raked and/or tedded.

I've held off on buying one because....if it was a good idea, why have they stopped building them that way? I currently don't know of a modern, production rollabar rake that reverses direction to a tedder.

If anybody has used one of these, I'd be curious to know how well they work.
 
[/quote]

I get that, but I don't have a silo on the farm, self unloading wagons, etc.

Doing round bales or baleage would require a wrapper, a tractor big enough to spear bales and carry them safely (and do it through the upstate NY snow pack)

I can risk hay getting rained on here and there, as we go through a few hundred bales of bedding through the bedding chopper every winter.

Our barn has a nice, big haybarn, so we're pretty much committed to doing everything in small squares.

For our operation, nothing is as fast as walking out to the barn on a winter's day with a deep snowpack and climbing up into a dry hayloft and tossing a few small squares down the hay chute to the stable...no muss, no fuss, no slogging around in the snow/mud to pick up baleage laying around outside and no climbing up into a stinky old silo chute to throw down haylage.
 
Look up Haybob operation on youtube. If you can find a haybob in the USA, they sell real cheap
since no one knows what they are. PZ made them under many different brandings.
They will tedd and rake. And do each pretty well. Lots of them in Europe. Lots of videos on youtube.
I bought a backup machine on Craigslist last year for $400, in working condition.
 
(quoted from post at 05:17:44 08/05/15) Look up Haybob operation on youtube. If you can find a haybob in the USA, they sell real cheap
since no one knows what they are. PZ made them under many different brandings.
They will tedd and rake. And do each pretty well. Lots of them in Europe. Lots of videos on youtube.
I bought a backup machine on Craigslist last year for $400, in working condition.

That does look interesting. Given the small scale of our farm, I often find myself looking at European equipment and wishing that more of it was in the USA. Thanks
 
I'm pretty small-scale with 11 acres in alfalfa in the Middle West - maybe 1500-2000 bales a year. Started out using my 8N with a sickle bar, Ferguson 3pt rake and NH 68 Hayliner. Now have a Hesston 6400 windrower and just got a NH 273 baler when the 68 broke earlier this year.

Still use the old Fergy rake, which is handy because I can pick it up to hop over a windrow or work my corners more rounded. I rake two windrows into one, and then bale.

A time or two when I was trying to beat the weather, I've borrowed a friend's hay inverter, and it's the cats. My Fergy rake tends to rope the windrow if I have to hit it a second time, where the inverter just flips it over and fluffs it a bit at the same time with little loss of leaf.

es
 
I admire your attitude about "needs" versus "wants". Sounds like you have a good balance - recognizing what you have, it works, and how to best use it in your operation.
Where we baled in NE WI - it is very low ground. Took forever to dry out in spring, couldn't even get machines in to cut hay until July. A rake was a MUST; the undersides wouldn't dry without it on first crop. Second was not much trouble, but we liked the nice fluffy windrows.

Curious about your experience with leaving the hay lay out in the sun for long periods. Does it affect quality? Does the sun 'bleach' out the nutrients?

Thanks for posting about your experience
 

To be honest, I think that you probably get a double whammy if a thick swath of hay is left in the Sun too long.

The hay on top gets bleached.

The hay on the bottom, that stays green for a long time, loses nutrients through respiration, as plant respiration will continue until the hay gets down to about 22% moisture. That green hay on the bottom takes a long time to get down to that moisture content.

On the other hand...tedding and raking and such will smash leaves...so those methods aren't without their drawbacks.

I have made hay with good nutritional value without a rake in two circumstances. One circumstance was a few dry days around May 21st. I jumped on the field and cut it when the grass didn't have enough yield to make a thick swath. The Sun is strong in the end of May. Days are long. The hay dried quickly and thoroughly, due to the thinness of the swath.

The other circumstance is setup by the first. If you get the first cut around May 20th, you can pounce on the same field again around July 10th or so. Again, days are long, weather is even hotter now and the second cut will produce a thin swath that dries quickly and completely.

The hay that I make without a rake as first cut on May 20th and as second cut on July 10th is the best hay that I've ever baled....and better than I've ever bought from others that tedd and rake. It is dried completely, quickly and all of the leaves are still there. The cows will literally run you over to get at a bale of clover second cut baled July 10th preserved so well that the blooms are still red and the leaves are intact. The yield isn't so great...but I got that yield with only two passes per cut...once to cut...once to bale. I can make a few hundred bales of hay like that with 10 gallons of diesel in our little tractor.

Other than that, I can make dry hay without a rake, but the thicker swaths will lose nutrients due to the longer drying time by the mechanisms mentioned way up at the top of my reply.

That's OK, though; because we have dry cows, wintering steers and yearlings that can use hay of lesser nutritional value, and we have a bedding chopper to chop the absolute worst hay into bedding...I mean...a cheap bale of chopped bedding replaces a five dollar bag of shavings from Tractor Supply...so bedding even has value, if, like us, you think that clean cows are important.
 
I am more small scale than most. I only hay about 5.5 acres per year on average. Sometimes a little more and sometimes a little less

I hay with 2 old John Deere model 594 hay rakes on steel wheels (action pics are on this site)

Indispensable tools for me. They rake, they can flip the swath as an inverter, improvise tedd in a pinch. Most importantly they make loose fluffy windrows that dry well and the fluffiness of the windrow is even adjustable. Many rakes make rope that does not dry out, these do not.

I have $25 in one of them and $90 in the other one. Plus some sweat equity getting them reconditioned like I wanted. Although ancient, these things have enough metal in them to be repaired and make like new again with some creative welding.

I have done nothing but grease mine over the last 3 to 4 years. (I use the cheapest grease available from rural king to do it too $0.97 per tube on sale). Otherwise not even a single broken tine.
 
I have a junky field that I mowed with the hay mower a few weeks ago and left it lay. And UP here even after a week of 90* weather and low relative humidity most of that "hay" was still green and dripping with moisture. Any parts of those windrows that didn't get exposed to the sun would just rot away before they even came close to drying.
 
Been a tough year. But after completing 1st cut in August (holy cow!) we got some pretty good hay. Here in So. Ill, it stayed hot and dry. I cut with a drum mower that leaves a single windrow of layed over hay. I let it set a day, then ted. My little 2 rotor Italian tedder does a pretty good job of fluffing the hay. Next day (3) we rake with a v-rake, then bale almost right away. Hay was nice and dry and bales were good and solid. Both squares and 5x5 rounders. No plugged balers, no green hay. I thought it would all be a big loss with waiting so long to get started, but the fields were not that bad.

We made good hay...

John
 

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