Sq Baler HP Requirements

--->Paul

Personally I still prefer that old 300 with narrow front for baling, problem was the 300 drank 3 Imp. gallons of gas per hour compared to 560D and 656D at about 1 Imp. gallon per hour. I do remember before having the 656, quite often we were baling and using 9' haybine at the same time. 560 always went on the haybine and 300 on the baler. The horsepower demands of the NH 460 haybine were greater than the baler, thrower and wagon.

I have baled and pulled the wagon on a few ocasions with the Farmall 130, when the other tractors were doing haylage. It wasn't fast, but it was only a small amount that got too dry for haylage. Since I had hired help doing haylage and I milked the cows morning and night and did this in between rather than shut the haylage operation down and have more hay too dry for haylage.

Square baling has never been about big horsepower but more about big manpower to handle the bales. I have baled 4,500 on each of 2 consecutive days with the 300. It took on average a dozen men to stow the bales in that old dairy barn.

If your running that kind of hp making square bales, where do you serve the hay, at the Walldorf?

I suspect some of these new balers can take more hp to work at capacity, however the 276 and others he was talking about are basically same baler as my old S-69 was.

We baled 2900 in 7 hours one day in about '73 with one 273 baler and put in the barn. 6 guys in the barn and three rotating in the field on the rack.

What some of these guys are not stopping to think of, is my bales on average were 45 lbs. For the guy doing 60 lbs bales, he need only bale 3,375 bales to bale the same amount of hay as I did. On the days I've baled 4,500 bales I would have had close a dozen men on the payroll. Hay making small square bales and stowing them away in one of those old conventional dairy barns had more to do with manpower than tractor horsepower.

That labor situation and the shortage of it, was precisely why I bought the 560D, later the 656 and still later 1066 and went into haylage. Good labor has never been easy to find on the farm, because of the short season. I will also say on days we baled those 4,500 bales, my dad and most of my 4 brothers were on hand, One of my brothers baled, one pulled wagons with an old Cockshutt 540. Dad cruised around with pickup keeping everything moving, pulling a few loads to barn with pickup if needed. The rest of us worked at and supervised packing of bales as we used a barn dryer, and care had to be taken not to have free air escaping.

I started haylage in the mid 60s. By 1975 my brothers were all gone off to their lifetime ocupations, dad was not as active as he had been, my S-69 was getting worn badly, thus I went to round bales to bale up what couldn't be stored as haylage.

Baling hay is not rocket science, you keep the machine in good order. Two things I see most frequently wrong with balers are plunger adjustment and dull knife. I can pick that one out 1,000 feet away by the shape of bales. It's not enough to have that knife sharp, it must be positioned so it shears. I found over the years, the limiting factor with an S-69 was the amount of hay that would feed through pickup, even with 35 horsepower.

Theman's statement about 35HP on a stationary engine is about right to run the baler, not including pulling the weight of the baler, tractor and possible wagon behind up and down hills. a good strong M(about 45hp) or equal should do the job no problem, just becareful if you have hills and the wagon behind the baler starts getting full, that's where more HP/weight comes in handy.

casey in SD