|
P Verity: Your question is rather a loaded one. To begin with I've never seen two different models of MoCo's make the same type windrow. There has been such a vast variety of hay rakes in the past 50 years, one would have to live to be 150 years old to try them all. Then you throw into the equasion, species being cut, geographic location, weather conditions mainly humidity and breeze. But you want to know something, those last two, humidity and breeze will have more to do with drying time than all the equipment from here to kingdom come. A third factor is keep the damn tractor wheels off the hay after you mow it. Here is what I ran into 40 years ago, and I lived in an area where humidity was rarely below 75% and more often 90%. I had been brought up as a young man to think like Leland, spread er out flat. I started putting up haylage from a 75% alfalfa 25% grass mix, often times we were dealing with yields of 6,000 dry matter per acre each cutting. We also had stones, thus material went right into windrows from the NH 460 haybine. We didn't want any rake gathering stones into those windrows. We were using 90 hp on NH S717 harvester, 60 hp at silo blower and two 40 hp tractors to pull wagons. Our average lead time between haybine and harvester was roughly 24 hours. Try as we might, everyday there was some material got too dry for haylage. Every day between milkings I found myself out there, turning these windrows as you do, with my Farmall 130 and rake, and usually baling that material with 130 as I didn't dare take one of the 40 hp tractors off the haylage, it would only make my problem worse. At that point I said, hold on, I've got to rethink this whole haying process, here I am trying to store haylage at 30 to 40 percent dry matter and each day I'm coming up with material in the 20 to 25 percent dry matter in less than 24 hours of undisturbed material. 2 to 3 hours after turning it I was baling it. We had never dried hay that fast in all the years we made hay. At the time we introduced haylage, we had been baling about 35,000 bales annually. Our goal was to put about 25,000 of those bales into silo as haylage. We were still intending baling 10,000 bales annually. It was never my intention to do it by myself between milkings with a Farmall 130. The plan had been for those 4 or 5 young lads I had hired running haylage equipment to first fill the silo, then bale the rest as hay with larger tractors. NEEDLESS TO SAY, FROM THAT DAY ONWARD HAY WAS PUT IN WINDROWS RIGHT FROM HAYBINE.
|
