The entertainment of baling hay.

I have been fun though, I always like to bale even when the baler didn't work right. My wife thinks I'm nuts though.

Bob

While I have never cut and baled I find it facinating. All my haying experience is being the young fella on the ground bucking bales onto the trailer. From time to time I would have to teach the newcomers how to stack the hay so we would not dump the load when leaving the fields. Come winter we got to handle that same hay again hauling it from the barn out to feed 250 head of hosses.

Haying was one of my summer jobs that paid dern good money for the hard work. I tell you this, when football season started in the fall all of us on the haying crews were always in shape.

Again, thinking of haying and putting my boys in the field bucking bales.

Spent a lot of days getting a tan on the hayrack behind one of those when I was a kid, that was the only time Mom ever drove the tractor.

Might have to go buy it to give the nephews some work to do...

Steve NW WI

Go get that 68.
Wait till my Son finds out the real reason I got my 68 was to keep him busy during the summers.

My dad bought the very first bale thrower New Holland brought into our area. Mounted on a Super 69 Hayliner the thrower was powered by a Briggs and Stratton engine with a cable control on throttle of the Briggs and running all the way to tractor. As we were partway through haying before this contraption arrived, we threw some quick racks unto a couple of wagons which turned out to be both too narrow and too short. My brother Frank was going to take to the field with Farmall 300, baler, thrower and wagon. Well that cable control was so springy and on the tractor Frank couldn't hear the Briggs. At the end of the first load, Frank had 68 bales on the wagon and 212 on the ground. My dad shook his head and said," well a least we'll have something for the wagons we didn't get rack built on to do." Second load and by this time the NH dealer came along with his live moving camra. I guess you wouldn't call it a vidio camra in those days. The telephone wires by our place in those days were the old steel party lines on a crossbar at top of pole, about 10-12 wires across. Frank started to bale the back swath along the highway, ducking in between the poles. He gave the thrower a bit or rather a lot more throttle and zip out comes a bale, went up through the two wires, separated a bit wider by the poles. The bale then turned crossways and came to rest on top of several telephone wires. The bale stayed there the rest of the day. I don't know how it affected the partyline conversation that day.

The Briggs powered thrower didn't stay around too long. The shock of bales hitting the belts put two rods through blocks that first summer. The thrower did have a flywheel. NH did a recall on that thrower and the next spring a new pto driven thrower arrived. We built 4- 20'x 8' wagons, Frank did get better at it. The second summer he could bale 3000 to 4000 bales in a day and have all but a dozen or so in the wagons.

Well the grass was about waist high when he told me this. I didn't know what to do. No one was willing to come custom cut a 1.5 acre piece. I was advised to buy a couple of calves, let them eat all summer and then sell them in the fall and make money. So I tried it. Lost $800. I decided that if I was going to lose money I'd rather do it with machinery than animals.

So I started accumulating machinery. Now I do my own hay (I still sell it to my sister, but the profit margin is probably negative). I use a Ford 850, JD#9 sickle, Ferguson DEO-25 rake and a MF124 baler. I also have a Ford 542 baler that I'm trying to restore to working condition. I tell people I have more equipment per acre than anyone else in the valley! I've been baling my ground (and now a neighbor's ground) since '99.

Funny thing is, before I got my own equipment, I asked my neighbor if he would let me use his. The look on his face was priceless. He was polite enough not to say what he was thinking. He just quietly said no, but I could see that he wanted to say "There's no way in he11 I'm letting some dumb city boy touching my stuff!" Now that I have "stuff" of my own, I know what he was feeling. After doing my own for a few years, I had baler problems last summer. Guess what? This same neighbor offered to let me take his tractor and baler to finish the job! I didn't even have to ask! I guess I passed his test.

I really enjoy watching the hay fall when the sickle mower is working good.

Maybe we could all get a group discount!
It's probably the best therapy of all.

Can't wait 'til Saturday.

Bob

I've been using a sicklebar mower to cut the hay, but now I'm looking for an old, cheap brush hog. I'll cut the left part of the skirt off, and use that to cut hay. The sicklebar is too much of a hassle, and a moco is too expensive and difficult to maintain. Even I can maintain a brush hog!!

Rich

Mark

Around the turn of the millenium I read that historians named hay as one of the greatest developments in the last 1000 years because it allowed cities (and the animals needed to work and feed them) to develop in northern latitudes. Tried to explain that to my brother and son as they go tup on the wagon to stack bales but they didnt beleive me. Felt a little like Tom Sawyer talkin his buddies into white washing the fence.

No the M doesn't have alive pto, you learn to kick it out of gear real quick to keep from plugging it up. The IH 27 that I borrow is a small machine and had quite a time handling a 7' swath that the JD #5 made. I finished up tonight, it was only 1 1/2 acres, but my cows can't eat that much that fast. I didn't it just to do it and ended up with 2 1/2 ton of good orchard grass hay. Some of the field had Reed Canary grass in it that was 6' feet tall so I ended up stopping and feeding it in with a pitch fork.

And wouldn't you know it as soon as I finished a small thunder storm came through and made it wet enough to keep me from stacking it tonight. But that will get done tomorrow.

Bob

Bought myself a sickle bar mower.....next looking for a rake....then a bailer..... yikes!

Take Care
Steve

Bob G