baleage

If you want to sell dry hay to horse customers build you a shed. Horse customers most often want small square bales stored inside. If you are going to wrap bales for sure you will want to do haylage, twice the food value for the same money. Take for instance any of the small grains cut & wrapped at the correct time will produce more usable protein than corn silage. Wrappers are available in the rental market, so smaller farmers do not need to purchase a wrapper.

• McHale Silage Guide

Bale sleeves (open ended), just net wrap, 100' tarps, or a pole roof storage building will actually be much cheaper once you start pricing the balage equipment.

--->Paul

Delmorst I have now reads to 45%. Same rule applies. I start to worry as the numbers start to fall. 30% is my break point, I either have to let it dry down to 20% or apply propionic acid. That 20-30% range is the killer for me. Some days the humidity here holds me at 20-25% for days. That's why I keep acid tanks. Working on some stuff now to use fans (really, really high volume) to barn dry on down (working on introducing heat into the air stream this year). We'll see how it works, last year I brought some timothy from 24%-18% in the bale in the barn in 36 hrs with my pilot project. Internal temp never got over 84 deg the whole time. I tried it on 150 bale lots last year, this year I'm going to gradually increase up to see what number I can dry in 48 hrs or less. With acid costs of $20-$30 per ton of hay I've got a little room to play.