What is your perfered method of harvesting hay

A lot of these guys giving advice have never made hay more the 100 miles away from home in their lives. There is a big difference between the great plains with 40% humidity and near one of those large bodies of water where humidity rarely drops below 80%. Your very best advice will come right from your own neighbor hood.

When in grass hay a disc/drum mower and a tedder will put up hay with less money spent and as quick as any discbine MOCO out there. Anything with a sicklebar is it wastes a day waiting for the dew on the grass to dry. The disc/drum mower will be done before the haybine starts to mow.

If the fields are wet, we make narrow windrows to expose more of the ground so it can dry out. Otherwise, we make windrows that are just narrow enough for the tractor to straddle on the next pass so we don't run it down.

The hay sits for about half a day typically, then the windrows are scattered into a uniform blanket with a tedder. Currently, that's a Claas Volto 1050. We let the hay dry at least another half a day. If it's very heavy (usually 1st cutting), we'll hit it with the tedder a second time. It gets raked up nice and neat, and should be ready to bale within a couple hours.

Tedding is up to you, but a mower-conditioner would definitely speed up your drying vs. a sicklebar. There are hay crushers around (we even had one for one particularly rainy year), but you'd be better off with a combo machine.

When I was a pup, we always had about 15 acres of irrigated alfalfa to put up three times a year for the darlin' Holsteins, don't ya know.

We would mow it with a JD # 5 or 8 sickle mower, rake it with a # 15 IH side delivery rake, let it cure and then stack it using the Farmhand F-10 loader running back and forth, up and down the field and to the stack with two men with pitchforks shaping.

Seemed like that 15 acres would end up taking 3 or 4 days as I recall.

The last year I farmed, I used a swather/crimper to drop the stuff. After the hay had cured, I could put up 45 acres before breakfast using a round bailer; then have it stacked before 10am.

Times change.

Allan