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Some High powered alfalfa harvesting!!!

J

JD Seller

Well-known Member
I am amazed at some of the machinery used in harvesting to day. Also sticker shock at the number of dollars of equipment shown in this video. The one picture shows 7 Oxbo mergers. They sell for around $140K each. Then add seven tractors to that. WOW. I Am sure glad I am not making any of the payments on that stuff.

alfalfa harvesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttJjKMxwJWU


P.S. for those that are unfamiliar with chopping alfalfa hay. The trailers being pulled behind the choppers are for water. At certain moistures the chopped alfalfa becomes sticky and even the blowers on these BIG self propelled choppers can not throw it very well. So you shoot a little water in the blower spout. It acts like a lubricant in the chute. Then you can blow the sticky hayledge.
CY harvesting
 
All to keep up with the Jones?s. My neighbor didn?t get his first cab tractor until 10 years ago . he worked his whole life to pay off the farm 700 acres he has sheep and cattle he puts up all his hay with inline little baler and stacks it all with a 3010 John Deere and a 3 wide pull type new Holland bale wagon . He finally bought a new swather last year he?s been cutting hay the last forty years with an old new Holland end transport mower that thing was older than methuselah and he finally couldn?t keep it together long enough to get any work done . He always has crops and calves that are as nice as any in the valley and he?s running equipment that looks like it belongs in a museum so a guy doesn?t need all that fancy machinery to do a good job. Is fun to think about ya but how do you pay for that kind of equipment with the price of farm commodities?
 
Cy harvesting is a custom harvesting Company in MN. They specialize in harvesting for the MEGA dairies in their area. They have been in business for a good while so they must make it work. Just boggles the mind thinking of the investment in equipment shown.
 
No disrespect intended JD, but I doubt very much they are hauling water in those tanks. More likely a silage inoculant , to enhance silage preservation. With tower silos it is commonly added at the blower at the base of the silo . If you want to add innoculant to silage going into a bunker, it has to be added at the harvest blower.. To add enough water to silage in the field to change the moisture level of the silage going through those harvesters, they would have to pull a forty foot trailer
 
it might be both, Bruce- a water based inoculant that helps reduce the gum that builds up in the blower chute. it didn't take but a drizzle into the blower to keep the grass going up the pipe, back when I was using the upright silo for haylage.
in a setup like on the video, there isn't any practical way to add inoculant at the bunk like we do.
I wonder how many fields that size there are to harvest out there. we have too many hills, woods, and streams (not to mention people and houses) to imagine something like that.
 
Whatever is in the tank it?s an impressive operation. My son worked for an outfit similar to that in Alberta last year,Meinama custom farming. When you have thousands of acres that need to be done in a few days you need equipment like that and the manpower to do it. Works out better to hire someone who can spread it over a handful of customers vs having your own at that scale.
 
Around 1970 we had a garden hose spraying water into the blower to keep the alfalfa from sticking to the pipes. Allis Chalmers WD45 on the chopper, D14 to pull the wagons, an old WD on the blower. Many times had to unbolt the pipe and bang on it to release a clog of haylage. The farmer I worked for got bigger tractors in a couple years.

Ken
 
When you get to the video there is another video available showing corn chopping. Same idea - massive machinery. Looks like they are chopping 16 rows of corn. How much horsepower does that take?
 
The custom harvesters probably put many many more hours and acres through each one of their machines per year than any individual farm ever could. The used machines are still in demand, so the depreciation isn't too bad either. The custom harvesters also provide the extra experienced labor to handle harvest that the farms probably don't have on staff and can't hire easily when every other farm is harvesting too.

If you do it right, providing services and skilled trades to farms could be more profitable than farming.
 
I tend to agree with ny bill...haylage at a certain moisture can gum things up real quick. We added water at the blower, no faster than an old man could pee, and that kept the pipes clean. Those tanks should last a day easily.

Ben
 
I used to help my father in law filling the silo back in the 70s before he quit milking. A one row IH binder and a belt driven Papec blower. He hired kids to pick up the bundles and stack them on the hay wagons. Always added water at the blower. I've seen the CY videos before and thought is was a dairy operation. Makes sense it's a custom outfit. It works out better keeping the equipment in use rather than only five weeks a year. I tried custom baling the hay this year due to shoulder surgery. Used to take me and the wife all summer to put up 24 acres and usually couldn't quite get it all. He cut it all in one day, baled 1500 small squares the next day and the rest he round baled the day after and bought from me. Had a five man crew of legal Mexicans who stacked the wagon and put it all in the barn. I may keep doing it this way.
 
there have been years and certain customers were the custom guys didn't get paid.

i've heard some won't work unless they at least get the fuel bill $ before they get in the field.
 
When my neighbors used to put haylage into their Harvestore silos, it was so dry , that green dust was flying out of any cracks in the forage wagons. And with my own experience chopping hay, too dry never plugged the blower on the harvester, but trying to chop hay that was too wet made me plenty of trouble.
 
That?s me I do a lot of custom farming but I don?t want much bigger or newer equipment the guys I work for pay cash and aren?t hurting for money . The way the dairy industry is going all it takes is a couple phone calls and those guys will be out of business with debt that they never will be able to pay off . Guy I work with was a big hotshot custom operator millions of dollars in equipment tuning thousands of acres about 3 phone calls latter he?s lost everything including his house and has debt he can?t pay . God bless these guys I don?t wish bankruptcy on anyone I seen that once and it?s terrible
 
In those blue silos, it needs to go in a bit drier 45 to 50 percent moisture. Open top silo around 60 to 65. Thats were the gumming issue comes up, but it differs from variety of alfalfa. Above 70 and it blows like corn silage, but it is too wet for proper fermentation and becomes bitter and unpalatable for cattle. Wet wrapped bales like yours are much more desirable for many reasons.

Ben
 
Bruce you very well could be correct. We never used an liquid inoculant on hayledge. We did use a dry product that a small Grady box applied right at the blower. So I never even thought of a liquid product. I have never put hayledge into a bunker silo either. Mine goes into a Harvester silo or silage bag. Top protein is not the main goal when feeding beef. Tonnage of roughage out of first crop hay is the target usually.
 
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