I ain't smart

grandpa Love

Well-known Member
Ha ha. This is a tractor post! Baled hay Fri and Saturday. 410 bales. Second cutting off this field. Was full of weeds and briars on first cutting. This was much better. 99% grass. Still some blackberry briars but much improved. Bubba decided he had a date Saturday so Mick had to load 200+ bales. New 951 was on baler duty and did great. Only issue is going down hills the oil pressure drops from 30 to 10. Comes back up on flat ground or going up hills. Sold 50 bales yesterday. Gonna deliver 125 today. Nice hot weather 95+
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Most crews will appreciate it greatly if you can reduce the walking to pick up. If you can find, or build, a drag type bale buncher (some do call these bale baskets as well and there are videos on line of using them by that name) it is a step up from dropping bales all over the field and reduces pick up time. Having 8 to 12 in a pile to pick up is easier than chasing one at a time. And you control where you trip the buncher so you can line the piles up across a field if you want. Those won't push a light tractor like a wagon or Bale Basket wagon can on a hill. We used one for a time, it does make things better for a crew. Moved up to wagons and now use a EZ-trail Bale Basket.

We also built a drag to pull behind the baler (rolled up steel head with 2x6 x16s for runners with a narrow (wide enough for a crowbar, too narrow for a foot to go into) open slot down the center to drive a crowbar into the ground to slide the bales off the runners)and used that for a couple seasons before getting a buncher. Someone had to ride the drag and pile the bales, 10 to 12 usually but could be more, then drive the bar in at the slot at the front held the bar and the pile slid off the free ends of the runners as the baler moved along. Likely not the best idea in this day and age, but it worked.


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Just a couple ideas to save the crew. Have fun.
 
It takes a while when you only haul 1 bale at a time..... :)

I can’t imagine picking 400 up from the ground, when I was younger I would stack that many on wagons behind the baler, and unload 2 in a day, but I couldn’t pick up a single load worth from the ground in a day, would be wore out.

More power to your crew.
 
Morning, hauled a many bale loading from the ground back in my teens. It builds character!!! We career tech teachers in the 90’s called it “the round bale syndrome ” With all the round bales and no square bales the teens did not get the opportunity to learn the value of hard work. Tell grandma love to tell bubba if the girl won’t come visit in the hay field now, she sure won’t later on!
 
(quoted from post at 06:13:27 08/09/20) Morning, hauled a many bale loading from the ground back in my teens. It builds character!!! We career tech teachers in the 90 s called it "the round bale syndrome " With all the round bales and no square bales the teens did not get the opportunity to learn the value of hard work. Tell grandma love to tell bubba if the girl won t come visit in the hay field now, she sure won t later on!

What I tell people about riding the hay rack behind the baler is you are so hot and tired you feel like passing out but those bales keep coming up and you keep going picking them up and stacking them. You do this day after day maybe not every day of the summer but throughout the summer and you learn how to find a little extra strength to keep going no matter how bad the conditions are. This is a good lesson about life in general.
 
And if hot tired and zoned out on the rack
is not enough punishment try a manual
stooker

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Closer to the dust and no chance to walk
away a few feet



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Good morning fixerupper.........

X 2 on your comment.....

In my teens I rode the identical bale sloop....it builds character........:)

Our winters in Northern Alberta are long...feeding cattle started around October 1 > May 15...

Two stacks of bales ..each stack 10,000 bales..

Bob..

Bob...
 
A good friend used to tell me when kids are little and cant really help they want to, then when they get to the point of being good help they do not want to. Having teens and young adults is really frustrating, you will have to find ways to work without them as they stretch their wings.
 
It is about 1/2 the work to load from the baler, but that takes more tractor, thus keep looking for more tractor.
 
It looks like you deliver a lot of the hay from the field, and use your trailer to do it. I agree with the other posts that encourage pulling a wagon behind the baler , but that only would save work if you can deliver with the wagon. I know from your other posts that your fields are kind of spread out,so hauling with the trailer may be a necessity. Something else to look into would be a ground driven bale loader that is kind of like a small hay elevator that you could use to load the trailer and your helpers would only need to ride and stack the trailer. These bale loaders would be pretty old by now and might be hard to find. Using an accumulator behind the baler is another good idea mentioned here and maybe you could get a grapple for your loader tractor and load the trailer with the tractor. Good to hear everything is working well.
 
By the time I was 13/14, 1977, I was 5'10" +200# and pretty strong from working on my family's farm/ranch/garden/fig grove. I started earning spending money hauling hay. Have never seen anything but a baler spitting them out on the ground. By my Junior year of H.S. me and two other guys were doing custom hauling for local feed store and select land owners. The owner of the truck/trailer was a Senior, '76 3/4T Chevy w/ 454, 4 speed. set the idle up just a little and who ever was on that side steered thru the window. We hauled 1500 bales in two days using the Chevy and the feed stores 2 ton flat bed and 18' low boy. Me and the other boy were Juniors and linemen on the football team. We never went to the "voluntary" summer work outs. The coaches didn't complain because we were in the best shape of the team. .25 per bale.
 
There is at least one company still making those bale elevators. Kind of a western thing. Wouldn’t want to price new, but at least parts are still out there..... might be the ticket to keep going with less help if the time comes. I can understand a hayrack might not fit this operation, with hauling on the trailer.

I understand the bale accumulators even the small 4 bale setups work nice these days.

Paul
 
Great pics.

Tell Mick he will build up great forearm and bicep muscles.

I'm married to a guy who grew up on a dairy farm & handled lots of hay bales. :)
 
As far as the oil pressure, I'll assume you've checked the oil level. The only other thing I can think of to cause what you're describing is maybe a cracked or broken off pickup tube
 

Grandpa, you still need to build a dolly so that you can pull the trailer behind the baler. or you could still come and get mine.
 
Yep,putting up small squares is work.Could you sell out of the field to help mitigate some of the work?I make around five thousand small squares in a season,about half of that sold in the field.The rest sold from the barn.Most guys around here use accumulaters and grapples.I use a New Holland bale wagon and a flatbed truck/bale loader with a hoist for dumping bales in barnyard or at customers place.I pay a crew to stack for customers and charge customers accordingly.

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Come on Kevin you know good and well females are way more important then any hay bale ever will be in a boys eyes.
 
Around here we bale at night hard enough to get someone who wants to load hay in the daylight let alone all night
 

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