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Post by DEKE on May 9, 2019 2:56:07 GMT
I stopped by the local auction yesterday to see what would be available Friday. Looks like someone is getting out of the hay making biz because it is unusual to have so much of that type equipment for sale. There was lots of stuff I'm not interested in like big round balers, hay wagons, and some sort of mechanized wagon that I didn't understand at all, but had the name "Hay Master" on the side.
With our increase in critter population, I need a hay supply. I have about 10 acres here and 30 acres at the tree farm a few miles away where I could make hay. That would be more than enough for my needs. Square bales would make my feeding easier and more efficient than round bales.
Stuff I am interested in:
New Holland 565 square baler. It looks practically new. Not sure of the year.
There are several rakes, the kind with eight multi-tined wheels that are powered by ground contact and put the hay in rows. The wheels rotated freely. They had been painted so no manufacturer markings were evident.
They had a tedder. Is this something I really need?
There was one Massey DM360 disc cutter mower. It looks to be in fairly rough shape. No idea how much work would be beeded to get it working.
Is there any other equipment I would need? I have a flat bed to collect the bales. I've gotten comp prices from several websites on all the equipment except the mower.
Any advice? Anything I should be looking for? I've made hay as a teen, but that meant I was the grunt taking bales off the baler shoot and stacking them on the trailer and then in the barn.
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Post by gob on May 9, 2019 10:08:39 GMT
How much hay could you buy just for the price of the equipment? Then the fuel and maintenance of upkeep every year? Is your time worth anything, or will you be doing it just for the fun of it? Do you have the help ready available when it is time to do hay?
Hay tedder is used for really thick hay or hay that got rained on. Sooner or later you would need a tedder. My luck, first time I cut.
We bred 185 ewes last year, I rolled zero bales. I normally buy all my hay. I will be have someone bale about 50 acres of mine this year. I will not be buying hay equipment till I can't find hay or someone to bale it for me. Just can't justify the investment.
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Post by Jolly on May 9, 2019 11:14:20 GMT
Most folks down here feed round bales, but most people are feeding cattle. Most of the folks feeding square bales are feeding horses. Some people will put the time and money into their hayfields to raise Bermuda and the horse people will pay an upcharge for it. Not much alfalfa, but that's all square bales. In our climate, no matter what the grass, a good hayman will get three cuttings a year.
But cutting hay, and especially hauling square bales is hard work. And getting harder to find help. When I was a lad, we would load and unload for five cents a square bales. Now, hard to find a high school kid at $10/hr.
Dumb thought...Instead of buying the equipment and incurring the costs of fertilizer, labor and fuel, could you find somebody to cut those 40 acres on shares? Or to pay you to lease the fields as hayfields, if the grass is particularly good?
If not, and you really do want to bale your own hay, maybe check out the horse folks around you. Might could make a little money and sell it in the field.
Lastly, if you wind up with more hay than you need, do you have a way to store it?
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Post by DEKE on May 9, 2019 15:44:15 GMT
How much hay could you buy just for the price of the equipment? Then the fuel and maintenance of upkeep every year? Is your time worth anything, or will you be doing it just for the fun of it? Do you have the help ready available when it is time to do hay? Hay tedder is used for really thick hay or hay that got rained on. Sooner or later you would need a tedder. My luck, first time I cut. We bred 185 ewes last year, I rolled zero bales. I normally buy all my hay. I will be have someone bale about 50 acres of mine this year. I will not be buying hay equipment till I can't find hay or someone to bale it for me. Just can't justify the investment.
All good points, gob. I really can't make the financial case for the deal. It's just something we want to be able to do. We went from buying about 15 big round bales the winter of 18 to 40 bales this winter. We've added animals and are over our carrying capacity unless we make some hay.
Locally, no one does square bales that we can find. They sell for $8 and it is only marginal quality as horse hay. The feed stores have $15 to $25 square bales but that is stuff we've never bought. I buy round bales for $45 but they have about 30% waste due to trampling and undesirable weeds.
We did have a haymaker come in our first year and bale for a 50/50 share. But that was when we could give him 30 acres of clear pasture to work. Now we have it chopped up in individual pastures which make managing the critters and forage a breeze.
Having our own equipment would allow us to 5 acres at a time without a huge time commitment and we could work around the weather as needed. The other advantage is the haymaker wanted to make lots of hay and insisted we wait until it was tall and too stemy for good quality. The guys who do their own hay nearby will get 4 or 5 cuttings per year because they bale young, tender grass.
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Post by DEKE on May 9, 2019 15:46:41 GMT
Jolly, yes, we have lots of storage space.
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Post by Jolly on May 9, 2019 18:14:46 GMT
Just a dumb thought (I specialize in those)...Alfalfa brings top dollar and is usually sold in square bales. Some people even sell mini-square bales (I have no earthly idea how they do it) for rabbits and such.
Since your fields are small and horse hay is hard to find, maybe one field of alfalfa and a couple of fields of what the horse people would buy?
I'm just thinking out loud...
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Post by DEKE on May 9, 2019 18:28:43 GMT
a good thought, but alfalfa does not grow here. I don't know if it is the heat or the sand. People who feed alfalfa pay in the range of $25 a bale. At my local feed store they had bought a semi load from Colorado.
In the winter, our area hosts a few thousand extra horses for a 3 month long hunter jumper event as well as a few thousand race horses. The majority of Kentucky Derby horses spend the winter here, I think I heard 16 of this year's racers had wintered here. These super spoiled and pampered horses drive up the price of alfalfa especially but also any quality square bales.
Our local alfalfa replacement is peanut hay. It is a tropical relative of peanuts, a legume, and makes for really high nutritious, high protein feed. But it doesn't bale real well and the fields require a complete round up stripping, then plant peanut runners, wait three years while you wage war on any weeds, and then you have a great field for maybe 10 years and you start all over. I don't have the patience for that.
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Post by Ellendra on May 9, 2019 18:38:27 GMT
Some people even sell mini-square bales (I have no earthly idea how they do it) for rabbits and such. If you do a search on "mini square baler", you should get a ton of hits for different baling machines. Some home-built, some made by the "big boys". I have trouble lifting a normal-sized bale, so I've been noodling over making one that bales a medium-sized square bale. Big enough to be worth lifting, but small enough I don't hurt myself. It would be good to have something like that for straw, too, since I'd end up with a lot of that from my grain crops.
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Post by Ozarks Tom on May 9, 2019 22:42:48 GMT
DEKE, $25/bale for alfalfa?! I pay $7.50 delivered here. You always wanted to visit the Ozarks, didn't you? We went to Tiff this year, the sheep left too much waste with alfalfa.
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Post by gob on May 10, 2019 10:59:30 GMT
We can get alfalfa bales for under $150, they are 3' x 3' x 7' bales. Most of them come from out west someplace. Might check into something like that if you buy a lot of alfalfa. Big square bales store real easy also.
We have thought about getting hay equipment in the past just do to the fact of being able to do the hay when we needed it done. The problem we have found with getting someone to cut hay for you is they all have hay they cut for themselves. This means theirs comes first. You have to wait till all their fields are done. Last year the weather played into this also. Our hay was cut so late the protein levels tanked. We have had trouble with nutrition all winter. Being able to cut the hay when it needed to be cut is the only reason for us to buy the equipment. We rolled 278 rolls last year. We will have someone cut and roll ours this year(@ $17 per roll) getting about 100 rolls, leaving us to buy the balance of a 100 rolls (@ $38.50 delivered).
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Post by Jolly on May 10, 2019 11:14:50 GMT
Speaking of the big square bales...Is that going to be the new standard? I was recently talking to a man that lives in Grant Parish and runs a pretty good size hay operation with his daughter. An older guy, he was really fired up about his big square bales equipment he had started using last year.
Said it stacked and worked easier, and let him get more out of the field per truckload.
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Post by DEKE on May 10, 2019 12:56:33 GMT
When I was driving thru Montana in 2017 I saw a lot of big squares being loaded out of the fields. Unfortunately I didn't get to see the balers making them.
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2019 13:00:56 GMT
Big squares are cheaper per ton, but we get more wastage. Additionally, they are cumbersome and difficult to feed out.
We use "small" squares, but even at that, Nick has to climb into the hayloft and get them down for me, as I cannot handle weight over 10, maybe 20 pounds. A good square weighs around 70, on average.
I would prefer to do our own hay, but the land we could use for it doesn't lend itself readily to large equipment. We'd actually have to scythe, then put up ricks.
We have been incredibly blessed in our hay guy, who grows non-GMO alfalfa/clover, and sells it to us for a good price if we pick it up in the field. But if we didn't have him, say, in a grid-down situation, we would have to reduce our stock numbers dramatically. A lot of folk had to do just that with the recent drought.
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2019 13:02:56 GMT
DEKE, have you looked into peanut hay? A couple of goat friends in Florida were talking about it a year or two ago, said that the goats really liked it, and they thrived on it.
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Post by DEKE on May 10, 2019 13:15:39 GMT
DEKE , have you looked into peanut hay? A couple of goat friends in Florida were talking about it a year or two ago, said that the goats really liked it, and they thrived on it.
You missed this in an earlier msg
"Our local alfalfa replacement is peanut hay. It is a tropical relative of peanuts, a legume, and makes for really high nutritious, high protein feed. But it doesn't bale real well and the fields require a complete round up stripping, then plant peanut runners, wait three years while you wage war on any weeds, and then you have a great field for maybe 10 years and you start all over. I don't have the patience for that."
Another advantage of peanut hay is that it is one of the best soil builders out there. The root mats can be a couple of inches thick after a few years and they trap carbon and nutrients to deepen the top soil. It's good stuff. I just lack patience.
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