Picking up square bales

[E.B. Haymakin']

After many years of not baling square hay, my son wants to put up square hay to sell. Still got the old NH 276 in the shed that should be good to go with a cleaning and greasing.

The problem is, good help is hard to come by when picking up the hay. The last we used the square baler we just pulled a wagon behind the baler. We weren't putting up but 1 wagon load to feed the goats and we would just back the wagon into the barn and unload as needed. That worked ok, but you need a lot of wagons to make that work efficient for much quantity.

Back when we put up a lot of squares I had a NH hay wagon. It worked fine for the most part, although it could take spells where it wanted to act up and good consistent bales were a must for a good stack. Would look at one of those again but the only barn we had that was tall enough to dump in got destroyed by a wind storm several years ago.

I've looked at various styles of accumulators and I'm on the fence about them. Still seems like a lot of work.

My cousin has a old Farris wheel type loader in the fence row he said I could get if it still worked. That seems like it would at least eliminate the ground crew.

Of course I would love a bale Band-it, but I don't think I could justify the cost.

Another thing that has crossed my mind is use the Farris wheel and have some sort of pallet racks on the wagon. Load the hay onto the racks and we have a big forklift with 8' forks to unload the racks and place into the shed. That would make handling a minimum, but I haven't ran the numbers on a cost to build said racks.

What do y'all say? What's the best method you found on handling square bales?

Back in the day when I was a teen we would run a crew of 6 in the field and 6 in the barn. We would put up 1,200 plus bales in about 3 hours after school and loved it. Nowadays I don't know how you would put together a crew that could do that. My brother put up some square hay a few years ago and asked me to drive the tractor. I got there and was a crew of 6 of the local high school football players. We were only putting up about 400 bales, but after about 150 those boys were spent. Ended up my brother got done baling and he called his wife to drive the tractor. It was me stacking (50 years old), my brother picking bales off the ground (46 years old), while the high school football team sat under a shade tree and watched us. Sad

Look up Rocky mountain bale sweep. It'll at least eliminate the pickup in field. Used with loader tractor or skidsteers

 

[olddavid]

A lot of bales we hauled were round bales done by a Roto Baler. Small round bales. People complained about hauling and stacking them but I actually preferred them to the square bales. Once you had end racks on the wagon or trailer they were a cinch. Stacking in the barn took a bit more thought but once that was figured out they were fine. For a while Dad used a "Hay-O-Vator" to pick up the bales in the field and just let them fall into the back of the truck bed with racks all the way around. It was one way one man could do it.

My bad, the "hay-0-vator" was a conveyor to move bales. I guess I have forgotten the name of the machine that picked up bales. It was ground driven.