Baling soybeans?

[Anonymous-0]

I don't do any row cropping here in Middle Tennessee. My farm is rough and hilly, so I just grow hay and raise cattle. I used to rent and farm 120 acres of corn and beans in Minnesota, but that was quite a few years ago.

Anyway, a guy about 5 miles from me has just cut and baled about 200 acres of soybeans. The plants were still green with just a tinge of yellow starting to set in.

I've never seen that before. Are you familiar with baling soybeans?

Thanks for any info.

Tom in TN

 

[paul]

Heard of it, well actually I did 7 bales of it a couple weeks ago - sprayer skipped along the alfalfa field, & the foxtail took over....

The difficult part up here in MN is to get the stems to dry without the leaves turning to powder. The feed value is in the leaves, stems & pods stay damp & real hard to get it all right in a bale.

With beans going up in price, musta been a bad crop!

--->Paul

 

[Anonymous-0]

Paul,

That's one of the things I don't understand about it. He's been cutting the beans one day and baling them the next. The moisture content inside the big round bales must be very high. I would think that he would have mold everywhere. He had a small field of about 20 acres cut when it started to rain. It rained off and on for about three days. After one day of dry weather, he baled that field.

I was wondering if maybe he was going to take the bales somewhere and have them ground up and blown into a silo.

Strange.

Tom in TN

 

[Don-Wi]

If hes baling it that quick, he's gotta be wrapping them to make balage. No other way that would work.

No idea how good soybean balage would be either, we've never grown beans.

Donovan from Wisconsin

 

[TGIN]

I had about 30 cows get in a mature bean field a log time ago . They cant digest the bean and I had to get the vet out on about 15 or 20 of`em and tube them to let the gas out if I remember right . I`d want to be sure there was`nt much of a bean in the pod . Dad always talked about the time they baled some beans for the dairy cows and they licked up every bit of it .He said they did it when the pods were just setting on . They did have a time getting the stem dry .

 

[Keith Harpster]

Soybeans were originally a forage crop used for making hay. Then uses for the beans were discovered.

 

[Anonymous-0]

Hi Tom,Did you say that you were finally getting some rain? How did you make it hauling the hay back home? I have seen soy beans baled in square bales before my uncle did it some. They are harder to get dry and the bales are even then seem to be a lot heavier. I don't know if I would want to do it unless I just had too. That is just my opinion though I think they keep too much moisture too long before baling.

 

[Kent in NB]

There was an article in the Furrow, JD magazine a few years ago about a fella in Iowa, or somewhere..., That was doing soybean baleage. Their tests showed that they got a higher RFV value on the more mature crop than on the early stuff.Best to research this a bit more before trying it yourself.

 

[Anonymous-0]

In the 1940's, some variety of soy beans was our hay crop (I was just a kid then). Cut hay with sickle bar mower, let dry, raked & stacked on posts in the field. Then, after a curing time, either baled with a horse-powered baler or loaded loose hay onto hay rack on the wagon and packed into barn loft (one hot job).

 

[Anonymous-0]

I think I remember Cornell doing some trial with something they called "succotash" for dairy ensilage. They planted a mix of corn and soy beans together , a couple rows of corn then one of beans. Then they chopped it all in together and blew it into a silo. It never caught on to my knowledge.

 

[Anonymous-0]

My dad used to sow soybeans for hay about every year. We didn't bale them though. Wern't rich enought to have a baler. Had pitch forks though. Just throw the stuff in the hayloft. Best i rem cows and horses both ate it just fine.

 

[NEsota]

My dairy neighbor plants what he calls “mileage”. It is a forage crop that is a mixture of a tall milo, (sorghum) and tall soybeans. This is chopped while still green and put in vertical silos or blown into the horizontal white sock type plastic tubes. This has a lot of protein but I do not know the percentage range.

 

[Formerly PaMike]

They round bale them at high moisture and then wrap them. Makes some good feed from what I have heard. Kyhayman has done it a fair amount. He might post if hes around.

 

[kyhayman]

Sure have, been doing it since 1982. Got the idea from my dad, they did it back in the 50's. Why do it? For me, its an annual rotational crop that I can use to break up something else with exceptional weed control options, high food value, double cropping potential (lets me get 3 crops in two years) and low input costs.

For dry hay, they can be a b--->. Terribly hard to cure. Thats the main reason we didnt do many before 2000. With the stretch film round bale silage you just cant beat them.

Why use them for forage? For me, the deciding factor is harvest. I would have to own a combine or hire one. Right now its 35 and acre for combining, plus 1000 to get it to the farm. Trucking is extra. There are two combines in the whole county, this country is just to rolling with too many too small fields that are suitable for big equipment. Corn is the same issue though there are choppers and pickers available though any decent corn picker is at premium money. Chopping wise, thats a huge expense. With beans, I can rent a 10' drill for 7.50 an acre, I dont fertilize beans normally, my P levels are ok, and I hit the double crop small grain heavy with K. Sometimes I lead a small grain crop into them and sometimes I follow with a small grain crop. Depends on what there before.