Picking up square bales

[m16ty]

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

 

[buickanddeere]

Bale Baron | Marcrest Manufacturing Inc.

www.marcrestmfg.com

 

[m16ty]

Bale Baron | Marcrest Manufacturing Inc.

www.marcrestmfg.com

I bet that thing cost a fortune. I don't know if we could cash flow that will our small operation.

Edit- Just did a quick look on Tractor House. Cheapest one was $63,500, with most being well over $100K. That $63K one must be worn out. Too rich for my blood.

 

[Loosehandle]

Buy or build more wagons, I had 7 when doing sm. squares you don't want to monkey around unloading anything during the brief baleing windows here in Wisconsin. Always seemed like baleing on the ground just increased labor even more.

 

[joeysmith]

Here everyone that does squares in any quantity uses accumulators an grapples
One guy still has a monster but they dont put many up anymore

Was a guy that had several box trailers he was stacking an storing his in with a grapple

 

[rrlund]

If your son wants to put them up to sell, why is he making this your problem? If he has friends who can help him, and you want to help them under his direction, fine, but if it falls through, get out the round baler.

 

[buickanddeere]

Any decent large square bakers on the market ?
Are there any makes and models to avoid ?

 

[tom upton]

All you need is a good person on the wagon and lots of wagons. We have a small hay operation and my wife likes the exercise building loads You can buy old forage wagons fairly cheap, and its not that big of a deal to build racks. On a good year we might do 10k bales and I dont believe I would ever justify the cost of a bale baron or similiar. At one point we used a belt style thrower on one of the balers, built couple layers right to the front then build rest. Did this for several years, but wife got sick of eating chaff and convinced me to take the thrower off. I have tryed thrower wagons, but it sucks unloading them, you dont get a lot on a load, and makes a mess of some bales. Tell your son if he builds the loads you will drive the tractor!

 

[deere4040]

Kuhns MFG./Norden 10 bale accumulator here. Over 10,000 bales a year. 90% of hay sold out of field. We do not load customers.

 

[DanielW]

Just a few additional thoughts/points: How many bales are you thinking? 2000 a year would be a lot different than 20,000 a year. I know a guy with a Bale Baron. It's certainly the Cadillac of accumulator systems, but you don't have to get that fancy if you want an accumulator. The Tubeline/Brown style are popular, and a fraction of the price. I've been looking at getting one at our Northern farm for a while. Still haven't been able to justify, as we usually have enough help and are doing more and more rounds (both for our own cattle, and because it seems fewer and fewer folks want to buy squares). A used Tubeline/Brown drag-style accumulator and grapple combo seems to go for about $8-10k. Pretty cheap compared to a Bale Baron, but still too much for me to justify. One of the problems is trying to buy them in matching pairs. All manufacturers offer a few different configurations in their accumulators, and you want to make sure the grapple matches the pattern the accumulator makes.

There are also more basic grapple-accumulators combos that you drive around the field with after, let them collect in the accumulator on the loader one-by-one and pick up once full. A little slower, but those style of grapple-accumulators seem readily available for $4k or so. With either style, you have to have a suitably large loader/skid-steer. Even though it may only be 12 or so bales (which is less than half the amount of hay of most round bales), the added weight of the grapple and the load being further out front means you have to have a reasonably large loader. At our Southern farm, even though we have three old loaders that all handle round bales just fine, I think the backhoe would be the only unit large enough to handle a square bale grapple. And you also have to have smooth fields for that drag/push style accumulator.

One of the reasons I haven't bought an accumulator/grapple yet for our Northern farm (apart from me being a broke cheapskate) is because they really make most sense if you can use them to unload. With all our squares going into old bank barns, the barns just aren't set up to drive around in and unload with a grapple. So we'd only get half the advantage of the accumulator.

At our Southern farm I use the same system as Tom - two guys working, and a pile of wagons in reserve. I do have an old Agratec bale stooker (the style that makes the pyramid-shaped stacks of 6 bales) and I built a set of forks to handle two stacks (12 bales) at a time. In theory, I can bale into stooks, use the loader to pick up and dump a couple stooks on the wagon at a time, then stop after every few stooks to build the load. But usually my brother or father are around to run the tractor while I build/load, so I don't bother with it the stooker. And even if I don't have help, it's really not that much faster to use the stooker than it is to just bale directly onto the field and go around after with a wagon and pick up/build the load myself. At that farm, I also have enough storage space in the pole barn for several wagons - enough to handle all the squares I'll do there in a year. I can store the hay on the same wagons I load onto. Old wagon running gears are commonly found for $300 or less. And because I have a sawmill (and scrapyard around the corner where I can get cheap used truck tires), it's pretty cheap/easy for me to build a wagon. I can stack/store on the wagons and just block up the tires if they're going to be stored for some time. If you have lots of room where you can store wagons, this might be an option to consider. As Tom noted, it doesn't cost much to build a wagon rack. For years I didn't even have a concrete pad in the pole barn: It was cheaper to buy/build a wagon to store the hay and keep it off the ground than it was for the equivalent concrete cost to cover the same floorspace as a wagon. The only reason there's a pad in there now is because I convinced my wife to have our wedding reception in there, and to spend the money we saved not renting a venue on putting a pad down for the reception (I wish I still had those powers of convincing...).

If I were you, I think the fenceline bale loader and a few old wagons is how I'd start out.

Also, make sure you can sell the squares. $6 - $7 per bale sounds great. But only if you can find somewhere to sell. I can't believe how much the market for small squares has dropped out around me. I'm considering not even doing small squares this year at our Southern farm. Even the folks with one or two horses or a few goats seem to prefer rounds anymore - they've all bought 25 HP compact Mahindras or Kiotis and prefer to use them to handle one round every couple weeks rather than actually spend any time with their pets. I find it a little stupefying to watch, actually: They all insist on only the best quality hay. Which I'm totally fine with (although very few of them actually know what makes good hay). But then they'll dump a 5' round bale in an open feeder to feed their one horse and a goat. And it'll sit in that feeder for a week or two as the animals pick away. After only a couple days, it's seen so much snow/rain/wind and the animal(s) have picked around and knocked all the leaves off, so for most of the time they're eating it, it has about the same feed value as rotten straw. Fine by me if they want to spend top dollar on top quality hay, but I sure don't understand why they bother.

 

[Absent Minded Farmer]

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

I know you had one, but hem older NH Stackliners are cheap these days. You can get a 1010 or 1038 with the single unload & drop them right on the elevator.

You'd need that 276 to kick out some dense bricks though.

Mike

 

[m16ty]

I know you had one, but hem older NH Stackliners are cheap these days. You can get a 1010 or 1038 with the single unload & drop them right on the elevator.

You'd need that 276 to kick out some dense bricks though.

Mike

A 1010 is what I had. Wish I had kept it, but it was taking up shed space and I wasn’t planning on doing square bales anymore. Never did use the single bale unload. Found it was quicker to just dump the load right at the elevator and let the guys put the hay in the barn while I was gone after another load.

 

[m16ty]

Just a few additional thoughts/points: How many bales are you thinking? 2000 a year would be a lot different than 20,000 a year. I know a guy with a Bale Baron. It's certainly the Cadillac of accumulator systems, but you don't have to get that fancy if you want an accumulator. The Tubeline/Brown style are popular, and a fraction of the price. I've been looking at getting one at our Northern farm for a while. Still haven't been able to justify, as we usually have enough help and are doing more and more rounds (both for our own cattle, and because it seems fewer and fewer folks want to buy squares). A used Tubeline/Brown drag-style accumulator and grapple combo seems to go for about $8-10k. Pretty cheap compared to a Bale Baron, but still too much for me to justify. One of the problems is trying to buy them in matching pairs. All manufacturers offer a few different configurations in their accumulators, and you want to make sure the grapple matches the pattern the accumulator makes.

There are also more basic grapple-accumulators combos that you drive around the field with after, let them collect in the accumulator on the loader one-by-one and pick up once full. A little slower, but those style of grapple-accumulators seem readily available for $4k or so. With either style, you have to have a suitably large loader/skid-steer. Even though it may only be 12 or so bales (which is less than half the amount of hay of most round bales), the added weight of the grapple and the load being further out front means you have to have a reasonably large loader. At our Southern farm, even though we have three old loaders that all handle round bales just fine, I think the backhoe would be the only unit large enough to handle a square bale grapple. And you also have to have smooth fields for that drag/push style accumulator.

One of the reasons I haven't bought an accumulator/grapple yet for our Northern farm (apart from me being a broke cheapskate) is because they really make most sense if you can use them to unload. With all our squares going into old bank barns, the barns just aren't set up to drive around in and unload with a grapple. So we'd only get half the advantage of the accumulator.

At our Southern farm I use the same system as Tom - two guys working, and a pile of wagons in reserve. I do have an old Agratec bale stooker (the style that makes the pyramid-shaped stacks of 6 bales) and I built a set of forks to handle two stacks (12 bales) at a time. In theory, I can bale into stooks, use the loader to pick up and dump a couple stooks on the wagon at a time, then stop after every few stooks to build the load. But usually my brother or father are around to run the tractor while I build/load, so I don't bother with it the stooker. And even if I don't have help, it's really not that much faster to use the stooker than it is to just bale directly onto the field and go around after with a wagon and pick up/build the load myself. At that farm, I also have enough storage space in the pole barn for several wagons - enough to handle all the squares I'll do there in a year. I can store the hay on the same wagons I load onto. Old wagon running gears are commonly found for $300 or less. And because I have a sawmill (and scrapyard around the corner where I can get cheap used truck tires), it's pretty cheap/easy for me to build a wagon. I can stack/store on the wagons and just block up the tires if they're going to be stored for some time. If you have lots of room where you can store wagons, this might be an option to consider. As Tom noted, it doesn't cost much to build a wagon rack. For years I didn't even have a concrete pad in the pole barn: It was cheaper to buy/build a wagon to store the hay and keep it off the ground than it was for the equivalent concrete cost to cover the same floorspace as a wagon. The only reason there's a pad in there now is because I convinced my wife to have our wedding reception in there, and to spend the money we saved not renting a venue on putting a pad down for the reception (I wish I still had those powers of convincing...).

If I were you, I think the fenceline bale loader and a few old wagons is how I'd start out.

Also, make sure you can sell the squares. $6 - $7 per bale sounds great. But only if you can find somewhere to sell. I can't believe how much the market for small squares has dropped out around me. I'm considering not even doing small squares this year at our Southern farm. Even the folks with one or two horses or a few goats seem to prefer rounds anymore - they've all bought 25 HP compact Mahindras or Kiotis and prefer to use them to handle one round every couple weeks rather than actually spend any time with their pets. I find it a little stupefying to watch, actually: They all insist on only the best quality hay. Which I'm totally fine with (although very few of them actually know what makes good hay). But then they'll dump a 5' round bale in an open feeder to feed their one horse and a goat. And it'll sit in that feeder for a week or two as the animals pick away. After only a couple days, it's seen so much snow/rain/wind and the animal(s) have picked around and knocked all the leaves off, so for most of the time they're eating it, it has about the same feed value as rotten straw. Fine by me if they want to spend top dollar on top quality hay, but I sure don't understand why they bother.

Planning on starting with about $3k bales a year. The main issue we have around here is weather, more often than not we are trying to get the bales out of the field to beat the rain. For the first cutting especially, the window is pretty tight to get the hay cut, dried down, baled, and put up without it getting wet.

Square bale market is still prettt strong around here. It’s hard to get $40 a roll, but can sell all the squares you can bale at $7 a bale.

There is one local guy that has an interesting setup. He rolls all his hay and has a stationary square baler setup in a shed. Never looked at his operation but he has some sort of setup where he can put a roll onto an unroller and it feeds into the stationary square baler. He just bales the squares as they are ordered. This allows him to roll and get the hay out into the dry in a timely fashion and then make square bales at his leisure. I could see this working for grass hay, but bet the leaf loss would be a lot with other hay.

 

[DanielW]

... I could see this working for grass hay, but bet the leaf loss would be a lot with other hay.

I've never had nor used a setup like that, but they've been discussed on here several times and I think you've hit it bang on: The general consensus seems to be that they're great for straw, ok for grassy hay, but with any sort of quality legume you'll just end up with a bunch of stems at the end of the day.

I do remember reading once poster saying re-baling into squares was great to improve colour: The outer layer of any bale fades/bleaches over time. With round bales, the ratio of volume to surface area is so great that there's only a small percentage of the hay that's had the colour fade. When you rebale, the outer layer that's lost its colour is 'diluted' with all the internal hay that's still maintained its green. So if you can re-bale as-needed and not have it in squares for too long, you'll always have good colour in your squares.

Of course, that means almost nothing for feed value. But if your customers are the type of goofy horse folks that many of mine are, all they care about is colour.

 

[m16ty]

I've never had nor used a setup like that, but they've been discussed on here several times and I think you've hit it bang on: The general consensus seems to be that they're great for straw, ok for grassy hay, but with any sort of quality legume you'll just end up with a bunch of stems at the end of the day.

I do remember reading once poster saying re-baling into squares was great to improve colour: The outer layer of any bale fades/bleaches over time. With round bales, the ratio of volume to surface area is so great that there's only a small percentage of the hay that's had the colour fade. When you rebale, the outer layer that's lost its colour is 'diluted' with all the internal hay that's still maintained its green. So if you can re-bale as-needed and not have it in squares for too long, you'll always have good colour in your squares.

Of course, that means almost nothing for feed value. But if your customers are the type of goofy horse folks that many of mine are, all they care about is colour.

Yes, some horse people can be a problem. Most don’t have a clue.

 

[olddavid]

Back in the 60s my two brothers and I hired out to a farmer to haul hay for 2 cents a bale each. Others paid us 3 cents but the bulk of it was for the first farmer. We were just a 3 man crew and we hauled over 20K bales that summer. No lifts we just picked them up in the field. No barn crew either. We did it all. We did have an elevator to lift them into the loft. If you could find a couple of young men who didn't mind working that would probably be simplest. I don't know what you'd have to pay them. I'm almost 78 and I think I could still do it but I'm not going to. It's hard dirty work.

 

[Wdj]

I've never had nor used a setup like that, but they've been discussed on here several times and I think you've hit it bang on: The general consensus seems to be that they're great for straw, ok for grassy hay, but with any sort of quality legume you'll just end up with a bunch of stems at the end of the day.

I do remember reading once poster saying re-baling into squares was great to improve colour: The outer layer of any bale fades/bleaches over time. With round bales, the ratio of volume to surface area is so great that there's only a small percentage of the hay that's had the colour fade. When you rebale, the outer layer that's lost its colour is 'diluted' with all the internal hay that's still maintained its green. So if you can re-bale as-needed and not have it in squares for too long, you'll always have good colour in your squares.

Of course, that means almost nothing for feed value. But if your customers are the type of goofy horse folks that many of mine are, all they care about is colour.daw

Hmm... Used to be a product called Greenzit to spray on Christmas trees with poor color. And a local sawmill sprayed red dye on hemlock studs so buyers back east would think it was Douglas fir. Makes you wonder... Nah ... Better not.

 

[m16ty]

Back in the 60s my two brothers and I hired out to a farmer to haul hay for 2 cents a bale each. Others paid us 3 cents but the bulk of it was for the first farmer. We were just a 3 man crew and we hauled over 20K bales that summer. No lifts we just picked them up in the field. No barn crew either. We did it all. We did have an elevator to lift them into the loft. If you could find a couple of young men who didn't mind working that would probably be simplest. I don't know what you'd have to pay them. I'm almost 78 and I think I could still do it but I'm not going to. It's hard dirty work.

In my experience you can’t get kids to pickup hay these days for any amount of money. If you do find some make sure you bring lunch to the field, if you let them leave they won’t come back.

 

[paul]

Makes me feel good at my age to get 100 bales stacked now with only 2 breaks for air. If the young kids wear out that fast.

Bale basket. Or 2 or 3. One person baling, one or two people stacking at the barn. Takes a tall shed to back in and dump, and takes people willing and able to pick up a pile if bales and stack, but it works. Doesn’t like very dry slippery straw/ hay and lots of corners, otherwise a good system I use.

Bale thrower and a bunch of thrower racks, similar to above. Can be a bit messy and picking up the missed bales in the field and takes some labor unpacking the racks, maybe more labor than the baskets.

Bale accumulator (drops 4 or 8 or so bales in a tight group) and loader grapple and hay racks sized to stack layers of bales on. A second grapple or a shorter drive back to the barn to unload into stacks at the building site. Then can grapple back out when you sell, don’t ever need to handle many bales by hand.

Get a round baler. I liked this option as well, life got simpler! round bale the poorer hay, small square the prime stuff.

Paul

 

[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.