Haying with 26 HP or less.

[zzvyb6]

I first started haying with a 22 hp Yanmar (not even live or 2 stage pto). I easily ran a NH 479 mower conditioner, a NH 55 rake (heck, I even pulled this with my Yamaha 4 wheeler), and a JD 14T baler. It was no big deal. Tractor never strained because the equipment doesn't really take much power if you run at an appropriate ground speed and you do maintenance on the stuff. Yep, there will be deny-ers, but they never actually tried it.

My only question is "What have you got to loose ?" Do you actually think you are going to break or fail something ? I see a lot of comments about the bailer bucking, chucking and (fill in the blank). This is a result of dull cutoff knives, worn out pto shafts, improper hitch setup leading to non-constant driveline rpm, worn out drawbar holes and pins, broken shear pins (Not even connected !!!), wrong rpm and low tractor weight. I started off helping a local dairy farmer and his 336 baler lurched like a pigeon behind a JD 4430. Yep, setup all wrong, 1/2" hitch pin bolt in a 1-1/4" drawbar, dull knives, and trying to run 12 mph.

I'm still running the same equipment now with a 35 HP JD 1070. My Youtube videos show the tractor running very smoothly at a constant rpm without a single lurch after over 25 years on the same machinery. Someone tell me what I'm doing wrong ! I do 10 -15 acres of hay and sell out before the end of the year. Some of my hills in the back are quite steep.

BTW: I now use a NH 1012 stack wagon to pickup and unload 56 to 64 bales at a time. That's 1 pickup load to my buyers and almost $200 at a shot. Either you go and buy old euipment and put some new parts into it, or buy all new for $60k. It's YOUR money ! (Might want to add air conditioning to the cab of that new 400hp tractor they will say you need).

 

[spoofrider]

What would you consider to be the appropriate ground speed.

 

[Turbys_1700]

How much is your budget? You can find decent used square balers around here for 1K. Anything less and they are junk. Make sure it has been in the shed out of the elements. Get something with good parts support. My experience is limited to New Holland but Deere is good also. Rol-A-Bar New Holland rakes go for a little more in the $1500 to $2500 range around here. You can get used disc mowers in the $1500 to $2500 range but maintenance and upkeep is important. You may want to opt for a newer style drum mower but you will then you will probably need to add a Tedder. Once all of that is settled you will need a larger framed and heavier tractor. Others have mentioned a MF 135, or Ford in the 3000 range. Get live PTO and power steering if possible. On top of that you will need a wagon. If you are a one man operation figure a day to cut, a day to ted, and day to rake, and a day to bale. Then you have to stack and load.

It can be done but it will take some $$$ and some time on your part. I don't know your needs but if you are paying $5 a bale and go through 500 bales a year you can do the math. Horse hay has to be clean and weed free high quality. We never had horses so horse quality hay was not needed. We fed our beef cattle mostly grass and clover. We hayed Sudex when we switched over to round bales.

I know that it is a lot to consider and you will get good advise on here concerning your options. Keep us updated on your progress.

These are my opinions and are based on my experience. Other have valid opinions also.

 

[Egon]

The 26 HP will run a sickle bar mower and hay rake with no problems. The baling could be done by adding an engine to the baler. Your big trouble comes when you have to gather and stack bales by yourself. A revised loader might make it possible to pick up maybe four bales for one load.

Of course for gathering bales a flat top bale wagon pulled by two horses and yourself on the pitch fork would work for one man operation. Doesn’t need a driver while loading.

 

[Hiptfarms]

Spoofrider, That makes good sense. I'm basically a one woman show myself. I do get help when it's time to pick up the bales but I do all the cutting, raking, and baling myself. Injured my knee severely last year and hit 50 this year. I'm definitely not taking on any more livestock to care for at this point in my life. Except a few chickens. No more crazy horses. When these die off I'm selling the hay equipment and saying adios to heaving bales around.

Good luck with your haying endeavors.

 

[rankrank1]

Yes, you can hay with 26 hp if you pick the right equipment. Unless I missed it you never said how many acres you would be doing?

If the acres is small then going with all new equipment is gonna be a very costly endeavor as you will simply never recoup the cost of that new equipment haying a few acres only. Frankly you will be literally paying to hay and working for free to boot on top of that. But hay (pun intended) if you are wealthy and can afford the expensive business proposition of buying all new that will never make any money then go for it. Lots of people have expensive hobbys. If the acres is large then why try to do it with only 26 hp?


For me, I piddle on on 4.5 to 6 acres of hay each year for over a decade now. I literally got my start using a Kubota L285 (only about 23 hp at 540 PTO rpm) but I use all cheap junk equipment that was carefully selected to work with the hp I had and also for its literal scrap iron prices I paid to purchase each and every piece. In other words, I have almost no money invested in purchasing the equipment but do have some sweat equity in keeping the ole junk workable. I enjoy tinkering with old antiques but this sort of thing is not for everyone as most of my stuff is 50 to 60 years old. I am not really making any money on my adventure either as what little money I do usually make I end up buying another hobby piece of antique iron. Regardless, I certainly am not pulling money out of my household budget or my retirement investments for the privilige of making hay. In other words, I make the hobby pay for itself (and yet I still work for free).

Lastly, If you think small square bales is going to be an easy money maker then you are in for a rude awakening. It is going to be nothing like sitting with one's butt firmly planted in the tractor seat and counting the money spitting out the back of the baler. It is very labor intensive. Sure there is expensive equipment than can be purchased to aide with bale handling but that only adds to the cost to do it - making the possibility of making money even more remote on just a few acres


I enjoy the physical workout of bale handling. That said, I would be in trouble without my wife as a sometimes tractor operator. She can rake and tedd the hay while I am at work at my real job. Often put her to baling while I pick up bales with me as the sole source of manpower too. There simply not enough money in the adventure to hire added help even if willing help could be found. Each and every haying is a 4 to 5 day window of commitment where every moment you are not working your real job or sleeping is dedicated to getting the hay in the barn. (in other words during every hay window do not plan on going out to dinner, seeing movies, visiting friends, going to kids or grand kids events etc.). Haying is a both rewarding from a sense of accomplishment yet masochistic!

 

[countrybumpkin]

I too was curios on just how many acres and how much hay your needing. That would be a big deciding factor , specially when you say your doing this by your self and working full time.

 

[CPTKILLER]

This could be done with a small tractor but the ROI and price of hay makes this an iffy investment.

 

[Gary Fowler]

Picking up and stacking the small rectangular bales is really for young guys. I don't know if you can find any teens to do that now. A couple of my buddies (brothers) and I used to haul hay for spending money for $.10 per bale hauled and stacked in a barn when we were teens. My brothers Dad had a GMC truck with 4 speed manual transmission that we used to pull a 40 foot long flat bed wagon (actually a cotton hauler with the sides removed). We could put the old truck in 1st (granny gear) and it would crawl along at an idle while one person was on the wagon stacking and the other two of us loaded. One of the ground crew would occasionally have to get in the truck to straighten the steering but we managed to do it and load out a couple hundred bales of hay on the wagon and about 60-70 on the pickup (we could get two sections of 6 bales in the bottom plus 4 on the tailgate for total of 16 on the bottom layer and add a couple more on the subsequent layers till it got so tall we could no longer throw them up (usually about 7 layers high). We would load that truck till the bumper was almost dragging the ground and all we could put on the trailer and then head to the barn to unload.

No way could I do that today, not even 2 layers high, I would be lucky if I could get a 50-60 lb. bale over the edge of a truck bed now, and following the truck loading was a jogging from bale to bale to get there.

Man they say those were the good ole days.

As for haying now, I prefer to have someone use a round baler to bale our hay for $25 per bale and then use a tractor to haul and stack it while sitting in an air conditioned cab.

 

[zzvyb6]

What would you consider to be the appropriate ground speed.

I have 3 ranges and 3 speeds, so that means 2nd range and 1st gear. Its a very fast walk. I can look up the speed in the manual. When I double windrow, I go back to 1st range and 3rd gear. That's slightly lower in case there is a large clump where I turn the rake around.

See if you can gauge the speed from here. Hay Baling 214 - YouTube

Mowing is a LOT faster: 2813 2411 - YouTube

 

[quicksandfarmer]

What would you consider to be the appropriate ground speed.

I bale at about 1 mph. I set the engine speed so that the baler is doing one plunge per second and drive in my lowest gear. Even at that speed I sometimes have to stop and let the baler digest a big lump or I run the risk of breaking a shear bolt. With a nice windrow I get a bale every 15 seconds, 15 plunges and 15 flakes. I figure on about 5,000 lbs per acre, my bales are about 40 lbs and I rake 12 feet into a windrow, so 240 bales per hour calculates out to 1.32 mph. For me the limiting factor is how much hay the baler can swallow so going faster wouldn't save any time, I'd just have to do smaller windrows. Mowing and raking I go as fast as I can and still stay in my seat, which is about 6 mph on my rough fields. If the grass is really thick I might have to slow down a bit.

This is with a Deere 24T baler, a wheel rake and a 4' drum mower.

 

[spoofrider]

Thanks for the breakdown.

 

[Turbys_1700]

Picking up and stacking the small rectangular bales is really for young guys. I don't know if you can find any teens to do that now. A couple of my buddies (brothers) and I used to haul hay for spending money for $.10 per bale hauled and stacked in a barn when we were teens. My brothers Dad had a GMC truck with 4 speed manual transmission that we used to pull a 40 foot long flat bed wagon (actually a cotton hauler with the sides removed). We could put the old truck in 1st (granny gear) and it would crawl along at an idle while one person was on the wagon stacking and the other two of us loaded. One of the ground crew would occasionally have to get in the truck to straighten the steering but we managed to do it and load out a couple hundred bales of hay on the wagon and about 60-70 on the pickup (we could get two sections of 6 bales in the bottom plus 4 on the tailgate for total of 16 on the bottom layer and add a couple more on the subsequent layers till it got so tall we could no longer throw them up (usually about 7 layers high). We would load that truck till the bumper was almost dragging the ground and all we could put on the trailer and then head to the barn to unload.

No way could I do that today, not even 2 layers high, I would be lucky if I could get a 50-60 lb. bale over the edge of a truck bed now, and following the truck loading was a jogging from bale to bale to get there.

Man they say those were the good ole days.

As for haying now, I prefer to have someone use a round baler to bale our hay for $25 per bale and then use a tractor to haul and stack it while sitting in an air conditioned cab.

It's almost verbatim my same childhood and teen years Gary. My father and grandfather would pay us around $1 per hour. Usually just gave us $5 a day to haul hay. Those were the good old days.

 

[scons]

To give some input, we started haying ourselves for our 2 horses 2 years ago. Bought a old mower, wheel rake, ans an old baler. The reason why we started was simple, with bought hay you never know what you are feeding, period. It might look good but you just don't know what is in it (nutritional wise). We used to buy big bales 500-600 kgs (1100-1300lbs). Sometimes it was reasonable, sometimes the amount of hay that goes in in the front, is the same amount that leaves at the end, then something is not right. The mower is still going strong, but it needs to get some minor maintenance this spring (belts, knives, oil), the wheel rake got a set of new teeth last summer, the baler was out after the first run we used it. There was a knotter issue we could not get right (timing was off). To make a long story short, propably in time we could have found a guy who could fix this, but an estimation of labour, materials ended up higher then the machine was worth anyway. Most farmers do not get rid of a baler when it is still in good shape. Because of the (very) small surface we do we took a shot a the small round baler (mentioned in a post above) and so far we are happy with it. No it is not as fast as bigger balers, maybe it will not last as long but you get what you pay for. We have bought it for around 5700 usd, new. We baled over 100 bales in 1 run with it last summer (1st cut) and over 80 bales the summer before (2nd cut). No issues so far. It is really small and does take little space to store. Grass is at least knee high when cut. And the whole process is fun to also, don't forget that. So it is up to you what you want to spend and/or if you are handy enough to get fixes done yourself.

 

[spoofrider]

Yeah that's the same problem down here. You are always buying your hay from a 3rd party. There's not that much hay being grown locally so they truck most of and in from other areas.

 

[prof fate]

Yeah that's the same problem down here. You are always buying your hay from a 3rd party. There's not that much hay being grown locally so they truck most of and in from other areas.

Why?

Generally if that's true then there's no way to grow it profitably where yo are - trucking it in is pricey. Seems there is a market...without the trucking costs it should be profitable...so is there something else that is more profitable?

 

[spoofrider]

Why?

Generally if that's true then there's no way to grow it profitably where yo are - trucking it in is pricey. Seems there is a market...without the trucking costs it should be profitable...so is there something else that is more profitable?

The land around here cost too much to using it for a hay field.

 

[flusher]

Here's a guy running a small square baler like a Deere 14T with a Farmall Super A. The baling starts at the 5 minute 40 second mark in the video.

FARMALL Super A - YouTube


Good luck

 

[Tx Jim]

For grins years back I pulled a JD 214 baler with my JD BO(16 HP) baling hay with no problems.

 

[HarryVanderpool]

What would you consider to be the appropriate ground speed.

Balers have a range of charges per bale that should be observed.
For the JD 24T the manual suggests 12 - 19 charges per bale.
So, with the tractor set at 540rpm one would chose the gear that would make bales at that rate.
Windrow size often varies so gears will change within field at times.
I count strokes between knots tied at times and shoot for 16 charges per bale.
I run as high as 4th gear and as low as 1st, sometimes stopping for clumps.

The small tractor wile bale just fine if the operator thinks about "smoothness'.
For fun, we baled our front field with a Ford 9N one year.
THE WRONG tractor for the job due to tall gears and non-live pto.
But as far as power goes it worked just fine at 23 hp.