Changed my whole operation

[redman135]

4570man, lifestyle people and the horse set like conventional bales as they are man/woman portable and stack easily. Also the money was spent buying the property.
Large squares require expensive machinery to handle them, and often for only a few bales.

My boss sell to this demographic and they often don't have more space than 5-8 bales anyway.

 

[WM75Guy]

I don’t know why more people don’t use the big squares. Small square bales should be obsolete.

We only have 2 horses now. We stack small squares in an empty stall so they are out of the weather and easy to get to for feeding. We cannot do that with large squares or round bales.

 

[sd455dan]

We are down to 3 horses Now. Still Never going back to small bales.
I Like the Large squares.
Our hay supplier was really busy this year (on track for about 5000 bales) He loaded us at the field last year, but this year asked if we could load and haul our own from the field. He said we would get a discount if we could so that is what we did.
Took about 5 hours total (including barn stacking) But that included hauling my tractor to the field and on the last load having the wife drive the truck and trailer back while i road-ed the tractor home.
The only hard part was tying a strap around 5 bales and driving the trailer out from under the first 2 loads.

The nice part is two not so young people can do the whole job and Just use the tractor to stack. We were blessed with nice warm weather and no rain so No wet bales to worry about.

The Maxilator does look like a real good solution to reduce bale handling. Anything to save on the physical labor sounds like a good idea. Congrats on the new work saver.

 

[Rockbadchild]

I don’t know why more people don’t use the big squares. Small square bales should be obsolete.

The price of the big square baler is a factor as well... not everyone as 100k for a baler

 

[lman]

This is what we use here.

 

[sea2summit]

Do you have any pictures ?

I'll try to grab some.

 

[sea2summit]

The price of the big square baler is a factor as well... not everyone as 100k for a baler

Where are you seeing a big square baler for 100K? Most folks would take two at that price

There's also the cost of the tractor large enough to pull one and the fuel usage. You really need to be pumping out huge quantities of hay to justify it, us little 100-200 acre guys probably aren't close unless it was alfalfa or other high value hay.

 

[sea2summit]

This is what we use here.

I'd love to move up to that but I don't think it will work on our fields, especially with my tractor. I would love to find one I could demo though to see.

The acumagrapple bunches them in to blocks of 10 bales so all the khun would do is reduce a little bit of the driving time in the pick-up tractor..

 

[sea2summit]

4570man, lifestyle people and the horse set like conventional bales as they are man/woman portable and stack easily. Also the money was spent buying the property.
Large squares require expensive machinery to handle them, and often for only a few bales.

My boss sell to this demographic and they often don't have more space than 5-8 bales anyway.

I've been a little shocked at how often some customers come for 3-5 small squares because that's all they can store, they'd probably save money building a small shed and saving the gas money!

 

[Rockbadchild]

Where are you seeing a big square baler for 100K? Most folks would take two at that price

There's also the cost of the tractor large enough to pull one and the fuel usage. You really need to be pumping out huge quantities of hay to justify it, us little 100-200 acre guys probably aren't close unless it was alfalfa or other high value hay.

lol well I didn't want to exaggerate I know they are expensive tho... yes that too for sure.