Haying with 26 HP or less.

[DaveOmak]

I finally had to get a drum mower... Sickle bar wouldn't work with my alfalfa... A 135 CCM is what I ended up with... A great mower.... And I have a 14T baler... When I get the ground speed right, for my windrows, it works fine... I'm still tweaking the baler to be dependable... I had trouble with the knotter tying... Found out, through testing, it took 22 plunger strokes before the knotter would tie... Couldn't find out WHY ??? but at 20 strokes, it skipped the knotting sequence... Soooooo, I had to slow down the ground speed while keeping up the baler speed.... My Jubilee works perfect for this.. It has an under/over/direct Sherman and an under drive Howard... 24 forward speeds and 6 in reverse... When I do get it all in sync, it works perfect... Tight bales... No banana shape...
...

 

[aczlan]

I don't mind repairing and do the general maintenance. However with that being said. My kids all grown up and gone. It's just a one man operation now. Working a full time job and keeping up with all this stuff can be overwhelming. So that's why I'm kind of leaning towards purchasing something new.

One other thought, you might look at finding a larger tractor (older 30-40hp gas tractor with a loader) and make round bales. My wife and I can bale our back field, making 10-15ish round bales and stacking them in the barn in a long afternoon. Doing that with small square bales would take 3-4 more people and a lot more effort.

Aaron Z

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 was going to mention that. We bale hay with our L3830 and we try for 10-15 strokes per bale.

Aaron Z