Posted by modirt on January 06, 2019 at 07:18:08 from (199.187.163.74):
Find myself in a situation where small square bales can be sold for a decent profit. Hobby hay for the hobby horse crowd. So got the cutting, raking and baling issues resolved. What remains is the fourth and most critical aspect, which is how to get those bales up off the ground and into a barn in a timely manner.
I started out small and for the first two years, picked them up myself by hand. Like eating an elephant.....start with the first bite, keep chewing and you will eventually get it down. Health issues now prevents me from doing that as the long term plan. BTW, all told, for now, only talking about a few thousand bales. But if a guy did a good job, that could easily double. All within a half mile of my house.
So last year arranged to have some neighborhood kids who were picking up hay do it.......then they didn't show up. Waiting three days before I rounded up some fellow geezers and we did it ourselves. Nobody died, but not a plan for the future. And letting hay lay on the ground didn't help. It went up perfect, but didn't stay that way, picking up moisture from the ground. That will not be allowed to happen again.
Market is 50# bales of grass hay, which if packed right, will run 32 to 34 inches.
So a few methods I know of:
Pick em up by hand.....low tech but labor intensive and requires help actually show up. And can get expensive. Like $1 per bale. That is the plan for now, except to look for better help. Local FFA kids tell me they will haul hay, as will some Amish lads, but they are 1/2 hour away and I gotta go get em. And take em home when they are done.
Don't have a bale kicker or bale wagons and none in this area, plus still requires the labor to unload and stack em.
Pull wagons behind baler.....put maybe 75 to 100 bales on a 4 wheel wagon. Still got the labor (maybe 1 or 2 hands stacking), and unless you stop baling to go unload, you gotta have enough wagons to hold it all.
New Holland stackliner........have seen one, never ran one, know nothing about em. Gotta have a barn tall enough to stack in. Don't know if they will handle those short, 50# bales. Also don't know if they will unload the stack on pallets.
Accumulator and grapple.......would probably work, but for small scale like me, too expensive. For short hauls like line of sight, could stack on a wagon, then tow the wagon to the barn, unload, go back and reload. Otherwise, would need a skid loader or tractor on both ends. One to load, another to unload.
Last option, and one I'd like to explore, is finding a hay monster. Back before round bales came along, this was far and away the best solution ever devised for handling small squares. Problem was, they came along just about the same time as big round bales showed up and were instantly rendered obsolete. Deweze was the best of them, and there may not have been more than 100 made, and only a small number of those still in operation.
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