Yes it is hard, the preservative system I put on definitely paid for itself this time around. And there’s areas that never see the sun along tree lines.
Wet slugs can make a guy go crazy… If you ever look to move away from liquid preservative you may check out Siloking… it’s a dry granular and is applied thru essentially a gandy box that sits on top of the baler and falls onto the hay as it passes the packing forks… real basic for a dummy like myself but no mess/no issues… we run on 90+ percent of our bales regardless just for added insurance (most of our hay has alfalfa and I’m chasing the horse customers).. it has saved my backside many times
Yes I’ve seen balers with the handy box on it. My system is homemade. A few adjustments and it’s already working pretty good. This year it should be doing pretty well. I didn’t know how well the granular mixed with the hay and got full coverage. I’m sure it works though, a lot of people use it. I’m always on a budget though. Have less than $100 in my entire system.
I hear you on that challenge of lining up the tedder heads with trampled hay. Sometimes with wet ground I’ll have stuff the tedder just never grabs. In a pinch, I’ll sometimes rake and then ted it back out. A pain, but better than uncured stuff in a bale… Nice video!
@@thebalerman yeah, I definitely meant that as an experience commiseration, not the “youtube commenter knows best” advice column 😅. But also your rake does a nice job of fluffing it on its own! I’m in New England and have a 256 side delivery. Not too common to see V rakes around here with field sizes, rocky ground, and challenging drying conditions. But, you’ve got a nice setup for where you are! How many acres / bales a year do you tend to do?
Oh yeah that’s how I took it, not negatively at all. For what it is that rake has done me well. It is built better than most carted wheel rakes. And it is fast. I rake this little field at my house in about 15-20 minutes. I’d like to upgrade but it is doing the job and I have other things higher in priority. I have 25 acres at my house that I square bale exclusively unless I have something unforeseen like weather or something that makes me round bale it. I usually make around 4000 squares. Then my dad round bales most of the cattle hay but we are trying to increase the number of squares he does as well as add more acreage anytime I get the chance. So i added the 5 acres from my neighbor coming this year. Then im adding the wheat field which will be hay for following years. So after that I’ll have 45 acres here which will almost double my production here.
Yeah hay takes a lot of time. My biggest limit is land, which I’m slowly adding. But then I have been hauling everything to my dads 30 min away to store. That takes a lot of time and limits the number of bales I can do at a time. But with my addition to the building that’s going to make a huge difference in efficiency.
