HAY

Okiepan

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Ok So today as I was working on my sickle mower ( JD#4 ) adjusting my blade and pittman assembly , It dawned on me How do so of y'all cut your hay ?
I use a scythe on my small alfalfa patch , And my #4 on the prairie hay ,
For baling I use a wooden box baler ,
So is it easier to buy hay round bales or square ?
 

tortoise

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DH bought hay equipment, finally got a baler last year. I don't know the proper names of the equipment. Sickle mower PTO atachment, a rake - not the kind with circles..., and a very, very old baler that makes small squares. Small scale hay equipment is expensive second hand and at auction, so it took us >5 years to collect all the pieces we need.

We still buy hay just to be safe. We only got one cutting this year because of our early drought. We usually get a couple hundred small squares, hopefully delivered! And DH usually drives to neighboring farms to get old round bales for the goats, just one or two for the winter. (2 niggie wethers) If they lose condition they can have some of the sheeps' hay, but the goats stay rotund all year.
 

CrealCritter

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Ok So today as I was working on my sickle mower ( JD#4 ) adjusting my blade and pittman assembly , It dawned on me How do so of y'all cut your hay ?
I use a scythe on my small alfalfa patch , And my #4 on the prairie hay ,
For baling I use a wooden box baler ,
So is it easier to buy hay round bales or square ?
My very limited experience upto 2000 lb round bales for larger animals and the square ones for smaller animals. I like the fact that you pick up the rounds with a tractor, (remove baling twine @baymule) drive it out to the pasture and lower it down and your done. But then again, rounds are a pain to get into tight spaces and it's a lot of work to unroll them and use a pitch fork to carry loads full to it's destination. So I like squares for tighter spaces, for ease of handling and where it's a lot of hands on needed. That's my very limited experience. Others here have much more experience than I do. So I'll be watching and learning.

Jesus is Lord and Christ 🙏❤️🇺🇸
 

Mini Horses

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The ease of buying saves some cost of making it...that's it for ease. 😁 still same loading, unloading, handling issues. I have tractor but no "hay" cutting/baling attachments. I don't see a baler as being an expense I want. Used often have repair issues I don't want.

There is then the consideration of grass quality. I've considered own hay. I could see a cutter and rake buy.....then a hand wooden baler. It would be limited quantity but, any helps. Right? Hay is expensive to buy. I've considered haystacks.:lol: work and skill.
 

flowerbug

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Ok So today as I was working on my sickle mower ( JD#4 ) adjusting my blade and pittman assembly , It dawned on me How do so of y'all cut your hay ?
I use a scythe on my small alfalfa patch , And my #4 on the prairie hay ,
For baling I use a wooden box baler ,
So is it easier to buy hay round bales or square ?

for the small patches of alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil i used to grow i was using electric hedge trimmers a few times a season or sometimes i would cut it handfulls at a time if i was drying it for the gardens or worm farm. since i removed one patch and the other was infested with grass we've just been mowing the back patch except i've started to reclaim it all for vegetable growing now that it's got super great soil again from all those years of letting it grow and then cutting it back and letting the worms turn all that into plant food. everything grows great back there now. :) originally i meant to turn it all into strawberry growing but that won't work without a fence. the deer and other critters do eat some of the beans but enough survive to make the space still very productive and useful. over the years i've also grown many pounds of garlic and green garlic. i made the mistake of spreading thousands of garlic bulbules in there and they were very hard to remove from around the roots of the plants. i had cleared most of it eventually but not all of it was removed before we started mowing it. i'm not sure how much is left out there. it's all so green. :)

the sod i've been able to mostly dig holes and bury it and only a few of the grass roots will come up through the cardboard and newspaper layers i put over them.
 

tortoise

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I've considered haystacks.:lol: work and skill.
My family did loose hay for a couple years until we got the baler. It's work! Hot, sweaty work! I wouldn't mind making hay so much if it didn't need to be done on a hot day in full sun, and wearing work boots! We didn't make haystacks in the field, we put it loose in the barn. The year we got the baler, we pulled the loose hay out of the barn and baled it. 50 bales. Loose hay takes up a lot of space, we could stack 200 bales in the space taken up by 50 bales worth of loose hay.
 

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