[justfarming]

We have just taken over a few acres of grassed land and are trying to find out what is involved in making hay. I have tractor but am unsure what machines are needed to make the hay ie cutters, which bales are best, plastic coated or not.  The hay would be used for a horse feed with any excess being sold.  Any help welcomed!!

[SallyintNorth]

Hello from north Cumbria.  We get long but not usually hot summer days here, usually breezy and sadly often showery.  It ain't easy to make hay!

I'm relatively new to farming but BH is a lifelong farmer and making hay is his passion - so I can tell you what I observe.

Up here it usually takes at least 4 days to make small-bale hay.  If the sun is hot and there's a good breeze and no rain at all you might bale on day 3. 

If you're in South Devon or Kent you will work the hay a lot less than I list here; you'll ruin it (turn it into dust) if you woofle as much as we do up here.  I hear tell that they don't woofle much in Yorkshire, either - no doubt someone on here from Yorks will be able to tell you more.

Day 1 - mow.  Let it wilt a bit and if it's a good drying day, strow it out (using a hay-bob) the same day, if not as soon as the conditions are right. 
Day 2 - assuming no rain (nor forecast for this day), woofle (shuffle it about, again using a hay-bob) once the dew is off it.  If the day is a good drying day, you might woofle it again later on.  If the day is showery but good weather is forecast for days 3 through 5, leave it alone today.
Day 3 - pretty much as day 2.  Stop woofling when it's dry right through of course.
Day 4 - BH says you want a 'killing day' for baling - you want good strong sun and absolutely no rain.  Usually woofle again once the dew is off, then row it up (again using the hay-bob but with the tines turned the other way) when you are ready to bale, and bale.  You need a baler, of course and, for small bales, a lot of helpers.  A bale sledge helps - makes a bit less work for the stookers.

The process for big square bales or big round bales is much the same, but you can bale a little sharper (with a little bit of dampness in the grass) especially for round bales, which can be left in the field to dry some more.  In fact most hay will benefit from some more airing in the field if the weather allows.  Round bales on their sides, square bales stacked on top of each other to keep the ground contact to a minimum.  If you're trying to dry the grass a bit more, leave gaps between the bales.

You'll need a trailer to bring the hay in; for small bale hay it's best to stook in 17s (5 on their sides, then 3 rows of 4, overlapping) and use a bale carrier, for large square bales a front-end loader and flat trailer, for round bales ditto or a spike or squeezy arms (bale grab.)

For round bale silage you need to cut, strow out, ideally woofle, then row up, bale and wrap.  We would usually do this over 2 days but some of our neighbours do it in one.  If you have a silage pit you can take the cut & wilted grass and put it straight into the pit, then cover completely and tightly with waterproof sheeting, weighed down, as quick as you can.

In our case, haylage is hay we couldn't quite get dry enough for hay so we baled and wrapped it - ie, it's dryish silage.  I know a lot of people make haylage on purpose, we almost always make hay if we can. 

To recap on equipment needed - mower, hay-bob, baler.  For silage or haylage, wrapper. 

If you have only a few acres it is may not be cost-effective to do much or any of this yourself - but you may struggle to find local contractors who will (or even can) make small-bale hay for you. 

Around here, decent 2nd-hand equipment would cost you :

.  mower I guess about £800 - £1000 - a new one is £2500-ish
.  hay-bob £700 - £1200  (£400 for one needing a lot of work)
.  small square bale baler £1600 - £2000 (you have to be really lucky to pick up a good one for less than £1000, even one needing a lot of work is often £800+)

Our contractor charges in the region of £11/acre to mow, then £4.50/acre per operation to strow out, woofle, row up.  Baling £1.85 / round bale, £1.45 / mini-heston square bale.  Wrapping £2.75 / round bale.   All plus fuel -they fill up on leaving.


In terms of which is better, wrapped or unwrapped, large or small, round or square bales, it all depends on your preferences and how you will store, handle and use them.  Hay needs to be under cover and kept dry, wrapped bales can be outside (but stock need to be kept away from it.)  You can carry small square bales around on foot, everything else needs a tractor to pick them up and move them.  Big square bales are easy to get a slab off and carry that; round bales are harder to take some out of but easy to use if you want to use a ring feeder. 

Hope that helps
Cheers
Sally

[justfarming]

Thanks Sally, your reply was very helpful.  After a bit of investigation I can see the difficulty in getting hold of the equipment! I am hoping to get some help from a local farmer but if that fails I will get a contractor in and he can take the hay this year so long as I can keep enough for our old horse.  Thanks again.

Phil

[suziequeue]

We've had a bit of a nightmare with haymaking so far. Prepare for rant  

We decided to grow one of our fields for hay. It's only about two acres and we didn't really want to ask our neighbours (big sheep/cattle/silage people with lots of tractors, always hareing up and down the lane on quad bikes and seemingly VERY busy) as we didn't really want to get into a commercial relationship with them as we would rather keep them as friends - so a contractor who was working on our fences last month said that he would do it.

Well the rest reads like a sorry tale from a dating website  

This week has been perfect for hay making and everybody in the locality has been at it. Promises to "get it done this week" turned into promises to "get it done this weekend" which have turned into promises to "get it done once this couple of days of rain next week have cleared and I'm over that side of the hill". He didn't phone when he said he would. I was expecting to be dumped by text  

Comments like "I haven't forgotten you - it's just that I've got some big farm contracts to get out of the way first......" make us feel very low down on this chap's priority list  

And there's the rub. We're lightweights. We ARE low down on his priority list and - lets face it - that's where we should be. One small field of wasted grass is nothing compared to a big twenty acre sward belonging to a local farming bigwig gone rotten (that's the grass - not the bigwig   ).

We looked at getting a tractor, a compact tractor, a two wheeled tractor, asking our neighbours, getting a co-operative going with another neighbour who has got a tractor, scything parties....... and on and on

I'll wait and see what this chap does next week but for next year I think we need to ask our busy farming neighbour well in advance to factor us in for hay making and have a conversation about bale size (he doesn't have a small baler - nobody does round here it seems   Small bale hay is seen very much as an expensive luxury for horse and guinea pig owners by the local feed merchants.   )

So we will probably get wrapped haylage which is fine as we don't have the space to store small bale hay under cover BUT the problem with that is if we don't get through an opened bale quick enough it will start to go off and that can lead to problems with the sheep. And - of course - being smallholders, we haven't got 200 sheep and a ring feeder on top of some windblown hill   - just eighteen little darlings who gather at the gate and bleat at us every time we get out of the car  

So - why am I writing all this?

Because we just hadn't appreciated the complexities of small scale haymaking until now - when it's almost too late..... I mean - yeah - it's only the third of July - but once the days start to shorten by any appreciable amount then the nutrient quality in the grass really falls off etc etc etc blah blah.

This week I've learnt about weather, nutrients, grass quality, bale size and maneuverability, weather, weather, availability of labour and resources, weather

But then - if we don't make it this year, hey ho - we'll be better prepared next year and - at the end of the day - it's only a couple of acres. We bought hay last winter and we can do so again this winter

So - I wish you all the best Phil but keep your expectations in check  

Rant over

(And I've lost my freakin' peening jig so even if I wanted to scythe it I can't   )

[horseyhay]

We are on a small livery yard and have just reduced the number of horses, hooray ! but we have 2 of the horses on box rest and the grass has grown so quickly, we now have more grass than we know what to do with ?
Thinking of topping the 1 and half acres but it seems such a waste when we are all buying in hay, and the farmer we get hay from has only half the yield this year (hay prices will be up again), so now thinking of trying to make hay from our unused paddocks.

Could be fun as it is a bit late to cut, and the whole process will be done by hand, anyone have any tips ?

Will post the progress. 

[SallyintNorth]

Oh suzieQ I do feel for you.  Occasionally smallholders ask us will we make hay on their fields, and I am afraid that really quite often the same thing happens - we have to prioritise getting our own forage in and then the weather turns and we haven't got the hay for the smallholder.  There just are only so many hours in the day, and when the weather is right we are absolutely flat out.  If summers behaved like they should, it wouldn't matter so much - but sometimes there are only a couple of hay-making windows in the year.

I don't know the answer to managing 18 sheep using big-bale silage; if they have nothing else to go at they should just about get through it before it starts to go off.  We find that 50 hill sheep will polish off a bale in 4 days when they have a hillside to pick at - and 4 days is as long as you want to keep it going, really - but will eat about twice as much when there isn't anything else.

The only idea that occurs in your situation is whether your 2 acres of good grass would make good grazing for a handful of your neighbour's stirks for a wee while - and whether in return for the grazing they might let you have some of their forage.  Kind of equates in the end but saves anyone having to fit in making hay on your 2 acres.

[Womble]

I just can't believe it's actually called "Woofling"!  (very sorry to admit it, but that has just made my day!!)

[robert waddell]

back in the old days there was a machine called a wuffler(bamford made it) lister made a tedder and lely made a cock pheasent       all were typcast as wufflers              you also have to allow for dialect changes to certain words               such a good day school is out 

[Fleecewife]

Phil - start looking for equipment now for next year.  We put ours together gradually.  The most important thing after a tractor (ours is an ancient David Brown - a gift from a relative and we also have a Siromer which is too small to work the big machinery) we found to be the tedder.  This is because you can find someone to mow your hay easily enough - it won't take them long.  You may also find someone who will bale it.  The most time consuming bit is the spreading, turning, rowing up etc, whilst watching the weather each day, so we got our tedder first, at a farm machinery sale.  At the sales there is plenty of junk and anything good will be snapped up so the trick is to buy something which will work but is older than most people are looking for.  We then got our mower through a later sale, so just had to get help with baling.  Then we went to a dealer who got us a wonderful small bale machine for £500 - it has turned out to be an amazing bargain and churns out the bales like a queen bee.  Then a very kind person on this group ( ) donated a flatbed trailer so we can bring in our bales and now we are totally independant for haymaking.

Even using a contractor is not ideal.  We have watched neighbours hay being made by contractors for the past few years - they turn it maybe twice and we have seen it being baled in the rain.  Not good for hay quality.  But it is inevitable that they can't be everywhere at once and the small acreages will be left til last.  In fact they probably wrap the bales once they get them home but what's left for the horses might not be top quality.  For us the independant route is the only one.  Before we achieved that we lost a couple of crops which were baleable but the person baling it couldn't get to us before the rain did.  It's all a learning curve but very satisfying when you bring in your own top quality crop of hay.  The equipment, if you are careful, will pay for itself in just a few years and you could even do some contract haymaking yourself 

[SallyintNorth]

back in the old days there was a machine called a wuffler(bamford made it) lister made a tedder and lely made a cock pheasent       all were typcast as wufflers              you also have to allow for dialect changes to certain words               such a good day school is out 

Uh, well now I know how to spell it - it's pronounced woofle up here but I see I should spell it wuffle   

[TheCaptain]

Just finished mine yesterday, luckily I'm on good terms with some of the local farmers and contractors who do a few fields around here so makes life much easier.  I hadn't intended on doing it over the last four days but I bottled it, turns out it was the right decision!!!  Cut first thing on thursday morning, turned (woofled/tedded) Fri/Sat/Sun rowed up on Sunday afternoon and baled yesterday.  In all about 5 1/2 acres, all in small bales with 530 bales made.  300 delivered to a horsey friend of ours and 230 kept back for my animals and a few to sell over the winter if the need arises, all chucked up and unloaded on a trailer between two of us (we'd already down 500 a few days before off some other fields).  Last night I was knackered.

[egglady]

we are having our first go at haymaking on a small scale this year...and my word, it's hard work!

Friend cut the grass and everything else is being done by hard.  So every night after work my poor husband goes to the field with his pitchfork in hard and spends hours there!  but we dont have any equipment yet so have no choice.

he started with small stacks and as they dry he doubles them up - hopefully in about a year we'll have 'proper' haystacks!! 

and then we need to move the whole lot once it's dry to undercover so we can feed the animals in the winter.

i doubt if it will be of very good quality but if it even saves us a quarter of our winter hay bill, then it will still be worth it.

i'd love to get to a place where we could use the horses for making the bulk of the hay

[seldomseen]

Just the thought of making hay with tractors sounds brill, but for 3 yrs we have been making ours by hand and its taking forever lol I have 2 15 by 15 stacks of good hay a loft thats 30 foot by 20 foot full of ok hay orchard type hay (goats dont like it but when they get hungry they will lol, and half the orchard is lucerne wich is about 20 peach trees so not very much really but that has had 3 cuts this yr already so am doing good, just spent the last 3 days collecting pea hay up (they love that stuff) so that will go ontop of one of the stacks (I hope lol) All done by hand

[Fleecewife]

Cutting with that sickle must murder your back.  A scythe doesn't cost much and would speed things up no end 

[suziequeue]

Ooooh yes - a scythe would be fantastic on that stuff