Round Baler Question?

[ironpeddler]

I have a wrapper an Anderson. It is a very good machine and very powerful. You can wrap around 100 bales an hour. I have also two balers. Class 280 and a New Holland 644. The 644 is a toy compared with the Class.
The Anderson cost me $25,500.00 in 2005. If you wrap less than 800 bales a year.....that's a lot of money.

The McHale 991BC is $13,000 new. This is the one man one tractor system. We have customers baling 2500 haylage bales a year with the individual wrappers. Farmers in our part of the USA don't always farm contiguous property and the may farm 10-40 miles apart. Individual wrapped bales offer our beef cattle owners more options than the tube style wrappers. Farming in North America varies from region to region and so does the equipment.

 

[K-SHIRES]

I can't get western Alfalfa for $110 a ton try $150 to $200. And I can't pasture the whole place, it wouldn't make good sense.

Hear that. Just trying to make the point that sometimes sourcing high level feed can be more profitable than investing in the machinery to make it. Silage production - Lots of gears and wheels turning, lots of maintenance,. Would a good round baler with net wrap allow you to get quality of feed high enough? Or does your local climate demand making wet feed to get top quality?

 

[ironpeddler]

I can't get western Alfalfa for $110 a ton try $150 to $200. And I can't pasture the whole place, it wouldn't make good sense.

Hear that. Just trying to make the point that sometimes sourcing high level feed can be more profitable than investing in the machinery to make it. Silage production - Lots of gears and wheels turning, lots of maintenance,. Would a good round baler with net wrap allow you to get quality of feed high enough? Or does your local climate demand making wet feed to get top quality?

Less than 15% of all the round balers sold in the Ky, TN, Carolina's and VA use net wrap.

 

[Crowderfarms]

I can't get western Alfalfa for $110 a ton try $150 to $200. And I can't pasture the whole place, it wouldn't make good sense.

Hear that. Just trying to make the point that sometimes sourcing high level feed can be more profitable than investing in the machinery to make it. Silage production - Lots of gears and wheels turning, lots of maintenance,. Would a good round baler with net wrap allow you to get quality of feed high enough? Or does your local climate demand making wet feed to get top quality?

Less than 15% of all the round balers sold in the Ky, TN, Carolina's and VA use net wrap.

I dont use net wrap or even know anyone around here that uses it.Not popular in this neck of the woods.

 

[gendronf]

IOr does your local climate demand making wet feed to get top quality?

In the last 4 years, I did not make any bales of dry hay. The weather is impossible to guess. In 2005 I made for me more than 6,000 bales of silage and approximately 1200 for neighbors. If the hay is almost dry, we wrap it too. That way, there is no lost and the bales are never dusty. In my area it is not very often to have more than 3 days without rain and with the silage we don't have to bother about the temperature.
I use net instead of twine. Cost around 0.65 cent more a bale but you save on time, fuel, machine worn out, in the field. At the barn you save again on time . Take less time to take out the net than twines. The cost of plastic. With 2 rolls of 30 inches we wrap 90 bales of 4 X 4. In 2005 I payed $80.25 a rolls. ($1.79 each bale) Canadian money. If you put less plastic, you can lost in silage quality.

 

[Anonymous]

In our area you have good hay or trash hay. We get a lot of sudden storms. My thinking was instead of having poor quality dry hay. Why not dry bale what I can and then wrap the rest>?

 

[gendronf]

In our area you have good hay or trash hay. We get a lot of sudden storms. My thinking was instead of having poor quality dry hay. Why not dry bale what I can and then wrap the rest>?

Before I made dry hay and silage. I realized that it was almost impossible to make round bales dry hay dustfree. Also after some month under the rain and snow there were losses. This is why I wrap all my dry bales. This way I always have a hay of first quality and no loss. The additional costs are thus compensated.

 

[K-SHIRES]

In our area you have good hay or trash hay. We get a lot of sudden storms. My thinking was instead of having poor quality dry hay. Why not dry bale what I can and then wrap the rest>?

Sounds like the tool to fit what you want to do is a round baler with these features: Silage special, net or twine wrap, CROP CUTTER. Both New Holland and John Deere offer this package. I mention CROP CUTTER, because your objective is to produce a highly desirable, salable product moreso than high quality feed for your own stock, yes?
The Crop Cutter option chops all material to 3 - 5 inch pieces as it bales, can be done with baleage(wet) or dry hay. This increases salability of your product: Folks can put into TMR mixer without first sending bale thru tub grinder. Also, a small stallbarn dairyman can feed those out without first grinding or slicing bale up. Also cattle can ingest more direct from bale than with traditional round bales. With this type baler, you have the option of making dry hay with net wrap, or wet hay to be wrapped, depending on quality of hay and weather factors.
Then you could rent or buy a wrapper to go along with it.
If you are going to produce high quality feed to sell, don't use a tubeline wrapper - you want to individually wrap bales so you can sell them in integer units. Once a tubeline of baleage is opened, it must be fed from every day, because oxygen is spoiling it rapidly.
Thoughts on silage production - Silage is a very hard product to sell off the place. Hard to truck - too loose and fluffy after you scoop it to load it. Vulnerable to excessive spoilage -In handling it you expose it to oxygen, snow, etc. And too hard to measure weights , too complex of pricing. Baleage better product for selling and trucking. More consistent, less spoilage. NetWrap is the way of the future. Gendronf offers solid testimonial to that.. Best of luck with your venture.

 

[DoubleK]

Hey Arm

Bez has given you some fatherly advise, and I don't disagree with him all together. However, I would prefer to improve my equipment with upgrades than to have a lot of money in the account. I dislike paying any more taxes than absolutely nessasary. Also, lower maintenance cost as well.

Since you are a builder by trade, have you considered a building of some sort that would serve multi purposes like silage storage or machinery storage?

Just a thought


Dub

 

[K-SHIRES]

I can't get western Alfalfa for $110 a ton try $150 to $200. And I can't pasture the whole place, it wouldn't make good sense.

Hear that. Just trying to make the point that sometimes sourcing high level feed can be more profitable than investing in the machinery to make it. Silage production - Lots of gears and wheels turning, lots of maintenance,. Would a good round baler with net wrap allow you to get quality of feed high enough? Or does your local climate demand making wet feed to get top quality?

Less than 15% of all the round balers sold in the Ky, TN, Carolina's and VA use net wrap.

***IronPeddler- Does Vermeer offer a round baler that is a silage special, will do net wrap, AND has feature to CHOP all material into 3-5 inch pieces as it bales? I know when I looked 2005 Hesston and Gehl did not offer "CropCutter" type feature.