High Desert Cowboy- How far is it up north?

[CntryBoy777]

Good to hear from ya and that things are going well for ya. I remember when I was jammin' gears in that area and saw those big bales for the first time....I knew they weren't hand-stacked.........I did see a tv program once that some built houses out of them....set the bales and cover it with stucco. There is way too much moisture and humidity here for that. Once ya get across Nebraska ya don't see those bales much, when traveling east....

 

[Bruce]

1,000 pound square verses 40-60 pound square. Yep a bit of difference there!

I've seen videos of the machinery to automate collection and stacking of small squares. Pretty cool. One collects them into blocks and another, as @High Desert Cowboy said, can pick up the entire block and place it on a trailer then take it off and stack it in the barn.

 

[Latestarter]

The first time I bought hay here, the farmer I bought it from had one of those "rotating claws on a platform" type contraptions on his front end in place of the FEL. He laid it flat on top of the bales and rotated the "claws" into the bales and lifted an entire flat of small bales at once. Carried them over to my trailer, and retracted the claws and the bales dropped into the trailer. I imagine it could have picked up one of those big squares as easily. The really big squares are 1400-1600 pounds. I imagine packed really tight they could potentially go a full ton. The hay farm near where I lived in CO used a huge Cat type bucket loader (like the kind you see doing road work) with a claw grapple on the front to move those huge square bales around. He'd stack them 2-3 high in long rows in the field and tarp them until they were sold and loaded/gone.

 

[High Desert Cowboy]

Rotating claw on a platform is the perfect way to describe that claw attachment

 

[Baymule]

We buy round bales from a neighbor, plus $10 per bale for him to keep them in his barn and bring them to us as needed. We think it's a fantastic arrangement.

 

[greybeard]

"They said I could be anything so I became Spongebob."


yes, it's a fake video, but still funny

 

[greybeard]

The way we did it, and way I still did......... until about 10 years ago. It was always lots cheaper to buy and load it in the field as it comes out the baler.

http://www.joneslandandlivestock.com/the-art-of-picking-up-hay-bales/

But..........I helped a neighbor do it the same way a couple summers ago, and I was flat wore out and hurtin by the time we got his 330 bales loaded.

 

[High Desert Cowboy]

Kya and Alfalfa weren’t feeling very photogenic. You can just see Kya’s back end going around Shaun, she was not having this take a moment a smile business. Bella’s all about the pose

 

[Bruce]

"They said I could be anything so I became Spongebob."

I wonder how many beers preceded that event. Sounds like the camerawoman had a quantity herself.

 

[Latestarter]

Bella is a pretty girl.