A Few Thoughts About Bringing In The Hay

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29384, 10 December 1960, Page 9

A Few Thoughts About Bringing In The Hay

THIS week has been a heartbreaking one for those wishing to get on with haymaking. Mr George Lindsay, lecturer in agricultural engineering at Canterbury Agricultural College, Lincoln, was ask'ed whether he could offer any crumbs of consolation or words of advice to farmers who were looking disconsolately on stacks of bales or windrows on rainsoaked paddocks. For those who went to the extent of covering stacks of bales in the paddock, Mr Lindsay said this was made much easier if a big sledge, capable of taking three or four layers of four bales to a layer, was pulled behind the baler. These larger stacks could also be an advantage where they were picked up directly with a buckrake and either carted into the barn or loaded on a trailer or truck.

Mr Lindsay said some farmers had been using the system of carting in stacks of hay with buckrakes fitted on their tractors.

At the farmers’ conference this year, Mr Lindsay referred to some work done by the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering in Britain. In this instance where the bales were in heaps of 16 a tractor with a buckrake on the front-end loader and another on the three-point linkage moved 32 bales at a time. Over a distance of 500 yards from the field to the bam one man was able to collect and transport 6£ tons of hay an hour, which was the equivalent of four man-hours per 1000 bales.

. Mr Lindsay said local farmers generally moved smaller stacks of only six or eight bales by this

method. These smaller stacks were more likely to tumble off than the larger 12 or 16-bale stacks which tended to bind together better and were more stable. Another variation of this technique is the use of the front-end loader with 'buckrake to load trailers or truckstin the field. Mr Lindsay said it was possible with such an arrangement with a pushoff device for a man to load four stacks each of 12 or 16 bales on to a truck or trailer unaided. For a vehicle with a 12ft deck he said that four stacks would be a minimum load. Real Place Mr Lindsay had one other thought. He feels there is a very real place for hay-making machines which will do a true tedding job. The finger wheel rake, he says, is a very popular and undoubtedly a very useful and a fast-working tool, but there is one job it cannot do and that is tedding or scattering or fluffing up a bulky crop of particularly meadow or grass hay to keep it in a condition where full use is made of what drying there is available in the atmosphere. These are the crops that do not lend themselves to satisfactory treatment with the stem crusher, which is useful in hastening drying of lucerne hay. Mr Lindsay said there were probably only one, or possibly two, hay-making machines on the market in the country that were capable of tedding in the real sense of the word, but overseas manufacturers were devoting attention to this sort of machine. “I feel that there is a place for true tedders and we are, in a small way, looking into that possibility at the moment,” he said.