[AT] Small bale quality

[Indiana Robinson]

I no longer bale any hay but son Scott still does round bales. Since most
of my bales that were sold for cash went to horse people and most of them
were female I found that they were very weight concerned. The horse gals
would complain about not being able to buy any bales that were not too
heavy. I found that many of them would pay extra for lighter bales, I guess
about 35 to 40 pounds. I was prone to bale a little heavy for my own use. I
recall one year when I was baling cereal rye straw (I grew it for cover
crop seed) and I would pack the crap out of those and they still were not
super heavy.
That year I had planted a small field of oats to bale green, grain and all
as hay. More recent horse people wondered if it was even edible but the old
timers loved getting those oats bales. So did the horses. I rolled out of
that rye field and into the oats but I forgot to back off the cranks at the
back of the baler. I made a handful of bales and walked back to look at
them. That first full bale of oats must have weighed over 200 pounds...
:-)  :-)  I could not lift it... I backed the cranks off about a mile and
cut the strings on those few bales and rebaled them. About the only
disadvantage to baling green oats is storing them. The grain in them
attracts mice kind of bad.

Years ago the son of a neighbor who had passed away sold off 3 building
lots of about 8 acres each. They just sat there for some time and quickly
became nearly totally covered with Canada Thistle... All of which produced
800 zillion seeds each. Being just east of it the prevailing winds out of
the west supplied me generously with more than my share of seed... One
benefit I had was that at that time I was raising quite a few sheep and
they loved eating them down to the ground in their lots  even when the seed
heads had turned brown and dry.
In those days I used to buy and sell hay both at a livestock auction barn
about 25 miles north of here. In decent weather they auctioned hay and
straw out in the parking lot. I used to bump into one of Diana's cousins
there often and one day I asked him what he was buying or selling. He
responded "I'm just selling a batch of junk weedy hay". I told him that I
never sold any junk hay but that I sold a lot of "sheep and goat" hay.
:-)  If I had good hay I said so but if it was weedy old stuff off of
excess pasture growth I always presented it as "sheep and goat hay". Often
it sold better than the good hay. Often my sheep and goat hay sold so well
that I would buy a load of really good hay to haul back home. It was
surprising how few people there knew good hay from crap.

-- 
-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com
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