Hay moving ideas

[Rod]

I have been musing about the issue of loading and moving square bales without much or any help and wondered what others are doing when faced with this problem other than eating more Cheerios and going at it yourself.
Since I do only a small number at a time and fairly close to the barn I thought of using a sled or possibly a modified bobsled instead of the typical wagon. The sled needs no brakes and is low to the ground so it could be stacked without getting on and off (smaller stacks). Animals seem to be the ideal motive power as one can just walk along side of them bale to bale so to speak.
Also has anyone come up with a homemade bale accumulator?
Any ideas on this subject are welcome.

[CharlyBonifaz]

I thought of using a sled or possibly a modified bobsled

Swiss invention: a sled with an axle and 2 wheels about half way back; one can load it well balanced; when animals start to pull, they will automatically pick up the front a little and the load will roll; when stopping, the front comes down again and aids in braking……..figured that was pretty smart 😉 and yes, they used it for hay mainly….

[Mike Rock]

When I worked in North Dakota we had a stone boat with a modification.
Four 2×12’s about twelve feet long bolted to a steel curved up nose, like a regular stone boat. The twist was there was a 3″ or so slot down the middle.
At the rear the boards were bolted in pairs, right and left and the slot keep on going out the back. The rear pieces were beveled with a plane on the front edges at a very shallow angle.

In front was a very low ‘dashboard’, maybe a foot tall. It’s only real function was to brace up a pair of 2-1/2″ ID pieces of pipe that were bolted to it.
Those pipes held a chunk of old driveshaft (for those old enough to remember cars with enclosed drivelines)!!. The shaft was pointed and did duty as a rock picker when fencing.

You were hooked to the baler with a short chain. The bales came out the chute and you started your pile at the rear, three abreast the long way and up to three high at max. When you got enough to be afraid of losing the load you picked up the iron rod and drove it into the ground in the groove, in front of the bales. They slid over the tapered rear brace pieces and onto the ground in a neat little stack. We picked them up later…..there was not much rain to worry about…..

Most respectfully,
Mike Rock
Now in southern Wisconsin.
With Percherons and Belgians and critters…..

[Rod]

Boy that sounds like a neat and cheap way to gather bales. I like the wagon/sled idea also.

[OldKat]

@BachelorFarmer 8958 wrote:

further to my above post:

I’ve always toyed with the idea of a ground drive hay elevator. Basically a section of pipe bale elevator mounted on something like a corn binder chassis which has tapered funnel like pickup arms. The elevator is offset so you would drive the team up alongside the bale and it would be guided towards the elevator, from thence it would be whisked up into a wagon which is hooked behind directly to the loader.
You would have to modify the standard elevator chain to have a tooth every few inches to ensure a quick pick up, and gear it a tad faster than ground speed…a simple matter of pulley/sprocket adjustment. The pickup head would just slide along the ground on shoes and be free to bob over humps etc, and the pipe elevator could be raised and lowered by a simple lever or winch to accomodate varying terrain or hay conditions. I have in mind a light open welded steel tube framework, perhaps even a mounted attachment for a forecart (If you’ve ever seen the old Farmall mounted corn pickers for their rowcrop tractors you will get the sense of how it would be mounted if it were an attachment . Still a purpose built implement would likely work better and save the hassle of installing a cumbersome piece of equipment and tying up the forecart. This would enable quick baling on the ground, then automatic loading. If you had something like a low sided thrower wagon, then you could just let the bales dump in and just have someone toss them back, much easier than building a load on a moving wagon….

I once saw the essence of what I’m thinking of attached to a flatbed truck, it ran down along the drivers side and the driver just drove along the row of bales slowly while a gas engine drove the elevator and a man stacked the bales on the truck.

… but what I think you are describing has been around for 30 or 40 years minimum. Maybe I am not following what you are actually saying though.

The ground drive elevator/loaders on the market may have required forward speeds faster than a team would generate, but I don’t think so. Not sure if anyone makes them anymore. At one time they had gotten real cheap, maybe $200.0 or so in our area when almost all hay was being round baled. As more and more people have gone back to making square bales for “horse quality hay” the demand has pushed the prices back up. The last time I heard a price on one changing hands it was over $1,000.00 and that was for one that needed some repairs. This was probably 8 or 10 years ago.

If I am thinking right, what you are describing would attach to the side of a wagon and as you drove your horse(s) along the row of square bales the shoe would direct the bales to a chain drive lift that would dump it on the floor of the wagon. Then someone riding on the wagon would stack them. Is that the concept?

[CharlyBonifaz]

do you have a forklift(?) in your barn? they used to put a stout pole or two on the flatbed, then pile the loose hay on top of that cart, finish it off with another pole, tighten the poles with rope or chain together (in front and back of cart); then at the barn, they lifted the whole thing from the wagon and didn’t need to handle the hay a second time…….
:rolleyes:can you make any sense of that?

[OldKat]

@BachelorFarmer 8962 wrote:

Yes, that is the idea. I have only ever seen the one motprised unit in my whole life. So perhaps in more advanced regions these ground drive units were sold. My design would be, instead of attaching to the side of the wagon, used in front. The team would be hitched to it with a central tongue. The wheels would be wide set for stability. The driver would sit centrally and the elevator would extend on a slight angle out to the drivers right, travelling back on a 45 degree slope to behind into a wagon centrally hooked to the loader. This way the team is permanently hooked to the loader and when the wagon is full you just pull the draw pin and drive away, backing up to the next wagon, and so forth. Someone else would have to be hauling the wagons away to the barn…. Unless you designed a small dump wagon with stake racks or a bale basket type thing that you could leave hooked on, then just pull up at the barn and dump off the load and then drive back to the field for another load.

I suppose if you are all alone, then neither of these is practical. I just know that on my own extremely hilly topography I try to avoid stacking bales on wagons. I’ve had enough hay topple off and roll down the hills. I love the bale thrower wagons, but they are too heavy for a team to pull on my hills being 8′ by 8′ by 20′ long and holding 125 bales of 50 lbs each. That is the down side, as the horses now only rake hay, everything else is out of scale for horses to do safely.

NOW I understand what you are looking for. If I have it right now, I think I am with you. There was a somewhat similar design for a self propelled hay wagon that was sold by maybe New Holland or New Idea. It had an offset for the operator that actually cantilever out in front of the vehicle and the input chute was located almost dead center of the front of the unit. I think the drive chain that elevated the bales and moved them back to the back of the wagon (with “fingers” on the chain moving down a medial groove in the floor) was ground driven, but the unit was motorized for self propulsion.

My understanding was that they quit building them when a couple of people had their legs wrenched off by catching their feet of their legs in the chain drive. Ugly. Anyway, the story goes that the lawsuits ended production. There were at least 2 or 3 of them around our area in years past, but haven’t noticed any lately.

I saw the first load of this years hay going into a barn today, so the equipment will be out in the fields in full force soon. I’ll see if I can locate one and/or I’ll ask around and see if anyone still has one so I can shoot a picture or two for you.

[Author]

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