From: Dan
Is there a good way to tighten the strings on loose bales? (these are 'small' bales: 50-65 lb.) By loose, I mean if you pick up a bale the usual way - with one hand on each string - your hands will be 4-8 inches from the bale. Frequently the bale will then fall apart. If you try to stand on the bale there's hardly any support. We stack 8 high in our barn and it can be treacherous up on top.
The problem is the baler consistently gives 80% loose bales. Since our hay pasture is only 4 acres, a neighbor with equipment cuts, turns and bales our hay. He's working with old equipment and he is well aware of the problem.
We have tried several things without much luck. We did find that if we pinched the strings at the middle and then put a piece of pipe, metal rod, or a hay hook under the strings, and then turn it so it twists both of the strings, we can get a pretty snug bale. But then what? We haven't figured out how a good way to hold that tension so the bale can be moved.
We grow our own hay on a small (13 acres) 3 horse farm midway between Portland and Salem Oregon. Adding to the problem, we store the hay in a big dry barn, and then move some to the animal barn every 4-6 weeks. So it's a headache all year long.
Our neighbor does nice work, and pays good attention to my wife - who knows what she wants, and when for the horses. All that is good. But we get a LOT of 'banana' bales and broken bales - especially during stacking, unstacking, loading, and then re-stacking. The only time it isn't a big problem is picking them up off the field. But the loose strings often snag on the elevator tines at the top and the bale explodes.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. And I would be pleased to make a donation to any non-profit organization you might suggest that helps rescued and/or abused animals, especially horses.
Thanks very much, Dan
According to my hay-baling farmer friends, many of whom are nursing along some quite elderly equipment, the best way to deal with loose hay bales is to do everything possible to avoid getting them in the first place. There are many possible causes of loose bales, and for some of them, there are "preventions" - much preferable to after-the-fact solutions. The first, easiest, and most obvious is the one your neighbour has almost certainly already tried: checking and adjusting the twine tensioner if, indeed, his equipment HAS an adjustment for twine tension - there are some very old balers that don't have this feature.
Another possibility is that the interior of the bale chamber might have become corroded and rough over the years. If this is the problem, there are, it seems, two affordable options to improve this situation. The first would involve some purpose-manufactured paints - the local farm store may have them - which, when painted over rusty surfaces, change the surfaces from rough to smooth. The second option would be acquiring a chamber liner (again, the local farm store might have this or be able to order it), purpose-designed to strengthen, smooth, and otherwise compensate for corroded, rough bale chambers.
Here are a few suggestions provided more or less at random by people who were reminiscing about their past problems with old equipment:
Is your neighbour using a chain baler? it's possible to adjust the tension on the roller chains and create a tighter bale
What's pulling his baler? Sometimes an old baler does best with an old tractor that has less horsepower than the newer tractors. There seemed to be general agreement that a 50HP tractor pulling an old baler would help create better bales than a 90HP tractor. I'm guessing that this would be because in most cases, the slower the tractor's ground speed, the denser the bale will be - and with less horsepower, it's more likely that the tractor will be moving slowly. One farmer said that back in his hay-baling days, he often had to choose between going more slowly and getting denser, more tightly-packed bales, or going faster and getting a lot of loose bales, and that sometimes it made more sense to go as fast as possible, because loose bales were better than baling only half the field before the rain started...
Do any of the roller bearings need to be replaced?
Other suggestions involved the twine itself - changing to a heavier or lighter twine -and the twine tube position (and, of course, the above-mentioned twine tension adjustment). One older farmer remembered using inferior twine that stretched and would create loose bales from what should have been tight ones, but he also said that this all changed in the 1970s when better twine was made available, so I doubt that this could be your neighbour's problem.
Finally, one farmer mentioned that if the hay itself is dry and stemmy rather than leafy, it will probably come out of the baler as light, loose bales with loose strings.
That's all from the experts in the field, so to speak, and I don't know how much of it will be useful. ;-) Now I'll offer my own contribution. Since I have to re-stack my bales periodically in order to maintain easy access to the different types of hay, I've found it necessary to tighten loose bales on occasion... never more than half a dozen, though, and I really can't imagine what I would do if I were faced with an entire load of loose bales! But if you just have a few to tighten, you can do it with simple equipment: another person, a lot of twine, and a 2' square piece of plywood. Oh, and knee pads are helpful, too. The loose hay bale is carefully placed on end, over a long piece of twine. The younger and braver person (wearing knee pads) puts the piece of plywood on the bale and kneels on it to squash it down. Sometimes this works well. Sometimes it doesn't work at all - if the hay in the bale isn't fairly evenly distributed, or if the person with the knee pads isn't extremely careful and coordinated, the result can be a disaster, with the piece of plywood "surfing" down the hay as the bale falls apart.
I have heard about, but never seen, a much more practical version of this method: a bale press. It sounds to be extremely useful, and involves two people and one strong lever (the lever described to me was made from a length of 2x4) permanently attached to the wall of the hay shed. The bale is placed on end next to the wall, and one person uses the lever to squash the bale into submission whilst the other person tightens and re-ties the baling twine. I should think this method would also work with baling wire, if the second person could use a stick or something similar to twist and tighten the loose wires.
Now, as for your specific situation and question:
You already seem to have a good system for tightning the loose twine on individual hay bales ("We did find that if we pinched the strings at the middle and then put a piece of pipe, metal rod, or a hay hook under the strings, and then turn it so it twists both of the strings, we can get a pretty snug bale. But then what? We haven't figured out how a good way to hold that tension so the bale can be moved.").
I would suggest that perhaps the most practical answer to "But then what?" would be to place the offending hay bales on long pieces of twine before you tighten the original strings, and then have one person tighten and tie the NEW lengths of twine whilst the other person is maintaining the tension on the original pieces of twine to keep the bale compressed until it has been tightly tied. Once the new twine is securely in place around the compressed bale, you can remove the original twine and save the pieces for use around the farm (whatever you do, don't allow those loose pieces of twine to blow away into fields where they can become caught in, and cause damage to, farm machinery).
Jessica
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