Final cutting of hay. Will the Sicklebar mower do a good job?

[Music] [Music] so [Music] this [Music] wow hello guys my name is evan and this is country view acres so today we are doing our third and final cut of hay this year this is the first year that we have cut hay and we've been using a nine foot sickle bar mower from new holland to cut the hayfield and i've gone through this thing three times i think so far trying to get it in good working order so i'm hoping today is my lucky day and that i have a good cutting of hay so it's about 4 30 in the afternoon the field should be completely dry there shouldn't be any dew or moisture left in the field and i'm hoping that this sickle bar will cut the grass and the alfalfa just fine so in the last video where i worked on the sickle bar mower i adjusted the lead and the lead is kind of the angle and the tip out there should be slightly angled forward than the this end of the sickle bar and i adjusted that and afterwards still i had several people saying the lead still needed adjusted and i saw one comment where they suggested that maybe it wasn't the sickle bar mower maybe it had to do with the sway of the three-point arms and i think they hit it directly on the head this tractor does not normally have three-point arms these are an aftermarket add-on and you can't stop the sway on these arms there's no there's no chain there's no turnbuckles there's nothing to stop the sway so it sways freely so as this thing is mowing down i think the sway arms are actually allowing this to go backwards because it can sway see how much sway there is in those arms that's that's a lot so i don't think i'm going to fix the lead problem with the sickle bar mower and that may end up really hurting me where it may still not want to cut right just because of that so we're just gonna have to you know fire it up and try it out see what happens so this being our first year cutting hay we only did three acres of hay this year and we may expand that here in the future but uh this is a grass and alfalfa field it's both plants are mixed up in here but alfalfa does really good in dry weather and it has been really dry this summer very dry so there is grass mixed up in here but it is shorter than the alfalfa and this is uh this is september 14th and around here i don't think you really want to cut hay past uh the end of september because you want this to get uh to to grow back a little bit from being cut and to get healthy and everything before winter hits so that's why it's going to end up being our last cutting of hay but the the alfalfa has got these little purple blooms that have that started on the alfalfa so when the alfalfa goes to bloom that's typically when people cut their hay but let's go ahead and fire up the tractor and get cutting [Music] so uh [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well i think the uh i think the sickle bar mower cut pretty decently i think it's the best cut that i've got on the hayfield yet with it now at the beginning of cutting the hay field this is i started at 4 30 in the afternoon and that side over there in the trees stays shaded during the day and it was wet and we've had a really dry probably last four weeks has been really dry no rain we finally got rain two days ago so i've let it dry for two days plus you know we get heavy due in the morning and that should have been dry by now you know and no it was still wet so it wanted to clog on me for sure so it took me about three passes i think before i finally you know on the fourth pass i finally got out of the shade and got into dry grass and then it was running pretty good um but i wasn't leaving like a good path for the for the sickle bar mower to ride in for the for the shoe here to ride in so i adjusted the swath board up here i tried to get it to roll the the hay over better than it did and i and it did improve after i bent that that's that swath board a little bit and after that i think it ran pretty decently i'm still not running real fast i'm probably um i'm probably only doing you know an acre an hour or something of course i'm running cameras and and stuff like that as well so i'm stopping for those things but i think i'm only going maybe three miles an hour is all i'm going so it still seems like it's a fairly slow process to be able to to cut this field with the sickle bar mower but overall i think i think i'm pretty happy with the way it's performed today and i don't know if there's really too much more that i want to do to it i think that i think this is probably about the best that i can ask for now this swath board um this swath board um i do need to probably tweak on that a little bit it actually when it when you lift up the sickle bar it actually hangs down a little too far so when you back up it kind of wants to catch sometimes so i need to adjust the swath board a little bit and try to just tweak that maybe a little bit more but other than that i think i'm pretty happy with it so um yeah last hayfield of the season and uh this should be pre-sold i need to call the guy and uh see make sure he still wants to buy it he actually talked about bringing his hay wagon over that way i could just go ahead and load his hay wagon as i did the hayfield and then i wouldn't have to uh you know unload it again when he and load his trailer when he came over so that would actually save me a little bit of work if he brought that over but uh yeah i think i'm uh i think i'm pretty happy with the uh with the way it it ran at least in the where the areas where it was dry so i think this is about the best i can probably ask for for now i know i've had a lot of people ask me why don't i buy a disc bind well a disc bind is a whole other price level and um you could spend 10 15 000 buying a discbine and i've i've bought this for like 375 dollars and then i've done a bunch of repairs to it and uh yeah eventually i may look into a hay bind instead of running the sickle bar mower but i think the more and more i use it uh the more comfortable i'll become with it and i think you know i think i'll be fine with it for now i mean we only doing three acres for now and we may add another three acres here in a year so i need to make up my mind if i want to do that next year if i want to wait one more year before i add another three acres of hay but yeah i think that's it for today's video guys i'm pretty happy with the way the sickle ball ran this time definitely out of all three cuts this year is definitely the best cut i've got out of this thing so anyway thanks for watching guys i'll see you next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Country View Acres

Views: 348,008

Rating: 4.9131799 out of 5

Keywords: Homestead, farm, farmstead, hobby farm, self sufficient, homesteading, rural life, country life, farm life, New holland 451, New holland, Sicklebar mower, Sicklebar, Mower, Cutting hay, Alfalfa hay, Grass hay, Hay field, Allis chalmers, D17, Antique, Cutting hay field, Mowing hay, Alfalfa

Id: dGIeA4CGYv4

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020