Making Gorgeous Alfalfa with my Dad (Step by Step Guide)

[Applause] failing this particular field is very exciting for us it's a big day it is literally the feel 25 feet away from The Farmhouse that my dad still lives in and I grew up in so it's just it's a lot of fun when we do this field it's really well drained we have a bunch of field Tower running through it it grows a phenomenal crop we usually get we usually get four cuttings a year off of it most other pizzas we get two to three it's just a really nice special piece to us and hay is always great this particular cutting came in extremely thick with Alfalfa so being that it's only four like 4.6 Acres or something we were able to play with it and try to get the Alfalfa made just perfect just perfect [Music] you might be wondering how we got here and how I can use these audacious terms like perfect well you're in luck because after you give this video a thumbs up and subscribe if I'm going to walk you through how he made this Alfalfa the most finicky timely precise crop we make maybe not perfect but definitely good enough for who it's for the first step in this anxiety-ridden tear-inducing emotionally damaging Venture of making dry hay in Northeast Ohio we first scour multiple weather sources teasing us with at least four days of dry sunny weather to take the crop to at least below 20 moisture once a date has been offered by mother nature but absolutely not guaranteed because she will take away we set off in this instance with our mix match John Deere Moko and Massey Ferguson tractor alongside accommodating weather we hedge our Bets with using the best conditioning system We Believe exists the John Deere Steel on steel trilo rollers now this is a full contact roller the entire stem of the plants are crushed and not crimped this is going to really pester some cripping fanatics but it's our belief anyway after passing through the rollers we lay out the hay in a swath as wide as possible in an Ideal World we would be running self-propelled mowers and not running over already mode hay but we do not live in an ideal world we live in a world of out of control inflation and skyrocketing interest rates and skepticism and hesitation to make huge Investments so we make do with what we have and we make the best of it this tractor is new to us this year the 7715 and it runs the mower and now runs one of the Barons we're very happy with the way it is fitted to our operation now we'll move on to arguably the most controversial and we think important aspect of drying out alfalfa this is a Tedder you can call the act of using this tool tetting where if you are someone who likes to watch the world burn you can call it tethering the feels wrong anyway I failed to document the first pass with the tenor which was the morning after Mowing and when the nightly do was pretty well burned off and an RPM speed probably north of 500 to really get an even spread across the ground this footage is now the beginning of day three day one mowing day two tetting once and day three tending again but with the twist Mother Nature taketh and mother nature giveth she trick the meteorologist into thinking we had four days of nice weather but this morning we realized our time was cut short and the hay had to go today my dad went out and tetted this in a very cautious way as you can see the machine is not spinning very quickly he is hardly above an idol here and the theory behind this practice is to gently pick the hay up off the damp ground and help it air out better at this point in time we had to make a game day decision the hay was definitely not dry enough to rake and with tomorrow's looming feather rain we needed to do all we can to help dry the crop out surely there was a little bit more Leaf lost than if we hadn't tedded it a second time but a little bit of leaf loss is way better than rained on Hay the next day so that's the scenario we chose and it worked about four hours later we had a crop dry enough to roll into a windrow management of the rotary rake is extremely important at this point and few do it better than my dad he is at an idol right now and matching his ground speed to do a good job cleaning the hay up but also being as gentle as physically possible to the plants to maintain Leaf retention this 5075e John Deere is almost never unhooked from the rotary rake and you seldom see anyone driving this combination but my dad he claims it is one of his favorite tractors others on the farm do not raid it quite as highly it's a bit of a stiff ride with pretty much no room for drinks we know my dad truly likes it from an economic standpoint because he got such a good deal on it years ago that it has paid for itself countless times should he be wearing a hat probably but no one has ever seen my dad in a hat and you know what they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks and you saw the steps we took to doing that let's see how it came out in the bail foreign there's two sides to every Bale but there is a visual difference to a side of an alfalfa Bale the side that comes out of the Baler first usually has a lot better Leaf retention because it wasn't getting beaten into the Bale from behind the the way the plunger mechanism works it it doesn't quite get beat as bad so you'll see not a nice leaf on this not quite as much that side got beat and bashed and beaten bashed and this side was sort of doing the dashing but I guess it just ends up being a little nicer take a look at the bail nice uniform tight Bale about 34 inches yeah there's definitely a leaf Alfalfa is very much a Bittersweet quap for us to make as you saw earlier in the video every single thing we did to this field was very timely very thoughtful and there was a reason why we're doing it when we did we did a really great job getting a tremendous amount of leaves still on the plant into the windrow which is great that's a victory there and then when you bail unfortunately you do have some Leaf shatter but you just try to get enough to stay on the Bale to make it appropriate we sell to the equine market so yes tests and feed value is important but the Aesthetics of the bail and just some softness and leaf on the stem is usually enough to make people happy I know that's kind of funny but you're feeding the person as much as you're feeding the horse it seems and these are definitely making some beautiful bales they're probing pretty consistently uh 15 to 19 percent there is a lot of leaf on these bales you can tell that the hay is not as dry as maybe some six six percent first cutting but it's definitely dry enough that it should keep and it's just phenomenal color nice tight flakes my dad is running the Baler I bought a perfect speed you have under two inch flakes here looks to be maybe 18 on on this Bale or so so that'll feed real nice break apart beautiful about 45 pounds maybe a little heavier that one could be closer to 50. 34 inches and we'll hop in with the old man and see what he has to say about this there's not much room with Luke uh Lewis there he is down there the leaf free tension on the Bales is excellent that's what we want yep and the preservative to it we probably wouldn't be a whole day at near 20 but we'll give this a try yeah it's fun to see what it's going to keep yep I'm guessing it will there's enough dry stuff in it the moisture is just translocated and it should be all right oh there's beef left on the gator Alfalfa is a little different than you know basic first cutting grass that what did you do I got a lot of you filming but I hadn't I don't have you talking about it how did you treat this feel differently well you just got a treat Alfalfa ghetto because when you rig get tedded anything you want the machine going slow because if you don't you just beat the leaves off it and that's what we're trying to hold on is the leaves so when I ran the Tedder the first time through we ran it pretty fast because it was real green and they were hanging on just fine but uh the second time through we just we decided along and it almost sort of put in a little bit of windrow with the Tedder and then the same thing with the rake we just took it easy did you do any was there any timing involved in that well the first time we cut it there was still plenty of dew on it uh this next time we tended it we made sure the dude burned off and we fluffed it up just so the bottom would get dried out good too freaking I just idle along today and he did it it was he had to do just about completely burned off before we rolled it up just because we knew it was going to be cloudy today yep don't see it a tremendous amount of dust behind the Baler or anything that's coming in tonight it's up to get stuff dry in three days this time of year and this is only through bed now three days so we're pretty lucky so then we grow well pretty much exclusively Timothy Orchard and Alfalfa and uh some pure Timothy and then a lot of Timothy Workshop Alpha mixes yeah so this is coming in nearly pure Alfalfa there's a little bit of Orchard that shows what would you say that you like about this this type of prop conditioner what would you say that you maybe dislike or I would like to see a little bit more grass mixed in with it because it's just a a lot easier to keep the leaf retention on the Alfalfa if we have a little more grass in it this field was it was actually pretty darn thin this spring and I don't know what happened before the Alfalfa sure did come on in the second getting third cutting stuff you got me how that happened you guys saw on the opposite end of that is there anything that you you like about Alfalfa oh yeah it smells good yeah but it's dry it seems to actually when we get dry in the middle of summer it does seem to come back for some tonnage yeah it it definitely handles the dry conditions better because if you get a real dry month at least you're gonna have the Alfalfa it's coming up the grass almost goes dormant when it gets dry so here's my plan I am going to run one of the new brand new fail bearings and this is my first time in it this differs from the machines we used to run because the arkusen's made 20 or I'm sorry the arcuzins the d14s made 14bale bundles the Bale Baron makes 21 Bale bundles so you jam up 21 in there knotted up and they'd slide back down here it's actually pretty similar mechanisms to a large square baler if you're familiar with those at all you have your injector so you could call that you know your your stuffer arms or whatever of the large square that feeds the Bales up and then you have a large plunger that pushes it back and once it reaches a certain length or seven bundles long 21 Bales in total it ties It Off I have zero training on this machine no one showed me how to run it I'm hopping in with no no previous knowledge I'm diving in the Deep End right away and I'm learning how to swim I've been told it's fairly easy so I should be able to handle it right this machine functions off a uh small thousand PTO so when I turn the PTO on I'll be I'll want to run at a thousand RPMs and there's basically two main controls that you operate from the cab on hydraulic one we have the sides or I'm sorry it looks like we have the pickup so high jog 2 you can swing the machine left and right so I will swing it out and that's hydraulic too and that gives you some variability in trying to grab a bale I have my PTO on I have it running at it varies right about a thousand you can see so I believe all I have to do is press and hold that to get this to turn on automatic mode press and hold one second we are on auto mode as you can see the pickup is now spinning the table back there is spinning I'm only going uh two seven right now because I'm trying to film and feed the very first bail there you have it went in around the table stuffed it up and We're Off to the Races let's see how this goes and looking up at my mirror up there with his angle right at the pickup so I can see the veil is going right in that actually works pretty well okay this is far too difficult to do while holding the camera so I'm going to keep going a little bit and get the Drone up in there and then we'll see what's going on maybe I'll get out and talk about it thank you going now I got around the field one time so now I'm not fighting my spacing because there's no bails to the left of me all I'd have to do is Dodge a bundle when I finally drop it and I and I drop a bundle I hardly did right the very end so now this is very easy cruising along I'm going 8.2 I could be going much faster I'm just trying to get a deal from the machine speed is probably no issue for it I mean it's just gobbling it up we will get back over where I dropped the first bundle and we'll check out the A and we'll look inside the machine and try to figure out what's going on together warning one more and it is about to tie off so you should hear a beep in a second plunger compressed now we're tying off and we have a tied off bundle in the chamber while we have some time my old man is coming to take over for me so I'll just sit down and tell you my experience it was positive it was good this machine is really easy to operate I haven't had a single Bale jam up the ability to to twist the machine left and right pivot lets you get around corners and pick up bales that are otherwise a little bit difficult this machine is long so I would not want to be in a bunch of small Fields all day just this relatively open field but small was a little bit hard to open up but once you've got to open up and roll and it was just fine pretty much the only thing you're doing is watching I mean obviously you're watching all the terrain holes rocks out that you know you're paying attention but as far as the screen the performance of the machine you're watching this block fill up so it appears I have one in the initial tier of three I'll kick two more in that'll make six full tiers and we'll have one more tier three to kick in and that'll be 21 Bales in the bundle and then this will tie off and there'll be something up here that says like initializing plunger compression compression and it counts to somewhere around a thousand and it ties off and that's all you're pretty much watching for there doesn't seem to be cycle times or spots where you need to slow down at least not in this light or third cutting maybe first cutting you could reach the capacity but this is pretty much no problem for the machine to handle there's maybe I don't know 50 or 60 more Bales out here and I'll walk behind the machine while my dad's using it maybe throw the Drone up in the air and that'll be it here is the very first bundle we made out of this field look at that wow that's really Prime that's really phenomenal stuff it's tainted by these first three bales of second cut Orchard Grass which is okay uh when Bagels stay in the chamber of a Baler for a while they just get squatty and small and compacted and all that stuff so yeah you can see the string kind of slipped off the first Bale but I guarantee the bundle will still hold together and it's it is what it is very tight strings here like banjos and as you can see we have another bundle about to fall out of the machine I assume one or two more plunges and it'll drop down that's some nice looking hey look at the leaf on it Dad it's I mean that is really phenomenal phenomenal that's great so I was gonna let you take over and fill me a little bit [Applause] a little it's pretty easy to run that's pretty good yeah right on or just ride along right alongside in my amateur ignorance I forgot and I didn't realize that we had lifted up the back roller table that the bundle slide off of so I should have taken this adjustment on both sides and put it in this elongated hole so there's some bounce and compression with the Springs the reason it's up is because when we're backing into one of our barns it's raised a little high and we're not worried about scuffing the bottom if we were handling these bundles differently meaning they didn't stay standing upright like Dad if we had the kicker on the bottom pulled out and it was flipping the bundle sideways and Landing so all 21 Bales are touching the ground that's when you run it higher because it needs a little more fall to to flip essentially I'm just saying that because that's what I've been told I've never tried it before is there room for me huh [Music] foreign hey where are you going he's not gonna let you in he's almost done why don't you get on here come on no hey why don't you get on the gator [Applause] as far as the handling of these new bundles we are doing it the exact same way uh grabbing them over top and still grabbing three bundles at a time so instead of 42 we were actually handling 63 at a time and these bundles are extremely tight so you have very little sag even with the added weight so I'll go grab the last two stick them together I already have my other Tower going on over here and the outside round specifically that my dad is is bundling up right now I'm gonna have those separated because that was a double row there's a little more volume going into the crop I don't think it was able to dry quite as well so I'll just have them separate and when I go to check on these maybe three to four days from now I'll check those and if those are fine I know that everything else is going to be just fine because there's no reason it should have been shouldn't have been even drier like that together go grab the last one so obviously there is a 1 in 21 chance that you would end the field with exactly 21 Bales right so that's a little bit less than a five percent chance and unfortunately we needed six more so we came up to the shop grabbed some spare Bales and got a full bundle in there tied off so what's really neat about these machines is you can actually go up there pull two pins loosen up the chain the chamber and we should be able to slide that bundle right out so so it's real simple up here just two pins they have little you know Clips on them it bins out pry it loose put a pin back in just to hold it and if you're strong enough dad you should be able to pull that out yeah I'll let you do it it might help if the ramp was taken out of so it's shock absorbed foreign [Applause] I think this took me in Justin oh [Applause] I'll pinch you with the Jelly Hammer okay there we go that's all there is to it cleaning the Baler out

Channel: Farming Insider

Views: 340,991

Keywords: hay, massey ferguson, john deere, hay farming, tractors, bales, straw, big operation, big farm, mega farm, semis, trailers, hauling, grains setup, big farming, making hay, alfalfa, two string, moco, jcb, baron, bundling, horse hay

Id: MCA5LZKs3Ss

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022