Anyone put up hay without baling

i have small pastures and a lot of scattered areas that always need mowing. does anyone put up small quantities of hay without a baler ? i'm thinking of a buckrake on my forklift to carry it several hundred feet to the nearest pasture...any ideas on this.

Sure. That's how our forefathers did it (and my actual father, when I was about 7). Lots of work, but its fine. Gather it together somehow (buck rake is fine), pitch it on a trailer, then pitch it into a pile in the haymow or in the barn, and feed it out over the winter.

We, until 1950, windrowed it, loaded it onto the hay rack with a hayloader pulled behind the hayrack, took it up in slings into the barn. Lot of people who did not have room enough in the barn stacked it outside. You would see small stacks strung around the yards and fields like you see rounds bales now days.

Id this girl can do it, surely you can, check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwfLJ6Cbj2c

John T
Putting up loose hay

Old School/ Traditional Amish around here still use hayloaders and put hay in loft loose.
The rest of the Amish/ Menonite sects use engine driven hay balers.
Loren, the Acg.

One heap strong woman.

We did many acres in the 50's and 60's. 1 man on the farmhand loader and 1 or 2 men in the stack.

Wow, that gal can put up some hay and do it in bare feet too.

Greg

We still fork odd scraps onto the truck or a wagon behind the atv. Too much trouble in some corners to rake and bale.

Used to do a little bit back in the 60s. When we cleaned the mow at my Grandfather's barn, there was some loose hay in one of the corners. Had to be at least 40-50 years old. Not sure how much food value was still there, but it was as green as the day they put it in the mow.

She sure can handle that fork. Stan

In the Little Blackfoot Valley around Avon and Elliston MT, they still put hay up with beaverslides.

(quoted from post at 21:53:26 10/10/14) In the Little Blackfoot Valley around Avon and Elliston MT, they still put hay up with beaverslides.

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do.....just leave it in the field & let 'em eat it during the winter.

I helped my 75 year old father put up a couple small trailer loads for the Donkeys about a month ago.

It was cut with a bush hog and raked with an old IH dump rake.

The neighbor was telling me he told his dad he wanted to by a baler. His dad told him he didn't want one because with a pitch fork you can pick up just the amount you want to.

And why buy a car when you can ride a horse to town?

Put a lot of it up during my youth. And I'm not all that old.Four of us teenage boys on the farm, sooo Dad bought a McKee Harvester System. Just a portable blower unit with a pick up and a 20' box wagon. Load up and go to the barn, Change pipe and a trap door and start pitching hay. Blows it right into the barn. We used it for years. Boy was it fun feeding in the winter.

We stacked loose hay in the field until Dad bought a Case hand tie wire baler in 1946.

We used two teams of horses to stack the hay. Dad ran the bucker with one team to bring the hay to the overshot stacker that myh Grandpa designed and built. When I was 6, I drove the team that pulled the stacker up and over to drop the hay on the stack. My two older brothers used forks to level the hay as the stack built up in the field.

In the winter, we used a hay knife to cut down through the stack so we could load the hay on the hay sled to haul the hay to feed the livestock. All labor intensive, but it was about the best available at the time.

We do it with small quantities. It's actually kinda fun if you don't have much else going on. We do it just like in that video.

We'll do about 4 acres like that. It goes a lot quicker than you'd think.

forking it out by hand is a pain. You gain a new appreciation for just how much hay gets compacted into one bale. But even using a forklift, you'll have to get good at judging the amounts. Otherwise you'll tend to under-feed.

I don't think there's any real trick to it. Just climb up on your pile from time to time and tamp it all down as you stack it. It doesn't really self-compress very well.

I will say it's not the kind of work you want to be doing if you've got any kind of heart condition.

There is a good reason balers were invented!

That's where I'm from. We went to round bales in 1976. My distant cousins didn't use a beaverslide this year for the first time. They had been using some round bales for several years. I have no idea why they didn't switch to all round bales much sooner. We could do round bales with one person in the same time it took five people to do with the beaverslide.

Your remark about being fun to feed loose hay reminded me of my youth also. Dad used a hay knife (kind of like a shovel with sickle sections) to cut the hay in the mow so you could pull it loose with a fork. Pitched it down the chute til there was a pile to the ceiling in the cowstable. In the mow where the hay was cut sometimes there'd be a "wall" of cut hay 10 or more feet high. It WAS fun as a kid to climb up on a ladder and jump into the loose hay before it settled. We used a buck rake and slings.

I like to use straw to cover the ground in my garden between rows. Straw has gotten above my budget now. I use a 10' rotary cutter. Cut about 4 inches above the ground. Let dry. Then I use a 80" root grapple and let the tines slid on the ground and go down each row and it piles in the grapple. Shed is close by so I just drive under the shed and make a pile. I cut before the grass heads out so I don't bring seed in the garden. With the shed beside the field I can move a lot of hay fast.

(quoted from post at 00:44:51 10/11/14) i have small pastures and a lot of scattered areas that always need mowing. does anyone put up small quantities of hay without a baler ? i'm thinking of a buckrake on my forklift to carry it several hundred feet to the nearest pasture...any ideas on this.

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Small quantities no. My mother was in the hayfield every year for over 60 years. I "made" her stop for health reasons about 10 years ago, she had back surgery years before, was causing pain riding the tractor, couldn't turn her head to look back which didn't work with mowing, well couldn't hardly get on the tractor, couldn't unplug it herself if she'd hit something, really wasn't healthy enough anyway, etc. She didn't want to quit. They did a small amount with those small round balers (roto?) earlier (have it yet). But horses were involved for some of it. Large stacks mostly, those big hay cages with the hay heads on them that got winched to the top (still have them). They used those shorter wheel dump rakes, mounted 3 on a tractor, one on each side, one in the back, dump them by hand and try to line the rows up (have the rakes, several, and the mount on a B yet). They moved to the longer hydraulic dump rakes. My uncle and family said he built the first one of those, but "Rowse" got it patented first, he tried but they beat him to it and made him stop. Saw several of my Uncle's rakes around. Later with the Farmhand stacker stacked until my dad died about 20 years ago. I didn't get in the hayfield as early as some, because dad liked to yell/cuss at me very much for everything and nothing, so Mom kept me out until I was probably 11 or so. I ran the rake and later mowed with the mounted double 7 on a JD 530, still never did it right but by that time I could just ignore the "noise". We didn't have a sweep so I'd rake piles as best I could. Used the Farmhand stacker as a sweep. A few years before that they'd have help and a sweep sometimes, did well over 100 stacks. About '96 switched to working with the cousins, they'd bring a couple tractors and a 510 JD round baler, then they'd take back a couple of my tractors, rake, mover, mowers and do theirs and their neighbor's. I didn't start doing my own until '02, then a couple years after that I lost the help.

The stacks were fed by loading on a cable and rack then forked off. Later with a loader, then moved with the stackmover, also had a feeder that went all the way around them. I bought my 2620 Haybuster new in 2000, much better way to feed in my opinion. Nice even row of hay and they can all feed at once without having to knock each other over. Little easier than pitch forks.

And on the eighth day-God created balers.

Well in my opinion a baler is only mandatory if you plan to sell the hay as no one will buy it otherwise.

For a guy who wants to hay 2 to 3 acres for his own use then the old ways are they only ways that make fiscal sense. Two acres could easily be hayed with nothing more than a hand scythe, hand rake, pitch fork, and a $5 cheapo tarp to collect it with and use as a drag. Laughingly there are lots of idiots out there buying a $25,000 tractor and a $15,000 baler (all on credit so add interest) to bale 2 to 3 acres. These geniuses think they are making money too on their enterprise. Sadly most of them have kids and that money could be better served in a college investment fund for the kids.

No reason you can not put up hay the real old fashioned way as it worked for thousands of years (prior to the mid 1940's) assuming you willing to put in the physical labor to do it. Sadly today we have too many lazy people who are not willing to work that hard. (Ever notice that you do not see a bunch of fat people in the pictures posted from the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, 1950's).

Now once the acreage meets a certain minimum level then more modern mechanized ways are certainly justified, economically feasible, and certainly warranted.

Got a couple pictures (ignore the weeds, hopefully I'll get around to spraying next year). If you could find an old dump rake or something similar somewhere, you can make some decent sized piles with those. Just depends on how much you actually have to do. I'd think they'd make something like them for pulling with an atv or something maybe, never looked at yard stuff like that.

I have lusted after a hay loader for years. When I get one and get it restored I will get a new blade for my snath then watch out!

If she would hit a rock or groundhog hole I think she would have a stomach ache.