Pallets and square bales hay

My friend with horses recently had back surgery and is restricted on what he can lift.

He likes to feed with square bales in winter. He buys his hay. I was thinking it might be nice if he would stack and strap hay to pallets and unload them from trailer with his tractor with forks.

Has anyone tried doing this?

Might be better if you feed his horses for him.

Get his wife to do it. Chances are horses were her idea anyway

Taking initiative to his medical condition might be all he needs to make it worse following your lead.

somebody has to load the dispensory device.
get on and off the tractor
up and down
bounce around
fighting in pain to satisfy some better way of doing things
all the while making it worse

hire him a central american laborer

GEO-TH he might find someone that uses a Bale Bandit. Several on here know more about them than I do but they band small squares in cubes of [I think] 21 bales. That way he could load/unload hay with forks without having to deal with pallets.

I used to do that at our other place with horses, difference being that we already had the hay delivered and stacked in the front barn. I would stack each layer of 3 or 4 on cut ends, on a full decked wood pallet, changing each direction on every layer to interlock them better.

I can't recall how many bales, thought it was actually 21 per, but it's been too long now. The stack was as high as I would dare to carry, but reasonably stable with uneven terrain to negotiate when bringing the stack to the back barn to keep it stocked for the hired hands that came in on the weekend, save them time from getting hay from the front barn to the back barn. We had a nice spot to land the pallet, did it for years like this after getting a set of quick attach forks for the small tractor.

I feed my horses rolled bales, placed in hay ring with roof over it. I even rigged a hand winch to lift hay ring when I replace bales ( I also have back problems.) I will construct a hay ring shelter for the cow hay this summer when pasture dries out.

Sounds like your friend needs to hire a helper. No matter what he does the hay has to be lifted at least a couple times and moved. Might be time to look into feeding round bales.

Geo, which are you asking about? feeding? or unloading the truck when his delivery comes in?

[b:971eac3f29]Mutt and Jeff[/b:971eac3f29] -- Excellent and thoughtful reply.

Wonder if he could get the hay supplier to shrink wrap the bales on a pallet?

A guy up the road from me bales and sells hay. He has a fancy attachment he can grab with the loader and move a nice sized stacked row of small "normal" square bales. It has tines that hyd. operated to go grab into each bale and hold them in the stack.

Lets see if this comes up. This is like the neighbors.
Untitled URL Link

Mike M's link shows the unit and I see this in the Ebay ad ....

"No returns, but backed by eBay Money back guarantee"

Hmmm, sounds like nobody will take the unit back but you could complain and get your money back (and keep the unit since you cannot return it). Doesn't make sense to me. Sounds too good to be true.

That was the first decent picture I found of one. Likely worth the time to shop around. I see John Deere even offered one a model AB16 but I could not get picture to load.

I think $5k is more than this guy want to spend. Front forks sell for about $350.

I think I can modify his 1914 barn so he could unload a pallet onto a second pallet on wheels and roll hay to where he feeds his horses. If he couldn't roll it we could use a wench to pull it.

My back is in worse shape than his. There are things I can do and things I should do. Lifting have and using a fork my back will talk to me all night.

He'll turn 75 next month.

So old guys need to use their brains instead of back.

He used round in summer. Horses want fed inside barn in winter so he uses about 400 squares in winter.

DELIVERY?? He is lucky to find hay and he
has to haul, load, unload and put it in
the center of his 1914 post beam barn.
All using his back.

So far it sounds like no one has tried
using a pallet.

His hay suppliers use their hay for cattle. Why would the farmers buy a bale bandit?

He's lucky to talk a farmer into sell him hay.

(quoted from post at 15:30:59 02/08/19) His hay suppliers use their hay for cattle. Why would the farmers buy a bale bandit?

He's lucky to talk a farmer into sell him hay.

Click to expand...

If you have said how many bales he feeds each day, and how and where he has to feed them, I've missed it. Stored in a hay loft or where? Fed out on the ground, in a rack, manger or where?

A standard pallet may not work, but we made a custom one once for a different use. It was 4' x 8' and we move it with a bale fork on a 3 point hitch. That alone would probably haul 15 to 20 small square bales.

Another option might be to stack up to 50 bales or so on a 4 wheel flatbed hay wagon and drag that around feeding them were they fall?

Or any other modest sized 2 wheel trailer, unless you can't drag that through lots and mud?

Lots of ways to help him. I'm of the mindset that anybody that age that still has the gumption to get up and go ought to be helped somehow to keep them active.

Just put a hay elevator from the door to the barn. Run hay up elevator to mow or just drop them on the barn floor. If left down as much as possible and dropped on a few bales placed there first it will not break many and since he is feeding it anyway no big deal.

(quoted from post at 15:43:44 02/08/19)

(quoted from post at 15:30:59 02/08/19) His hay suppliers use their hay for cattle. Why would the farmers buy a bale bandit?

He's lucky to talk a farmer into sell him hay.

Click to expand...

If you have said how many bales he feeds each day, and how and where he has to feed them, I've missed it. Stored in a hay loft or where? Fed out on the ground, in a rack, manger or where?

A standard pallet may not work, but we made a custom one once for a different use. It was 4' x 8' and we move it with a bale fork on a 3 point hitch. That alone would probably haul 15 to 20 small square bales.

Another option might be to stack up to 50 bales or so on a 4 wheel flatbed hay wagon and drag that around feeding them were they fall?

Or any other modest sized 2 wheel trailer, unless you can't drag that through lots and mud?

Lots of ways to help him. I'm of the mindset that anybody that age that still has the gumption to get up and go ought to be helped somehow to keep them active.

Click to expand...

Modirt, have you gotten out of this whether the question is about unloading a delivery? or daily feeding? or both?

Putting bales on a pallet to move to barn does not solve the problem of feeding them. Most of the time feeding is one or two bales at a time. Why would you want to pull a loaded wagon around for a couple of bales. Still have to get them off wagon.

Sounds like he needs a good neighbor, hired hand or get rid of horses. Some times choices are not always pleasant.

(quoted from post at 18:12:22 02/08/19) I think $5k is more than this guy want to spend. Front forks sell for about $350.

I think I can modify his 1914 barn so he could unload a pallet onto a second pallet on wheels and roll hay to where he feeds his horses. If he couldn't roll it we could use a wench to pull it.

Click to expand...

Good luck with that. Last wench I had wouldn't even pull her own weight.

What goes in as feed must come out again. Will he be able to handle the manure, do all the other chores to care for the the horses, or ride any horses before his back is well healed? If he can't ride and no one else that rides is willing or able care for the horses, is it time to consider finding either a temporary or a permanent new home for the horses?

[b:dd0c230b6c]
[i:dd0c230b6c]Modirt, have you gotten out of this whether the question is about unloading a delivery? or daily feeding? or both?[/i:dd0c230b6c][/b:dd0c230b6c]

Nope....I don't think it was ever made clear, but it sounded like he was thinking to load bales on pallets at the source, then unload and stack bales in the barn with a tractor using a front end loader with pallet forks. Presumably, that would be stacking them on the ground in the center alley of this 100 year old barn. Not sure how they were going to be fed, but perhaps off these pallets. In our area, 400 bales of hay would get about 6 to 8 horses through the winter months.

Have been thinking about it, however, and if he is feeding 400 bales a year, that is a lot of pallets to be moving around. If standard pallets, and you could get 10 bales to stay put, that is still about 40+ pallets. Might be doable. If they were bound together, not much different than moving the smaller big round bales.

Part of my interest in this is I'm selling all my hay to horse hay customers, one of which is a 70+ year old widow down the road, plus several other ladies in the area, all of which hand me $100 bills or good checks upon delivery. One thing they all have in common is the inability to handle even these small square bales if they are too heavy. In that, they are no different than a big guy with a bad back.

So I'm always interested in ways to make it easy on them if it means value added to me. One hinted she might pay as much for a 40 pound bale as one weighing 50 pounds, since it was easier for her to handle a 40 pound bale. Hmmm.....that sounds like a way to increase profits just by packaging.

Until I got involved, I never paid much attention to the barns they were building to house these horses. Most of them are modified metal clad pole barns, with hay stored inside at ground level, which creates two hay feeding problems for them. Hay is stored inside at ground level, meaning they have to isolate their high dollar hay from the ground to avoid spoilage, then have to move it horizontally to feed it.

I'm thinking they would all be better off building well ventilated, two story loft barns to store the hay in a high and dry, well ventilated loft, then to feed it, simply drop it down chutes into a hay manger in each stall.

But that still leaves the daily mucking chores if they keep their nags in box stalls, plus it is unreal how much condensation shows up once horses are moved indoors and housed in box stalls. With an uninsulated, metal clad building, there are many, many days when it will be raining inside the building from all the moisture condensation. There goes your hay again.

Modirt, I used to sell a lot to horse people with ladies doing most of the work. My wife used to call them my Hay-babes. The barns were rarely designed for ease of hay handling. The ideal to me was a set-up where I could pull my wagon up to the front of a barn behind my truck, raise my elevator to a door at the upper level floor, and run them up with one or two in the barn and me on the wagon. One fellow who used to put up a lot of barns had the second floor recessed inside so that you looked up to the underside of the roof. This meant that the elevator had to be on the ground at the door entrance which meant another handler, thus more money per bale.