hay combustion

how long would it take for wet hay to catch fire?
how long would you know your safe?

its squared baled hay

i finally started my first cutting and i allmost know i got it in the barn just a little wet, though when twistin a handfull it crunched like it was plenty dry, but there was some clover in it. it cured for 2-3 days

If it was mine I would put my hand in the middle of a bale.You will know if its heating up.Be careful because you could get burned if it is.

do this , use all the availble dry floor space you can find STACK ON EDGE WITH CUT EDGE UP a spread hands distance from one another , GET 50lbs SALT from feed store AND SPRINKLE LIBERALLY ON THE TOP ( one bag may do 250 bales ). leave bales undisturbed ..Fans will help ( TURNING ONLY CONFUSES THE MOISTURE AND ACCELLERATES MOLDING ).. IN 2 weeks DRY WEATHER ,(NOT a rainyaz week such as now ) all should be ok to put in regular stack .... and ALWAYS TRY to wait for a 4 day window of clear weather before cutting hay ....

I've had some trouble with moisture over the years with mostly 2nd cut, in ideal weather conditions, it varies, field to field, wet areas in fields etc., on that note I try to check carefully, even then it happened last year, really nice 2nd cut thick grasses, several days of clear sunny days, light winds, 60-70 F, full sun on the fields, I used the tedder and then side delivery rake, one small field it was borderline, long story short, I've found sometimes you really have to check the windrows and use care when raking, darned hay was cut, left in the swath, 2 days, tedded, then raked, still some wet bales.

I had another guy run the baler and I hand stacked the wagon, you could easily tell by the bale weight, what was going on, so I separated what i could when I loaded the truck for delivery to our barn, then separated them at the barn, I reduced the loss, but in a few hundred bales I found a couple of warm or hot ones, you definitely want to check those bales with your hands for heat. In the past, I received hay on the wagon and when stacking, I had 23 wet bales, I left one to see if it would heat, the others I opened the bales and spread on tarps, fed when dry after 2 weeks, (horses) There can be lots of variables, just don't take any chances, any questionable bales, separate them dry em down, salt or discard, it's not worth it.

Seems every time I get involved with 2nd cut this issue arises for one reason or another. The guy I work with on this has just got a Kuhn rake, supposed to be better than the old NH side delivery, we shall see LOL !

You can get away with some moisture in hay if it has not ben rained on, but rained on hay must be dry. 4 to 21 days is the danget peroid for combustion. drive a steel rod into the pile then pull it out and check it for heat.

The cut edge direction doesn't matter. The salt is a waste of time and money. Fans and ventilation make all the difference. Turning doesn't help but it doesn't confuse the moisture. If you can get them on pallets or a slatted floor even better.

The farmers here who have stack drying fans can get away with an extra % or 2 moisture vs us normal folks.

Even better is proprionic acid or the other type on your baler when baling high moisture hay.

My own temp probe sees peak temps in wet hay at about day 4 then tapers off.

If it is wet hay buried in a stack, it will stay hot for months and catches when the stack is opened and a rush of oxygen enters.

Any heavy bales stay out 2 weeks at our barn or are directly fed.

It has only taken a fistful of wet green hay in the middle of a stack to start a fire in many cases.

About a month ago I was traveling north on I-77 near Charleston WVa and came across a traffic slowdown due to a hay fire. A semi with a large closed trailer (53ft?) had been packed with OLD hay and you could see where the front end of the trailer had a huge burn hole through the side of the trailer just behind the driver. The fire dept was on site and had the bulk of the load spread out all along the shoulder and first lane of pavement and you could easily see that the hay was NOT freshly baled. There was lots of smoldering still evident. Sure brings home the dangers of packing hay into a closed-in trailer.

I'd bet dollars to donuts if you baled hay in Kentucky this year its too wet. Crunching doesnt tell anything. Its a good technique for west of the Mississippi River but here, if it crunches that just means your barn may or may not burn down. As to hazards, I've noticed the first couple of weeks are usually when bad things begin to happen. Give it a month at least before disturbing.

Moisture testers are cheap compared to losing a crop of hay, or a barn.

An old insurance adjuster once said he never investigated a barn fire but but where new hay wasn't stacked against old hay. He recommended the new hay be stored a foot away from old hay.

..and the cattle love the salted hay! I Had some tough hay that I stacked cut edge up and salted it at one end of my mow. The rest of the hay was nice green dry mixed hay. On into the edge of winter I was feeding and throwing bales down off each end of the mow into the mangers below..I heard a lot of commotion and went down to check,,darned cattle were all shoving and fighting for a spot at the end where the salted hay was dropped..they do love it...salted peanuts or plain? No choice there!

Just curious about that insurance adjuster
comment. If a barn burns up, how can you tell
which hay was where?

I always worry about mine too. I'm no farmer, kinda got thrown into it after my wifes grandfather died. But I've put some bales in the loft that I thought were too wet. 2 bales out of 1000 were a little moldy. I was told by the old farmer down the road to stack "damp" bales on their end in the barn. He said his dad would put bales up that he was sure would burn the barn down and never did.

I was told by another person to put pickling salt inbetween the stack layers.

So far stacking them on end in the barn has worked out pretty good. Although they don't stack quite as nice. So I throw all the heavy bales over to another part of the barn and stack a whole bin on end.

Has worked ok for the last 5 years that I've been doing this. We've only had 2-3 bales that were just barely moldy.

I baled some oats for feed and that was a bad idea. They were green when I cut them and I let it dry and it was really dry. Twisting the stalks would break off easily. So I baled it. After going through the baler you'd a thought it rained on them. I feed them to the neighbors cattle. He said there wasn't enough left of it to bed a cat. Musta been good stuff.

I suppose some day I'll actually get it all figured out. Maybe by the time I'm 90.

I'm going to have to disagree with you about the salt, Ken. I've done this many times over the years and it works like a charm. Now mind you, this is for hay that is just a little too wet, not sopping wet. I did this late last summer with some really nice 3rd alfalfa/orchardgrass mix hay. It needed just a few more hours of drying weather to make it perfect but it clouded up and was threatening to rain so we baled all the racks full and had what was left round baled. I stacked all of this (800+ square bales) in the center of my barn mow. We stacked then on edge in a normal stack, no spaces between the bales, 6-7 layers high. (My experience with this is that it doesn't matter if the cut side is up or down. When the bales keep coming up the conveyor the guy in the barn doesn't have time to check each bale for that.) We salted each layer as we stacked it with regular feed salt. Then we left the mow doors and windows open for awhile after that and let the Minnesota winds blow thru the barn. It kept very well! The bales were heavy when we took them out this past winter and I thought that they would be hard in the middle. We checked several and they weren't - just really nice well-preserved hay. It sold very well at the hay auction - several different persons bought it over the course of the winter and they all loved it - most of them were feeding it to horses!

any hay that I have ever opened up to check and found that it was heating up was also turning yellow. That made it look old. Is four days old?

Probably based on the owner's statements; wouldn't dry hay have a lower kindling temperature than wet hay?

We used to put up about 20,000 bales a year. Most of it went into our barn which was so big we would just drive the loads of hay into the barn and unload them on both sides, about 17 to 20 bales high. Then we would stack the center full.

Sometimes we would put the hay up on the wet side of ok if we were dodging wet weather.

If you would walk into the barn a few days after it had all been stacked and stick your arm into the stack between a couple of bales sometimes it would be too hot to keep your arm in there. But as long as you didn't open the stack up it wouldn't catch fire.

Sometimes the next winter when we were feeding that hay you could see from the color that it had been pretty hot.

B'duckie

The simple solution is to not try to be lucky. Leave the hay in the field until it's dry enough to bale.

it was put up the 3 rd and 4th of may, i believe its ok, i ve kept n eye on it pretty good, no heatin in the bales or in the stack, then day it was raked, it was really windy, (blowing windrows out) some is goin to be great hay, some i believe will be a little on the moly side
thanks for the replys

I have put hay a little damp and have salted the layers and put really damp bales aside or just three them to the cows. barn always had open sides. I also think the salt helps to slow the heating up of the hay and the cows do like it.

He can tell cause it takes days to burn up a large pile of hay. It will still be setting there in a smoldering lump long after the barn is gone - dont ask me how I know.

We never checked the "crunch". Always went by the look and feel. When we got a wet bale it got thrown aside or stacked on the edge of the mow. We did put up some wet hay a few times, salted each layer, some came out a little moldy. If we weren't sure, we would leave it on the wagon for a week. Any hot bales got thrown aside.

When I lived in Southern Ohio I sold hay to a lot of horse people in Kentucky. Would never have survived the eighties without that income. We put up fifty to sixty thousand bales a year. I flat stacked some ONCE it did not keep as well and the strings where in bad shape when we loaded it out. Edge stacked hay has the stems going vertically and they DO wick the moisture better this way. Look it up on University of Kentucky ag web site.
As for salting high moisture hay. I have salted all of my own feeding hay for close to forty years now. It will keep better and longer. Plus the palatability is better. Also I don't like salt blocks rusting and rotting out my feeders.