Round hay bales

With my new cattle, to make it through the Winter, I need more hay than the 10 tons of small bales currently in the barn.  Since I was borrowing Dan's trailer to move concrete rings, I decided to find and buy some large round hay bales.  The large round bales will come in handy for the times I may need to put out hay to last multiple days instead of feeding some small bales daily to the cattle.

I found some 1100-1200 lb large round bales for $80 each.  That works out to $133 to $145 a ton. 

2013 first-cutting grass hay- 5'X5' round bales approximately 1100- 1200# Timothy and orchard grass mix. No weeds and in excellent condition, has been tarped off since baled and never rained on. $80 a bale. Located 25 miles northwest of Whitefish in the Star Meadows/ Tally Lake area.

Hay seems to be selling for around $150 a ton, though some people are asking $180 a ton.  Whether they get $180 a ton is another matter.
 
Dan told he he was sure he could get me hay sold closer to town and cheaper as he thought there was lots of hay for sale.  I remember from last Fall when he said he could get me some cattle to keep Momma company over Winter and I ended up finding cattle when Dan came up empty.  And then the same situation this past Spring when I needed some extra hay.  That time I ended up finding hay for both Dan and I when he could only find poor quality and more expensive hay.  So I decided I would get the minimum amount of hay now and not wait. If he finds more hay, great.

The hay was 36 miles from my ranch - about an hour drive.  No, not close but very good hay and I had not been to the Tally Lake / Star Meadow area for some years now and Tammy has never seen the area.

So... let's go for a road trip.

Well... by the time the seller called me back I was in the middle of scrubbing out the livestock's water trough and had to finish and fill it before I could go.  Tammy had a Tastefully Simple event so she could not come with me as we would not be back in time.

It was a nice drive with little traffic.

Close to the hay seller's property.  Now where would a hay field be?

The seller lives up in the mountains at about 4200 ft elevation.  His hay field was a large cleared off meadow in the forest.

The seller's hay.

The person who created the property was a hippie from the 1960s/ early 1970s who built the place before electricity came up that far.  The current owner is in the process of updating the house.  The house was built with no foundation.  The house originally sat on telephone poles and old timbers reclaimed from bridges.

The property was irrigated from gravity.  A creek flows down from a taller mountainside, and to run the sprinklers, he turns on faucets on underground pipes coming from the creek as it crosses the property. The grass was still a nice green and looked good.  Sitting high in the mountains he gets more precipitation than I do in the Valley.   Of course, that also means more snow in the Winter.


The trailer holds three large bales.  The seller noticed a little room at the back of the trailer and offered to sell me a half bale for half price. I was unsure if the bale would fit but decided to buy the bale if it did fit.  It did fit, though it looked smaller once he lifted the bale in the air.  On the trailer the small bale again looked bigger. Once loaded he offered to sell me the bale for $30.  Sold.

The seller and his son loaded the hay using his large tractor.  The seller was rocking the mountain man look.

We chit-chatted for a while about his property, his wood-working business, the 2007 Brush Creek fire, weather, and animal indicators for the upcoming Winter (the squirrels, absent all Summer, are now feverishly gathering nuts).

I spent over an hour loading the hay and chatting.

Even though the hay bales were cinched tight to the trailer I drove home slow.    Fortunately there was very little traffic from 6:30 to 7:45 pm.

I decided to store the hay in the loading corral.  I don't plan to use the loading corral to load cattle until next year, and in there the hay would be safe from the cattle, horses and deer.

Of course Daisy had to inspect the hay and trailer.

Then she settled down to watch the sunset.

Watching the sunset.

I can just roll bales weighing 1200 lbs.  However I do need leverage to roll the bales.  I was able to easily roll the small bale off the trailer onto a wooden pallet to keep the bale off the ground.  The other three bales were too close together for me to start rolling them. None of my neighbors with strength to help me were around. I waited till morning.

Still no neighbors were around in the morning so I improvised.  I had a long metal pole and I used that to pry one bale apart from the others.  Tammy helped me by sliding a post behind the bale as I moved it so it wouldn't roll back when I re-positioned the pole for better leverage or rested.

Once I could fit in between the bales I was able to roll one bale off the trailer onto a pallet.

One down, two to go.  Separating the last two bales was harder as I could only stand on the last bale and not on two bales to use my long pole. Still we got them separated and then one off the trailer.

I expected I could just roll the last bale as I could now stand on the ground for leverage.

Nope.  The final bale was sitting on a flat side.  The hay seller had stacked the bales at his place three high and this was a bottom bale.

Lots of pushing and grunting and Tammy sliding a post under the bale so it wouldn't roll back as I re-positioned or rested.  Once the bale was off its large flat side I was able to roll it.

The bales were a little wider than the pallets.  While I tried to position the pallets in the center of the bale, invariably the pallet ended up being to one side of the bale.  I had some treated pieces of wood my uncles gave me and Tammy slid a few of them under the bale when I rocked the bale off the ground on one side.

While round bales shed most water and only the outer ring of hay would get wet and bad, it is still good to tarp them so none of the bale goes to waste.  Fortunately I had some old tarps.  I had to use several tarps as my largest tarp had holes in it.  I used railroad ties to weigh the tarp down.