Waldo here I,m in the state of new South Wales australia .first job in hay making was sitting on Tha back o f a Wisconsin driven inter baler tell making shore knots tied.about 5 years old now 55 years down the tack have Owen 2 round balers 10 big square baler and all the rest of the gear to go with it.now have hay done by contactor,s in small squares for horse market.putting 30 ac. Of thimothy grass for pet rabbit trade.having a guess if there was 100ac of thimothy hay grow for hay in australia I would be surprised.main work is supplying hay into dairy and feedlot market.well that about wore my typing skills for today
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Welcome to haytalk Waldo.....we have several folks from Australia here, all very nice and knowledgeable folk. One thing I will mention, this site is photo friendly, so if you have pics of the countryside, we would all love to see them. Just a word of warning, if you post pics (more reply options) make sure to post the pic upside down on your end and by the time it gets back to us it'll be posittioned correctly 
Gonna have to put Australia on my "Bucket List"
Again, welcome to Haytalk.....
Gonna have to put Australia on my "Bucket List"
Again, welcome to Haytalk.....
Welcome Waldo. Good to have another Aussie on the Forum.
Just post your photos the right way up and it will be fine by me.
The folks in the Northern Hemisphere can just stand upside down to look at them, then they can get to feel a little of what we have to put up with all the time. They will get to appreciate the photos even more.
Just post your photos the right way up and it will be fine by me.
The folks in the Northern Hemisphere can just stand upside down to look at them, then they can get to feel a little of what we have to put up with all the time. They will get to appreciate the photos even more.
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hi everyone i am John from se kansas i own 50 acres 38 of it hay field. I dont know much about haying but i am going to learn. i am almost 40 years old I have a wife and two sons 18 and 20 my boys are going to help on this venture as they would like places of their own.
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Welcome, John, just hang on to those boys, nice dependable labor (notice I didn't say cheap labor, I had 3 of them and could they eat). They will last longer as dependable labor if you can keep the girls away is my experience. I have learn A LOT from this site, hope you have the same experience.
Larry
I have learn A LOT from this site, hope you have the same experience.Larry
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93 Posts
Hello Gents (and Ladies),
I'm Louis from North Central Arkansas. We have a small 550 acre farm that's mostly overgrown but still have some beef cattle. Currently we have about 50 acres in hay on the home farm and I cut another 100 acres on shares. Hoping to reclaim hay ground to about 110 acres on the home farm in the next few years.
My first hay field job was raking when I was about 7 years old with a Ford 641 workmaster pulling a JD 660 rake. When I was 9 my dad finally let me pull his square baler with a little JD 820 for about an hour. Grew up around small square bales and worked myself half to death with them many MANY days. Branching into round bales now because the marked for mixed grass squares is very small and I don't have the physical ability to mess with them nor the funding to buy the equipment to make it easier.
I'm leasing the home farm from my mother since my dad passed away on a profit-sharing basis. Dad passed away of kidney cancer in 2013 about 3 years after I ruined 2 discs in my back at work. So, as I can, I'm trying to clean up the old place and put it back in order with the help of one full-time manager and 2 or 3 occasional part-time hands.
I'm Louis from North Central Arkansas. We have a small 550 acre farm that's mostly overgrown but still have some beef cattle. Currently we have about 50 acres in hay on the home farm and I cut another 100 acres on shares. Hoping to reclaim hay ground to about 110 acres on the home farm in the next few years.
My first hay field job was raking when I was about 7 years old with a Ford 641 workmaster pulling a JD 660 rake. When I was 9 my dad finally let me pull his square baler with a little JD 820 for about an hour. Grew up around small square bales and worked myself half to death with them many MANY days. Branching into round bales now because the marked for mixed grass squares is very small and I don't have the physical ability to mess with them nor the funding to buy the equipment to make it easier.
I'm leasing the home farm from my mother since my dad passed away on a profit-sharing basis. Dad passed away of kidney cancer in 2013 about 3 years after I ruined 2 discs in my back at work. So, as I can, I'm trying to clean up the old place and put it back in order with the help of one full-time manager and 2 or 3 occasional part-time hands.
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Welcome Louis.
Making hay with a bad back would challenge anyone. It is nice that you have worked out an arrangement with your mother on the home farm. Nothing like farming ground you grew up on.
Hopefully cattle prices will pick back up and make that end more worth while.
Making hay with a bad back would challenge anyone. It is nice that you have worked out an arrangement with your mother on the home farm. Nothing like farming ground you grew up on.
Hopefully cattle prices will pick back up and make that end more worth while.
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111 Posts
Thanks everybody for the welcome.
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3,874 Posts
It also keeps the place from growing up more. Amazing how quickly Mother Nature can reclaim a place.
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Yep... looking at old photos and little switches coming up in the fences were full fledged trees now. We had the old fencelines bulldozed on the Needville place and chainsawed down trees straddling underground phone lines and stuff and let the stumps rot down, back when we were still row-cropping. Since we've re-fenced the place and gone all hay and cows, we ride the fences and pastures and spray Remedy/diesel mix to wipe out switches as they come up.
Same thing at Shiner, in places switches grew into trees and trees into thickets with greenbriar and crap that the cattle couldn't hardly even get through. Then the fences go to pot in there and you can't even fix them. Lots of old cross-fences that had gone totally to pot and needed to go, so we started spraying Remedy/diesel mix and wiping it out. Started with the perimeter fences (which were in pretty good shape as they'd been replaced over the past decade or so) taking out various trash trees that were growing up in them, most about 6-12 feet tall and usually no larger than 4-6 inches. Cleaned up a lot of mesquite and huisache and toothache trees (camphor trees) and hackberries and similar crap from the pastures and started doing the cross-fences. We rolled up as much crossfence as we could and pulled lines of old posts, but the heavily wooded/thicket areas we just hosed with Remedy/diesel mix. Needless to say it was a step-by-step process, that we did over the past five years. Spray, let the chemical kill the trees the first year, let the tree dry out and "loosen up" the roots the following year, push them out with the 5610S and FEL during the winter/spring when the ground was wet and soft, push into burn piles. We finally pushed and burned the last of it last spring-- we pushed the old fences out with it in the really brushy areas and burned it wire and all, then I'd come along with the FEL and roll the barbwire under the bucket to make a big "turd" of barb wire all balled up on itself and load that on the trailer-- hauled a load this past spring that was 5,500 lbs of barb wire and various old cow troughs and junk... Nothing nicer than turning a mess into money!
Now we can do one pass with the golf cart with my brother driving and me running the spray gun with Remedy/diesel in the late spring and wipe out everything that comes up with just a couple gallons of chemical at the most... but it's a continuous effort... if you think you'll just clean up brush and walk away forever, you're sadly mistaken!
I just shake my head at some guys around the area that spend boku big bucks bulldozing and root plowing mesquite and huisache and other nuisance trees and brush, disk it and spin some grass seed out, and think they're done forever... and in a dozen years it's grown up into a thicket of 10-12 foot tall brush and trees again... When all they had to do to keep it clean and brush/tree free was ride around on a golf cart or four wheeler with a TSC electric sprayer on the back with a couple gallons of Remedy in it and about 8 gallons of diesel fuel as carrier, and spray the bottom foot of the brush all the way around-- which for small switches 2-3 feet tall, is usually just a quick "spritz" with the gun on stream mode on both sides of the trunk... Couldn't be easier... Wait til they're a foot in diameter, it takes a gallon of mix to coat the entire trunk all the way around a foot or two up from the ground, but it WILL kill it... might take a year though.
And we did it all with a 70 horse Ford tractor and a golf cart...
Later! OL J R
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Welcome to Haytalk. You will learn much if you choose to here. Hopefully teach some of us a thing or two as well.
HI everyone. I am from Northern iowa. I have reading on here for some time, thought I should start posting. I have a small growing flock of ewes and I started haying to save on my hay cost. Slowly growing my hay equipment too. I have enjoyed reading and I have learned a lot
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Welcome Kasey. Your knowledge and diversity will be welcome here. I read a post earlier and observed that you had been a member for quite some time...glad you decided to participate a little more.
Mark
Mark
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