Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Why are there round bales still in the field?

I'm curious, I don't know much about farming but I've noticed baled hay isn't left in the field. Just down the road, there are fields on both side with round bales sitting there. They have been there for well over a month and now there is snow on the ground. Why?

Thanks

in Tn, they get about 3 cuttings per season. They get the rolls up within 1-2 days after theyre rolled. They are then moved either to a barn or to the edge of the same field in a nice long row.

Tarping them is optional.


If they are still sitting out in the field all random-like in the same positions that the baler crapped them out....well then it's possible that the farmer is derelict in his affairs and spends his time on the campfire talking about rain and mud and colored ww2 newsreels whilst his hay goes to shît.

so if they get rained on does it ruin them for feed?

i ain't no farmer for damn sure.

Round bales are around to help shed water or they can be stored outside with minimal waste. . If they sat in the field a long time to that cuz somebody is been very busy and it's not good hey I haven't moved it yet or that could be kind of lazy.

Lots of possible reasons...they could be bedding hay, dry cow or heifer hay. Mulch hay, mushroom hay....

Maybe the farmer doesn't have room to store them. We used to leave round bales line up in the fields all the time just cause

Round bails are more weather resistant than square bails. If they are rolled tight enough the rain will shed off just the the top of a well rounded hay stack. If they are not tight, and the top sags, will, that's a different matter.

Of course many of today's farmers and ranchers are an aging population. This might not be the result of a plan, but the result of hardship.

Lots of hay is stored out side in the elements. Rain will not necessarily ruin them for feed. Some farmers feed them direct from the field to the cattle, thus saving one handling of the bales.

Or load them directly is selling in small lots.

I've used them to shoot deer from, when one farmer still rolled up four footers and left some in the field. Most places I hunt, bales are collected in an area to winter feed beefers, so the bales are out in the weather all year Some farmers use a wrapper baler, most don't..

The outside 8-10" of the roll soak up the water and rot,

Cattle, usually peel that off and piss and shît all over it anyway.

They also peel off the better inner layers and piss and shît all over that too.


A hay ring helps, but that invention has not made it to areas around here.

BUT***
We're smart enough to know that Pabst Blue Ribbon is pure crap.

Worst thing about leaving them scattered in the field is it kills out whatever crop is under them. Also finding a dry enough time in the winter to haul them out without tracking up the field can be a problem

Maybe they haven’t felt like it yet.

We still have about 400 big rounds of hay barley left to haul. They've been sitting out in the field since July.


Normally we would have them off the field shortly after baling but this year we have been fighting mud and soft fields. Too slick to haul them now so the plan is to wait until next week when it freezes up again.

Seems like every time it was dry enough to do anything we were busy doing something else....

On our alfalfa fields we get the bales off ASAP because if you leave bales out for too long it will create dead spots under the bales, that and the alfalfa will start growing up around the bales and I hate to drive on nicely growing hay. And if it's dry we are usually in a rush to start irrigating the fields.


As for quality and rain I actually think the rounds do better unstacked. As was mentioned the rain will only soak in a little and then it rolls off. If you put them in a traditional triangle stack that creates little crevices and catches rain. Some guys do the flat side down on the bottom row and then set a bale round side down on the top row. Which works fine if you have the time and room to stack them like that.

That's what we used to do with the last cutting, which was usually pretty sparse. We had horses renting pasture and the owners paid for the hay in the field, as well as for the pasture forage value. They would break open bales as needed over the winter. Our winters are much drier than most places. The bales were the small two-wire variety, baled very tight.

Feeding cows is different than feeding horses.Cows can eat less palatable hay,horses will colic or get heaves from moldy hay.Most round bales are wrapped now and see every little waste. As noted the water will run off them. There is a lot of sorghum type hay still laying out in windrows in eastern Colorado. It is cut later and takes longer to dry, but then it must be dry with a little moisture to bale. It isn't uncommon to see that hay out all winter. A lot of farms and ranches raising beef will grind that hay and feed it that way, instead of just setting round bales out or unrun rolling them.

Depends what area of the country it is.

We started feeding weaned calves, our coming 3 year old cows and open cows last week.


The bales have had about 12" of rain on them in the last few months but there is basically zero damage.

I am MUCH more concerned about the moisture of the hay in the windrow when baling than the moisture that comes down after it's wrapped up.


And of course it depends on your baler. Our NH 7090's make a nice tight bale.

8-10" someone needs to upgrade balers

Coyotes and fox like to use em for a vantage point.....

Everything has to be somewhere. The field behind the house gets cut once in July and the bales get stacked for the hay hauler. The guy that has the hay has other things to do and the hay hauler usually shows up after the ground freezes up. Just looked, still there.

Mike Bryant, Bryant Custom Guns, sent me a photo of his round bale deer blind. Looks like the others in the row by them.

Prolly too danged heavy to pick up an put in the back of a pickup.

There was an old guy near where we hunted who arranged his round bales to make a blind. One year he had a nice little castle.

Potential spontaneous combustion?

i learnt a lot about hay bales in this thread and will henceforth play an expert on the internet.

Rug, a stack fire would be the worse case scenario.


Generally speaking you run into mold and or 'stack burnt' hay.

Stack burnt hay is when the hay cooks itself inside the bale(no fire, just high moisture/high heat curing). Alfalfa will turn a brown color, or if it's really bad, black.

The cows actually love to eat hay that is a little 'burnt'(it has an almost sweet, tobacco smell) but loses feed value and gives the cows the chits.

Here is the best reason to leave round bales out all winter.

But the term "deer blind" is a little ambiguous. Deer were being pushed hard so we were driving to figure out where they were so we could get ahead of them. Something caught our eye and we had to go back to look. Farm yard on the north side of the road. To the south a small shed of some sort with no doors or window glass. Then we saw it, a yearling lifted it's head and peeked at us through a window.

Old goat up the road from the cabin used to fetch his round bales in and stack 'em as high as his loader reached - Four, three, two then one row on top, IIRC? Then he tarped them with huge plastic tarps, tied down with old tires as "anchor weights". Well, one year his grandsons did the tarping. Month later when I was up, there he was on top of the pile, rasslin' loose tarps back into place. I think he was 79 or 80 at the time?

Stopped and helped him get everything back where he wanted it, held the extension ladder.for him to get back down again. Cussing the entire time about how [bleep] worthless kids were and if you wanted it done right, do it yourself. Miserable ol' cuss, like that ever since I knew him from kid on up. One of the other farmers came by as we were about done. Later stopped at the cabin to needle me about sucking up to ol' grumpass.



The old devil is gone now. His oldest son and grand kids now just bring the bales in and let 'em sit near the beef barn. No more super stacks on that place. As of this past September, half the bales were still scattered out in the field. Most of the folks around there round bale once, then turn the cattle into the fields to graze, w/electric fences up...

That's a fun little video, but whoever titled it is REALLY confused.

As far as round bales scattered around a field, multitude of reasons from not enough time to no storage to too lazy. FWIW, round bales left out in the elements here in KY lose up to 3" to 4" of outer layer due to rot from rain and snow. 3" to 4" on a 48" roll may not seem like a lot. But, I'm told it amounts to 25% to 30% of the hay volume in a soft center roll. Stacking them in a pyramid pile outside just exacerbates the rot.

Many folks in our area are building the hoop frame fabric barns/shelters for storing hay rolls out of the weather. Son In Law has put up two of them. He says the only thing better are the silage wrap bales.

Rained on first cutting in early August. Light rain.

WTF?

Deer hunting blinds!

They make good dove hunting blinds around here. Put my stool in the shade of one quite a few times.

LMAO...

They're the kind of urban dimwits we'd like to give a stool, pail, and a tied up bull and tell them to milk it.

Timely topic for a non agrarian.
I have spent the last month in Idaho and Wyoming and have observed "hay" in multiple configurations. Yesterday I encountered actual cowboys who successfully found 5 stray bovines way up Cliff Creek in Wyoming and they explained the whole process to my wife and I. Ranching/farming is the last bastion of the American west and, is to me, fascinating.

A few days ago I hiked 1.5 miles up an overgrown 2 track on the edge of the Gros Ventre wilderness to find a substantial pole barn full of large bales and not a cow to be seen. Lots of Griz, wolf and elk tracks in the area but only old cow and horse turds. You guys who do this for a living, on the edge of civilization, should market adventure tours to the curious. I am available to help promote this untapped income stream.

Sammo and Large James, you guys need an agent! Call me.



mike r

Down here they are still in the fields because it has been so wet. Also, with all the rain we've gotten some folks got 4+ cuttings this year and all their barns are full and they have no where to put them. Good problem to have.

Maybe he got smart and decided to bale graze.

Take your livestock to the feed....not your feed to the livestock.

Have them cows cycle those nutrients back into the soil.



..........orrr.....he just aint got to it yet.

Moisture in the windrow, green hay, will also wrap around rollers and burn out bearing. So you get to crawl in there and cut that crap out with a pocket knife. Bad way to find out the dew hasn't quite burned off yet, sets the tone for the day.

1 option everyone has missed is "bale grazing", You can google that. But if it's the last cutting, they might throw up some hot wire and move it as needed to allow livestock access to more hay.

I've never met anyone here doing it, but I used to know 1 woman in MN that did. She raised sheep, and was a pretty firm believer that anything that rusted, depreciated, she didn't want around so she never had a tractor. She trucked the hay in and had her neighbor place it in a grid around the field.

Dang it guys, as soon as I can afford the part on the loader that crapped out, I'll fix the tractor and get them out already............

Sam, do y'all prefer the New Holland balers over Deere's or is it just random?

Your dogs told me you're too busy hunting, you slacker.

Practicing for Sam to give it a chance.

It's hard to make big ones square?

Biggest reason - it gets rid of labor from kids / men stacking square bales in the barn, the machine it self is less complicated and cheaper to make and maintain.

Second. - Barn fires don’t happen when round bales are outside (less insurance), Bail stackers are crazy expensive, and moving round bails is a PITA... they don’t store efficiently either so less Barnes are required (lower fixed cost).

Last - Gas ain’t cheap, when you are bailing you can leave them there, or have another tractor or loader running them back to a barn somewhere... that’s more gas and road wear.


Due to this they made that outside wrapper to help protect the hay....

I man now can round bale all his hay himself, doesn't have to be in a great hurry to put it in a shed.
Haying is pressure packed and picking small squares requires manpower , on flatter land a bale wagon might work. Expect equipment repairs., either way.

No, just takes more money. The round balers are simpler but considerably slower, as you need to stop to tie off each bale, as opposed to a square baler that keeps rolling while tying off.

that and you might loose 20% of the protine value, then there are times when you have enough extra hay that you carry over till next year , if there is to much moisture you lose the hay.

More than likely it’s been to wet out, and some guys put hauling hay on the back burner.

I always liked to leave them in the field for awhile, just so there wasn’t any spontaneous combustion, or lightning strikes to the pile. Or if you farm on or near a Rez it’s a good idea not to leave any next to a road. Ft. Totten Rez had a fire bug running around this year, something like 285 fires that started in March. I never did hear the total.

New-fangled balers don't have any baling wire to fix their machinery and vehicles with.

We like to pick the bales up a soon as we can. They kill out the spot they sit on. And tracking the regrowth.

Thanks for all the information. I really liked that youtube vid of the lady farmer. That was some great video.
I do have another question. Years ago, I bought a round bale that I used for a back stop for my bow target. I *thought* it would get consumed by critters over the winter but 10 years later, it was still there so I soaked it with used motor oil and burned it.

Are round bales unappealing to deer?

Round bales of what?

Might just be busy with other fields or crops.

Around here most times they are moved to the dry corners(parts of the field that are not under a water system) of the field.

Late in the year, but round bails make great collectors.
In the field, fence rows or stacked on pallets.

They make good homes for mice and other rodents.
Plus they stay warm.

If you have a bunch out in those conditions, go gather them
in late August or September.


You will soon know if you have rattlesnakes in your area.

That is the way it should be done. I move them out of the field while they're being baled if I can. Anyone who leaves them in a field that has grass that will grow back, is a very poor steward of the land. Bales left for months will do exactly what Wabigoon says, and kill the grass underneath them.

I realize that there may be situations where bales cannot be removed for a time, but in a worst case scenario, they should at least me moved to the field edges.

However, this is only true for grass and alfalfa. Sorghum type forage like Haygrazer must be planted every year. Some even bale corn stalks.

Seeing a lot of corn stalks bailed for bedding here now.
Never used to happen.
I think it's because of corn and bean prices being high lately.
Less oats and wheat planted, less straw to use.

I think it's because the soil can digest only so much corn trash, helps prevent disease building up in a field, and most importantly it is free bedding.