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Front-Mounted Bale Unroller
Bob Willats, Orchard, Neb., needed a round bale unroller but he didn't want to spend the money for a commercial unit. He came up with a low-cost solution by mounting a pair of 14-in. wheels on spindles that bolt to the front of his Deere 4020 tractor.
The wheels, spaced 2 ft. apart and about 1 ft. off the ground
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Front-Mounted Bale Unroller BALE HANDLING Bale Handling (31B) 26-2-25 Bob Willats, Orchard, Neb., needed a round bale unroller but he didn't want to spend the money for a commercial unit. He came up with a low-cost solution by mounting a pair of 14-in. wheels on spindles that bolt to the front of his Deere 4020 tractor.
The wheels, spaced 2 ft. apart and about 1 ft. off the ground, spin freely. To unroll a bale, Willats simply drives forward and pushes the wheels against the bale.
"It's a simple, low-cost system with almost nothing to go wrong," says Willats, who runs a cow-calf operation and also a feedlot. "I've used it for two years to feed alfalfa bales to my cows. I use a 3-pt. bale fork on the tractor to haul the bale from my yard to the field, where I drop it off. Then I turn the tractor around and roll it out.
"Most of the bales I unroll are wrapped with sissal twine and are one to two years old. The twine has decomposed on the bottom side and falls apart as soon as I start pushing the bale. As a result I don't even have to get off the tractor. Sometimes the bale gets wet and flattens out so much on the bottom that it's hard to roll out. If that happens I use the bale fork to flip the bale over and get the flat part off the ground. Once I can get the bale to start moving it'll keep on rolling out. The only limitation to my bale unroller is that it doesn't work in deep snow.
"I got the wheels off an old anhydrous ammonia toolbar, and a friend gave me the steel for the frame so my only cost was my time. I had been making hay in stacks and using a grapple fork to dump it on the ground. I didn't like how the cattle wasted the feed so I switched to round bales. With my bale unroller there's hardly any waste."
"Whenever I want to use the tractor for other purposes I just pull two steel pins to remove the wheels from the frame. It takes only about 30 seconds to put the wheels back on again," notes Willats.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Bob Willats, 86754 514 Ave., Orchard, Neb. 68764 (ph 402 893-2026).
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