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Pallets Make Hay Handling Easier
Commercial hay grower Steve Hedrick wanted an easier way to move small square bales into storage. He uses a New Holland 1002 Bale Wagon, which accumulates and stacks up to 55 bales at a time.
"What we needed was a way to move stacks with a front-end loader," says Hedrick, who grows about 150 acres of alfalfa and
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Pallets Make Hay Handling Easier BALE HANDLING Bale Handling (31B) 26-4-6 Commercial hay grower Steve Hedrick wanted an easier way to move small square bales into storage. He uses a New Holland 1002 Bale Wagon, which accumulates and stacks up to 55 bales at a time.
"What we needed was a way to move stacks with a front-end loader," says Hedrick, who grows about 150 acres of alfalfa and mixed hay near Peebles, Ohio.
The 1002 wagon is designed to pick up bales in the field and stack them against a set of forks on back. The wagon tips vertically to drop its load. Once it's fully upright, the operator drives forward and the bales slide off the forks onto the ground.
"I figured if we could just set the stack of bales on a pallet, we could move them into the barn with a set of forks," Hedrick says. "The best way to do this seemed to be to put the pallets on the forks on the wagon before we loaded the bales."
To test the idea, he built a specially sized 5 by 6-ft. pallet that he could slip onto the rear forks. "It worked quite well," he says, so he built 35 of them to use last summer.
"I put one on the forks and secure it in place with a piece of baler twine before I go to the field to pick up hay," he explains. "When I have a load, I pull the wagon back to the barn lot, drop the load, put another pallet in place and go back to the field. It doesn't take much extra time and saves us a lot more time when moving hay into storage."
"Not only was it easier to handle the bales this way, the hay was up off the ground," he says. "We had fewer bales spoiled because of mold. And since most of the hay I sell is picked up at my barn in pickup trucks, having it on the pallets makes it easier to get it out of the barn."
Hedrick says he wanted the pallets to be sturdy, but as light as possible. "I bought rough cut lumber to save on costs. I used 2 by 4 oak for runners and topped them with 1 by 6 poplar. The pallets cost only about $4 apiece."
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Steve Hedrick, Mound View Farms, Ltd., 203 Hedrick Road, Peebles, Ohio 45660 (ph 937 587-6151; E-mail: sehedrick@earthlink.net)
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