He Bales Bales With A Big Baler BALERS Balers 31-5-2 Small square hay bales are preferred by many horse and small stock owners, but their size can mean high labor costs to a hay producer. Now, a patented new "bale buncher," developed by James Toews of Waskatenau, Alberta, solves that problem. It "packages" 12 small bales so that they look and handle like one big bale. Toews' "re-baler" is used once a field has already been baled. It's pulled by a tractor and bundles the small bales into a bigger one, using twine to hold them all together. Each of the 12 individual bales remain intact so the only difference to the end user is that they need to cut open the bundle to access the small bales. To build his unit, Toews modified a Hesston 4755 medium square baler by removing the feeding mechanism and replacing it with one he designed to accept bales measuring 14 by 18 by 32 in. long. "When the first bale comes into the unit, a shuttle pushes it back onto a horizontal table," Toews says. "This table has automatic switches on it so that, when the second bale comes in, it stands both of them up so they're sitting vertical. A cable elevator below them is timed to the plunger, and when the plunger is at its most forward position, the cable elevator lifts the two bales up in front, directly in the face of the main baler plunger. The plunger pushes those two bales back into the bale chamber. When it has accumulated 12, it ties them together just as if they were loose hay." Bale size can be adjusted to bunch anywhere from 8 to 14 small bales in one group, but Toews says his experience has shown that 12 works the best. "Handling and stacking these bigger bales is a much more economical way to deliver high quality hay to the end user in a form that they can easily handle," he says. "For the producer, these bunched bales have the handling economics of big square bales, but the feeding convenience of small bales." Toews has spent the past four years building and perfecting the system and is now talking to manufacturers about possible commercial production. He has a North American patent on the device. "I think there's definitely a market for it," he says. "I'm really happy with the way it works. This year, in real heavy going - two swaths raked together so there were a lot of small square bales close together - I was able to make a big bale every 30 seconds. On average, I bunched over 1,200 small bales an hour." Toews also points out that, by using his re-baler, he was able to single-handedly load 792 bales into a transport van in a little over an hour. "The problem with marketing square bales normally is that it's hard to find enough help. My system gives the end user the product they want, but you can do it with a 2 or 3-man hay crew instead of an 8-man crew," he says. Toews welcomes inquiries from interested manufacturers. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, James Toews, P. O. Box 53, Waskatenau, Alberta, Canada T0A 3P0 (ph 780 358-2356 (home) or 780 358-2287 (office); sales@waskatena umotors.com).

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