Writing this, as I am sitting in the alfalfa field, waiting for the dew to burn off this morning so I can get to bailing. Dad started bailing in the 50s with the new Holland 2 wire powered by the PTO of the tractor in the late 60s He moved to Freeman 3 wire Balers with Wisconsin V4 engines then back to new Holland  3 wire with the Wisconsin later we had  3 cyl. Diesel powered twine New Holland Balers. Now 4 cyl diesel twine Hesston 
which now is the thing of the past thanks to the California air resource board, new small Balers now are PTO powered, 😵‍💫

As kid I remember our Case dealer still selling a little hand tie skeins of wire for the few old 3 wire Cases left running in the very early 60. As for powering hay balers, my dad did commercial hay baling for 30 plus years and bought me a New Holland 290 3 wire when I was 13 which I put ALOT of hours on!!! and have also run a New Holland 280 with a VH4D 30 HP Wisconsin and is good power, on the 3 wires we used VG4D Wisconsin 36HP which I liked but in heavy grain hay could be a little short on power but still got a lot done in a morning, later on they started putting on water cooled Fords which were good power but kind of shook themselves to pieces not my favorite engine, the overhead valve Wisconsins were a better choice in my mind and had a lot of power but the diesel was the best hands down lots of power. Everybody likes PTO now which to me is a DAMM!! Poor way to power a hay baler so much more ease and versatility with an engine driven baler and you don’t need a big high horse tractor to pull it! I had a hell of a good time when I was young baling hay driving Cats and everything else that went with it boy do I miss all of it today. 17afarmer. Mike

The 290 NH with Wisconsin power definitely one of my favorites, When we got  into heavy oat  Hay put the Spring up on the governor one hole, got a few more revs  out of it!  

Thanks Skinner and 17Afarmer, the good, bad and so, so memoirs down through the years. In my hillside farming, little odd shaped fields nothing like the baler having its own power. Had that discussion with the Midwest boys that have never known anything but PTO power. Idle along with the tractor, giving more or less throttle as the hay changes, but you keep the throttle wide open on the baler engine, running with it up against the governor just popping bales out the back.

Keeping this a Cat thread, I had the NH290 on a D2 for a crazy baling job. Was not to bad, but if a 60 to 70 hp 4 wheel drive is not enough I will pass anymore too.

Loved baling hay.If everything was going good the lull of the baler would put me to sleep.And the baler knew it too.Thats when something would happen $***

 

Seeing all those bales reminded me that as a kid my job was to orient the bales so all the wires went around the bale horizontally so we could pick them up with the farmhand with the hay forks. 12 bales per load on the farmhand. Can remember parts of slithering critters were in the bale with some parts still hanging out. even some business ends of the buzztails.

Hi, Folks.
My first 2 hay seasons were with bales. As a 16 and 17 year old, I got the job of throwing the bales up on to the truck where the boss would stack them and then throwing them off the truck to where the boss would stack them under the hay shed/barn.

My last 3 seasons on farms, they still used the old reaper/binder machine which produced 'sheaves' of hay which were a lot easier to handle and could be handled with a pitchfork.

Just my 0.02.

I have heard many stories about our slithery fiends in bales but never have seen it myself. Too many places to hide in a big square or roll i guess. As an apprentice i had to ferry around our baler mechanic because he lost his license for drink driving. He walked beside the baler on the outside watching the knotters and i walked behind the twine box. He said if the snake doesn’t get picked up by the baler in the windrow he will be bloody angry and the first thing to bite will be you. Never walked along there again.

Hi, Folks.
Off the subject of balers but still with snakes, the brother-in-law of my boss on the last farm I worked on before taking up operating full time was harvesting a very low crop of wheat with a tractor-drawn header harvester and happened to glance around at the header comb to see a pretty large and VERY 'upset' brown snake being pulled back into the comb. It would have been mince meat by the time it got through the threshing drum and not able to bite anything but he reckoned it sure looked like it wanted to bite something as it was being pulled back into the header comb.

Just my 0.02.

We had 290’s with the 172 ford water cooled engine, that replaced JD 3 wire balers with 4 cylinder JD water cooled gas engines. The JD’s were before my time but up until about a decade ago one of them was sitting in the yard of the local baler mechanic/expert. Apparently from what I remember from the stories I recall they went to the 290 when New Holland purchased Haro-Bed manufacturing because the bale size and more importantly the density that that machine and the squeeze required by the local industry.

As Ray 54 said above you can change the speed of the tractor and keep your stroke count consistent. Keep everything consistent and you have a self standing block that you don’t have to manually touch a single bale. I’d rather spend a few extra bucks on an oil change than have to handle hay bales… but to each their own. I am pretty sure I have moved more hay by hand now that we no longer grow hay them when we were growing hay, at least I am getting the lighter 3 string chambered bales.

Another great reason for engine powered balers is when you get into the short soft spongey hay in the late season providing you miss the fall rain, you can idle back the baler, keep the tension up and extrude out some bales that the roadside crew, the squeeze driver and truck driver won’t complain about… the alternative isn’t pretty.

After the 290’s we had 500’s with the ford diesel and then the last one was a Deutz 54 horse 3 cylinder diesel. They had that one until 2016, never touched the engine, but the baler frame was getting brittle from getting thrown around for 33 years hitting one too many potholes in expansive clay soils. We also had the 505 and 515 with the same Deutz engine.