Trimming Tractor Time
Author: Hay & Forage Grower

Byline: Bill Barksdale

Beef cattleman John Spain was already looking for a way to put up hay with fewer trips over the field. But the decision became more urgent after he was injured in a 1999 car crash.

Spain, who operates JB Ranch, Hindsville, AR, with his wife Becky, regained his mobility. But he could no longer endure the grueling hours on a tractor required for conventional haying.

So he switched from hay to silage, using a system that's less labor intensive and more weatherproof than conventional silage-making methods.

When forage is ready to harvest, Spain direct-cuts with a Gruett Lacerator flail chopper. The silage is blown into a Buckton forage wagon equipped with a hydraulically operated live bed.

He unloads the material on the ground in 21 x 50' piles. Before starting each pile, he lays down a 10' section of perforated 4" plastic pipe. He covers the pile with two layers of 6-mil polyethylene and seals the edges with limestone gravel. Then he connects a pto-driven vacuum pump to the pipe and extracts air.

"You can see the plastic gradually shrink down against the forage," he grins, "and by the time I'm finished, a couple of hours later, it looks like a vacuum-packed food product such as bacon."