Hi I’m Mike.
Haying is due to start in a just a few days and to do that we need equipment.
Specialized equipment that is only used here on the ranch for a couple weeks a year.
Today we are going to get everything out of storage, gather it up, go through it and start
haying season, 2019 on our Wyoming life.
There seems to be two gears on the ranch.
Low and go to beat hell.
Winter time is almost a slower pace.
We feed, we do chores and odds and ends but nothing is really time dependent.
Then we get into calving, which really dictates a pace of its own, depending on weather, and
nutrition levels of the cows and their over all health.
Some years calving can come off without a hitch, other years you seem to run into issues
every time you turn around.
But the fact of the matter is that you never know what’s going to happen, until you get
started.
Welcome back to our Wyoming life.
Hit that subscribe button to follow our story as we continue on our slice of heaven, a cattle
ranch in northeast Wyoming.
Each and every video, three times per week we invite you to come along with us, explore
the ranch life and escape the ordinary.
Haying season is a great place to start, if you like tractors, implements, tools, repairs,
skinned knuckles, cursing and occasionally watching a grown man have a temper tantrum,
it’s the perfect place to start.
Our goal today here on is to get all three of the haying tractors pulled out, then get
the piece of a equipment, be it the mower, the rake or the baler that they are mainly
going to be running attached to them and pulled out of storage.
We are going to get everything out here in the in the light, then go through it.
See if there are any repairs that need made from last year and get everything ready to
go.
So lets get started.
We have three main tractors here on the ranch that we use during haying.
A John Deere 6410, a John deere 4055 and a john deere 6420.
Today we are going to get started with the 6420.
The John Deere 6420 is our main tractor here on the ranch.
It’s the newest one and we used it almost daily.
Through out winter, its our main feeding tractor but during haying, it becomes our baling tractor.
Last year during haying, we lost this tractor for most of haying season.
A hydraulic valve system went bad on it, forcing us to have to send it back to our local john
deere dealer for repairs.
Repairs during the busiest season of the year and of course we didn’t get it back until
after haying was done, along with a bill for nearly 10,000 dollars.
Here’s to hoping this workhorse can finish the game this year.
The 6420 is the newest tractor on the ranch, manufactured back in 2007, and originally
purchased for about 44 thousand dollars.
Its 4 wheel drive and rated at 110 horsepower with a 4.5L diesel engine.
The fuel tank on it is about 50 gallons, and cost 150$ to fill up, which we will do every
couple of days out in the field.
Behind it will be working our John Deere 568 Baler, a round baler that creates bales that
are about 1400lbs each.
Gathering enough food to feed one cow for about 45 days, or 45 cows for 1 day.
This baler is equipped with a Megawide Pickup, which allows us to pick up more hay off the
ground, increasing baling productivity and making more bales per hour.
Its also a netwrap baler, encasing the finished bale in a tight netting that will protect
it, keeping it dry and of course keeping it together.
The baler is controlled from inside the tractor with a monitor controller that allows the
operator to control bale size, net wrap specifications, gate opening and closing, pto speed, moisture
levels and manage error reports.
Now that the baler is out of
the way, we can start bringing out tractors to play, and we are going to start with John
Deere 6410, the older version of our 6420 this tractor came to the ranch in 1999.
It is also a 4 wheel drive tractor and almost identical to the 6420 aside from a bit less
horsepower and a smaller tank, and an older transmission.
Where the 6420 has an a IVT transmission, a variable transmission which basically gives
you unlimited gears, the 6410 has a 4 speed power shift transmission, giving you a total
of 16 forward gears and one reverse gear.
This year, we are assigning the 6410 to the H&S wheel rake, a 30 foot wide implement that
will be used to gather cut hay from the ground, using these 36 inch wheels to move the hay
from the entire width of the tool, toward the center eventually dropping it all into
a windrow which comes out of the back, ready for our baler to pick up and turn into a bale.
But before we can bale or even rake the hay into a windrow
we need to cut it.
Cutting this year will be our largest tractor the ranch and one of our oldest, the 4055.
This tractor was purchased in 1990, it’s a 7.6 L, 6 cylinder diesel, it also has 16
forward gears, along with 6 reverse gears and about 115 horsepower at the PTO.
That PTO will be driving our mower, a Rowse double 9 sickle mower.
Allowing us to cut 18 feet of grass at one pass.
The sickles move back and forth along a guide, the grass moves into the teeth and by moving
them across the guide they act almost like a big pair of scissors, cutting grass cleanly
and very close to the ground, allowing us to take advantage of even the shortest of
grass here on the prairie.
At full speed the sickle travels back and forth more than 2000 times per minute or 33
times per second, allowing us to cut grass fast and efficiently.
And that’s the name of the game when it comes to cutting grass on the prairie.
We have to move fast.
Because this is dry land farming we normally don’t have any issues with wet hay.
When we bale, we want the moisture levels of the grass to be between 12-16 percent.
Because of that, we cant make silage, our grass isn’t wet enough to create the fermentation
that makes up silage.
In fact, its usually a race to put up hay that still has enough moisture to not just
disintegrate in the baler and turn to dust.
Often times we can cut one day, rake that same day and be baling the next.
And if its very dry, you will find many of us baling in the middle of the night to take
advantage of cooler temperatures and higher moisture levels from the dew.
Haying is just another race on the ranch.
Trying to out run mother nature or sometimes even a breakdown.
It may be a race, but is all about adaptation.
Making it work with what we have.
If we lose a tractor some reason, then it becomes about time management, as we try to
get it fixed, while still trying to bring in the harvest for the cows.
Without a successful hay harvest, all this equipment is a waste, its another year of
having it on the ranch, paying for it and not using it to its full advantage.
And as nice as it looks, its all a very expensive lawn ornament if you don’t use it.
They saying is, Make hay while the sun shines, which really just means to take advantage
of the chance to do something while the conditions are good.
Make good use of your time and make the most of an opportunity while you have a chance.
But it really means, get to work, which I need to do.
Thanks for hanging out with me today.
Be sure to subscribe and come along this haying season we’ve got some surprises in store
for you, some special guests and the opportunity to drop you into the drivers seat and let
you make a few rounds in the tractor this year, and a whole lot more
Its gonna be a lot of fun, heres to thick hay, no break downs, and of course a bumper
harvest.
I’ll see you next time, until then, have a great week and thanks for joining us in
our Wyoming life.