Illinois Hay: Bale Accumulator Helps Make Up for Lack of Summer Labor – DTN

“Accumulators are important because there are just absolutely no kids available to help.” That’s a little-known fact about hay shared with DTN late Sunday evening by View From the Cab farmer Chase Brown of Decatur, Illinois.

The accumulator Chase referred to is a bale accumulator, used to collect and drop onto the ground small square bales in uniform rectangles of 10 that can be easily picked up with a tractor or a skid-steer loader. From there, they’re moved from the field on a hay rack to waiting buyers or to temporary storage. Skid steer tracks for sale can be found for a really good price at Fortis Tracks. Not planning to use it for long? Get a skid steer rental.

Many hands make light work. Going back to Chase’s youth and before, haying was done with manual labor by a crew made up mostly of high schoolers on summer vacation. But not anymore. “We think we want to put some hay in the barn, but when there’s just three of us, we usually decide 200 is enough,” he said.

Monday saw perfect weather for harvesting second-cutting alfalfa. “It was really nice hay. Not a weed in the field,” Chase said. “It got a little more bleached than we wanted, but we had a bale accumulator giving us trouble.” That accumulator problem was made even more important when storm clouds appeared. “We didn’t want to, but when we saw rain coming, we went ahead and big baled it. But when the rain got within a couple of miles, it just fizzled and we never got a drop,” he said.

That’s why later in the week, the worn hydraulic accumulator was replaced with a new Kuhn 10 bale accumulator that relies on gravity rather than hydraulics to collect bales, flip them on edge and align them. “We are going to bale a lot of straw this week, so we decided to make the change.”

The straw referred to by Chase is wheat straw, a valuable byproduct of his wheat crop. That harvest officially began on Saturday after a rough start on Friday. “Friday afternoon we tried cutting and fought the combine all afternoon. We couldn’t get the rotor shifted from gear one for corn to gear three for wheat. The only way to fix it was squeeze into an area about big enough for a 5-year-old kid, between the grain tank and the hot turbo and muffler. We finally cut a little bit on Saturday. It tested between 12.5% and 13% moisture. It’s all going into a grain bin for seed wheat. We cut 32 acres and the bin holds 3,500 bushels. It’s not quite full. I’m gonna say it made 100 bushels (per acre).”

Wheat has made something of a resurgence on the farm after a period of lower-than-average yields. Chase credits the Becks brand of seed they’re using. But that’s not the only edge the Browns give their wheat fields. “Guys here treat wheat like a second crop. We treat it as a high-value crop. We make it a priority to get the wheat planted on time in the fall. We started putting gypsum on. It’s high in calcium and sulfur, a byproduct of local power plants. And fungicide is a must. Beck’s is a big believer in seed treatment. Theirs is visibly different. It looks healthier, comes up faster…we give a lot of credit to changing companies on our seed. After switching, we hit 100 bushels that first year. This is the third year we’ve had 100-bushel yields,” he said.

Chase, his father and an uncle also grow corn in the farm. Earliest-planted fields have tassels emerging. “There’ll be a lot of corn tasseling this week. Being as hot as it is, we’re starting to get dry pretty quick. We had a super-muggy, super-hot day today — 98 degrees (Fahrenheit). If we have that this next week, we could have pollination issues,” he said.

On Wednesday, Chase traveled to Auburn, Illinois, to participate on a farmer panel about cover crops. “When I showed up, I was kind of intimidated. There were only about 30 people there, but they were fertilizer retailers, crop advisers, and university researchers, the kind of people who are really up on things. When I come home from one of those things, I think we’re doing everything wrong, but you have to do it in baby steps. One thing I learned is that we’re only using about 45% of the nitrogen.”

Cover crops, seed wheat production, straw and hay sales, purebred Herefords, selling farm produce at Saturday farmers markets — none of those may seem like typical activities for black-dirt grain farmers around Decatur, Illinois. That’s why Chase and his wife, Ashley, have decided to compete in an American Farm Bureau contest for young farm entrepreneurs.

They’ve been working on filling out forms, writing an essay and recording a three-minute video, all requirements of the contest.

“There are a lot of smart people out there, but we’ll never know how we stack up if we don’t try,” he said.