# can you...



## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

Bale grass that was brush hogged?


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

I have a small section of grass that the farmer who cut said he wasn't able to turn around or something. Anyways I have tall grass I want to knock down and preferable not waste. I obviously do not have a mower or bar because I had to hire out the work. I do however have a brush-hog. I know it's not ideal but if it's even doable I will do it. I do have a couple goats that I could feed it to otherwise we have horses. I'm looking for advice and anything related to this issue...

Thanks!


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## Tx Jim (Jun 30, 2014)

Yes but IMHO brush hogged hay bales aren't as good looking as hay cutter cut hay. BTDT


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

Yeah I understand. I'll feed it to my goats... I'm not after pristine looking sellable bales. Just wanted some opinions.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Yeah, you can, but of course a bush-hog really shreds up the grass... why we just call them "shredders" here. LOL

Works best if you have sharp blades on the bush-hog of course, and if you have a removable panel on the back or side for discharging cut grass as quickly as possible from the blade area so it doesn't get mulched, take it off so you can get the cut grass out of the blade path as quick as possible. If not, maybe raise the tail wheel(s) all the way up so the grass can fly out the back as quick as possible.

Cut as low as you can in as high a gear as your tractor can pull it without stalling and still get a decent cut. This will move the grass through it as fast as possible to minimize mulching. Depending on your grass species and height, you may have to cut kinda high, make the hay, then come back later and mow it low-n-slow to really get a good mowing job done-- just mulch whatever's left after you get the hay off.

It should dry pretty quick because the bush-hog will mulch the stuff up to some degree-- can't be helped. You'll have kinked and pulverized stems, busted leaves, etc which dry out pretty quick, and it should be spread pretty evenly. Drying depends of course on your local microclimate and conditions, but should be quicker than a hay mower/conditioner and basically it's "tedded out" as you mow.

Getting the bales to hold together may be fun. Why cutting fast and getting the grass out from under the mower in as few pieces as possible is important. I round baled some creekbanks the county bush-hogged a year or two back, and had a devil of a time getting the round bales to start in the chamber, because they shredded it "low-n-slow" to really pulverize the clippings and slow regrowth as much as possible. Stuff was SO thick though I just hated to see it go to waste, and at the time needed the hay...

Later and good luck! OL J R


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

I just finished knocking it down and I'm actually surprised how un pulverized it is. The grass was damn near chest high... So I'm thinking it will square bale decently. I'll hand rake it in windrows tomorrow or monday and bale Tuesday or Wednesday.


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## Swv.farmer (Jan 2, 2016)

Last year I had some johonson grass that got way to big the stems were like your thumb so I shredded it and it bailed did not look the greatest but it cried fast and the cows liked it.


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## rankrank1 (Mar 30, 2009)

Yes you can certainly can bale hay cut with the bush hog. When I first started my hobby haymaking venture I cut with the bushhog. Some brands work better than others. The key is a reasonably clean discharge without too much mangling. My old square back bushhog actually worked great as it spit it out well without shredding it up too bad at all. Hay sales from bushogged hay payed for the haybine I eventually bought a few years later. There are even bushogs made where one side is removed to help discharge the hay. Many a farmer has modified a standard bushhog with a torch too. Raising the back can help on some brands too.

Bushogs can even serve as a poor man's conditioner as they mangle it a little for quicker drying. On inferior rough hay crops they even can tenderize it a little to make it more palatable to the animal. Very simple to upkeep - grease it and sharpened the blades with the grinder. Pretty idiot proof too. I let my wife cut with the bushhog all the time. No way will I ever let her run the haybine. Some of the finest hay I have ever made was cut with bushog as it was simply so soft to the touch. .

Downsides: You will have yield loss compared if you cut with a true hay cutter. Some people claim 50% yield loss, but I do not think my yield loss was anway near that bad the years I did it. More like a 33% yield loss at a maximium and likely even less than that is my best guess. Considering I was getting zero before what I did get was fine. Leafy crops might suffer a bit more leaf loss which can be bad. Also, cutting thick and dense hay can require very slow travel speeds in comparison to a proper hay cutter, No big deal on a few acres though.


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

I have a very old brush hog but it seemed to do well in a pinch. I am also trying to sell hay to purchase my own equipment. When the day comes I can do it all myself I'll be a happy man.


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## somedevildawg (Jun 20, 2011)

A few folks down here ran a bushhog with one side cut out of it......


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## rankrank1 (Mar 30, 2009)

Well you can easily make the bush hog you have work even if you have to get clever and slighty modify it a bit by making one side unboltable and removable to make it work even better. If you do it right the side can be easily bolted back on for regular duties. King Kutter still offered their hayside line of rotary cutters up till a few years ago. Sure pictures exist somewhere to get ideas on how to modify yours. On grassy hays the yield loss is not that bad at all and you just have to accept it. From a cost business perspective it will takes years to pay for a true hay cutter on what little yield loss you save especially on a lower end hay crops like grassy hays. Best of all the maintenance is nill. Grease it sharpen the blades occasionally and go cut.

Even working for free it is going to take several years to pay for the $1800 dollar baler you own as it is on lower end hay crop sales unless you just happen to be in a market where there is such a shortage that even lower end stuff sells high.

For a cheap rake that is excellent for a small timer I love John Deere 594 rakes. I have less than $100 in each of these and they do a spectacular job. They make loose fluffy windrows that dry so you can rake more than once. In effect you use the tail of the rake to flippy the windrow so you maintain color and get it all dry. JD called it making hay the John Deere way in their 594 manual. Comparitively many modern bar rakes that sell for $1500 or more used are known as rope makers. In other words you only rake right before you ready to bale as it ropes the hay so much that it feeds into the baler great but if you rake too soon it will not dry at all. (Why is this important? Well if you own something like a 594 you can get by without a tedder. If you own a rope maker for a hay rake then you also absolutely need a tedder - so there is yet another $1500 to spend on top of your rope making hay rake)

I like the 594's I have because they have a lot of metal in them so even if they have sit outside for decades no issues at all. My costs to use them are grease it and go (I use the cheapest $1 a tube grease I can find and grease every 5 acres) . Metal tines last forever and I do not even have to worry about flat tires.. I do not think I have broken a single tine in over 6 years (and I rake 3 times per cutting minimum as it is also my improvised tedder).

New Idea, also made a 4 bar rake like the 594 that can be quite desirable as they have a reverse gearbox that will do an even better job of an improvised tedding than the 594 which only has a 1 direction gear box. That said, the New Idea is all made with light sheet metal compared to much heavier metal in the 594. Anywhere New Idea needed strength they riveted several layers of light sheet metal together. Sitting outside the laminated layers of metal have not stood the test of time well as they rust out. (My opinion is skip all other brands of this era design of rake except the JD 594 4 bar or the New Idea 4 bar if you find a nice one. The Amish will pay a premium for a nice New Idea so they are valuable in some markets. JD 594 can be had much cheaper. The IH Mcormicks were terrible and some of the other brands were sold in such few quanaties that even if they worked okay you will never find parts if you need em. Something like a 594 is easily everywhere in fencerows and you have enough metal to work with that you can weld on them if need be. Skip the even older 3 bar rakes too).

The pictures below are both JD594's: the one with factory steel wheels is a 1937 (or 1938?) I am the 2nd owner of it as I bought it at the sale of 90 something year old man who bought it brand new as a kid with his dad. I was bidding against scrap man and got it for $90. The one with the home brew steel wheel conversion is roughly a 1948. I have less than $50 in it.. I have refurb'd and painted them both as they were rusty


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

Thanks for the pictures!


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## rankrank1 (Mar 30, 2009)

Well if you liked those then here a few oldies of the wife cutting hay with my old square back bushhog and the Kubota L285 (Only tractor I had back then so it did everything. cut, rake, and bale). This was like 3rd or 4th cut of a dry year if I remember correctly so not overly thick at all.


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

I posted these pictures in a different thread. In case you hadn't seen them. Farmall 200 with the brush hog I used and the second farmall BN.


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## rankrank1 (Mar 30, 2009)

I did see those pics in your other thread. What I did not notice till just now though is that your PTO shaft on your cutter is lacking the protective outer guards. Those would be worth getting and installing for your safety.

At an absolute interim minimum though make sure that PTO shaft is completely stopped before getting on or off that 200 tractor - especially since you climb up the back of most vintage tractors to mount them compared to newer tractors where the operator mounts in front of the rear wheel where it is slightly safer and more away from the PTO compared to the back.


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

I know accidents can happen even when being extremely cautious. I am very vigilant of safety while running the pto. I do appreciate your concern for safety.


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## rankrank1 (Mar 30, 2009)

Also I would like your bushhog better (as an improvised hay cutter) if those wheels on it were not wider than the mower. In light hay it may not matter. In thick hay it simply is mashing more hay down (as are the tractor tires but that is unavoidable). Good news is that with some creative welding and cutting it looks like it would be easy to flip that wheel angle and narrow it up so the wheel rides behind and within the width of the mower.

My bushog cutter does not have suction blades on it so it did not always lift stuff that got mashed down. That was actually more my yield loss problem moreso than excess mincing of the hay.

Here is a photo of where we cut with the bushog one year after a terrible hail storm. My beater car that I drive back and forth to work is dented to this all over like a golf ball from that storm. Wife is raking here. Notice the large uncut hay that is not getting raked? That is not from the tires mashing it in this case (although that did happen quite a bit too but it was not quite as bad as this pic). My bushog does not have suction blades so it lifted nothing.

Moral of the story: Anything you can avoid mashing down will only help yah when hay cutting even if you have suction blades on your brush hog cutter. Not much you can do about the tractor wheels but you could alter those rotary cutter wheels. Notice how on all dedicated hay cutters the tractor rides to the side on already been cut hay to avoid mashing down the new stuff? (sickle bar, drum mower, disc mower, haybine, discbine all equally utilize this design feature cause it is benficial).


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## bool (Mar 14, 2016)

Yes, put a guard on that shaft. I had a friend who was killed when he got caught in one of those shafts.

I'm not convinced those wheels are much of a problem, they are narrow. A couple of other points though. Cut the back off it to help the hay get out. You could bolt it back on if you ever need to. Keep the blades sharp, both to help it cut and to lower the power consumption. And make sure that when you are cutting the front of the machine is slightly lower than the back, to ensure everything gets cut only once.

Roger


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## MyDaughtersPony (Jun 12, 2016)

Thanks guys! Also I just left my dad's for the normal father's day visit. I have the manual! I guess it's a super 66


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

somedevildawg said:


> A few folks down here ran a bushhog with one side cut out of it......


The six foot bush-hog brand shredder (3 point mounted) that Grandpa back in the early 80's that we shredded down cotton stalks and maize stalks in the fall after harvest, had a removable side panel on the LH side... it simply unbolted with about six bolts. The front skid on that side was a piece of flat iron that bolted on in the front, curved back and down, and up slightly at the back end (so it wouldn't dig in and bend if you backed up). This let it discharge whatever it was cutting very quickly out the side, basically as soon as it was cut. I had to do some looking to find that old shield to put it back when we quit row cropping and I wanted to clip pastures and stuff, and mulch the stuff up a little better by keeping it up under the deck in the blade path longer.

We didn't care how ground up the cotton stalks and maize stalks got, but we DID mind how much power it took to shred those waist to chest-high green stalks and leaves up... plus we always shredded at 6mph at PTO speed... so to run that fast, even with a 6600 Ford tractor, even only cutting down two rows at a time, you had to run with that side shield off so it would just spit all the ground up stuff out fast enough. Once it dried out a few days the disk would chop it up the rest of the way. It took a lot longer doing it two rows at a time, but it was faster than picking cotton on a two row picker going maybe 2.5 mph... and Grandpa and Dad were sick of trying to keep 2 or 3 gearboxes fixed on the old pull-type 4 row shredders they'd bought used up to that point (rode hard and put up wet I'm sure, but they were convinced that the gear boxes "tore each other up" when it would bounce in the field and the blades hit the dirt on one side or the other... but wore out crap will do that but it's all we could afford). At least the 2 row Bush-Hog, you hitched it up, checked the oil in the gearbox, and ran, PERIOD.

Would seem ideal for cutting hay, as far as using a shredder goes-- get that stuff out from under the deck PRONTO so it doesn't get buggered up so badly.

Daddy had an old pull-type 2 row crop shredder back before he bought a four row shredder... one of the old drag type ones that had the wheels on either side of the deck, and an extra deep deck to mount TWO sets of blades, one above the other. The two sets of blades would really chop up stalks (usually they had a "stationary blade" bolted to the side sticking out between the two spinning sets of blades to chop stuff up better). He pulled it with his old Super M. Lots of guys used to pull a 2 row drag-type disk behind it when cutting stalks to break up the ground and bury the ground up stalks some, so it was basically ready to plow when you were done. Dad tried that a year or two and had SO many boll weevils it about killed him-- ruined the following crops. He figured that when you shred up the plants and bury it all right behind the shredder with a disk, you were basically burying a buffet to keep the boll weevils fed all winter. Don't know if that's the real reason, but after that he traded that rig on a 4 row shredder; we'd shred stalks, let it dry out a week so everything was crispy in the hot August/early September sun on hard baked ground, and THEN disk it. Never had boll weevils anywhere near as bad after that. I think they'd feast on the ground-up stuff til it burned to a crisp on the ground, then move on, and it probably cooked their eggs and maggots to death in leftover squares and blooms and bolls laying on the surface of the scorching hot ground for a week, reducing numbers the following year. Burying them right behind the shredder seemed to put them in a 'bomb shelter' from the sun and keep them alive thru the winter.

Now, if a guy could get ahold of one of those old shredders, ditch the top set of blades and the stationary blades from the side, and put on a SHARP set of bottom blades, he'd probably have a pretty good "poor mans hay cutter"... the deep deck would let the grass have plenty of room to stay out of the blade path and get tossed clear out the back before it got pulverized. Course it couldn't compare to a REAL hay cutter, but for the purpose, or cutting fields that might have 'surprises' in it the first time, it could be a handy thing...

Later! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Course, all of this is sorta beside the point. Just starting out, you can probably find an old sickle-bar mower that will do a MUCH better job of cutting hay than a rotary mower/shredder will ANY day of the week... for not a whole lot of money. Even an old sickle-bar machine, with the sickles and guards in good shape, properly adjusted, will cut a LOT better quality hay and do a lot better job than a shredder will under even the best of conditions. But it will be a more parts and adjustment, but once you've got a sickle-bar mower "dialed in" correctly and fixed up decent, there's not much to it but to "grease and go".

Course anthills aren't a lot of fun, but so long as the grounds not too wet, they were manageable, even when we were using our old Ford 501 sicklebar mower.

Later! OL J R


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