# Hay Dryers?



## sleepygit (Sep 22, 2009)

Has anyone got any experiences of hay driers like this one: Veda Farming

I'm in the UK, where we regularly have 2-4 days of good sunshine, where it is possible to get hay down to about 25-30 percent moisture, and we normally then bale and wrap it as haylage.

However, decent hay requires longer than this, and with our weather, often mean leaving hay out for a week or more in the sun to dry it out, especially if it is a decent yielding crop. This mean most of the goodness of the hay gets bleached out, the hay ends up like rotten crap and you are taking a big risk with the weather.

The truth is most UK hay would seem like absolute rubbish compared to what you have in the US, and it is comparitively expensive here - 10 dollars would be common for nasty conventional bale hay.

I produce about 6,000 bales at the moment, which are relatively speaking good quality, but even being well mechanised we struggle, we have about 2 or 4 weeks a year to make hay - so you have to do it in one hit.

If (and a big if) I could bale hay at up to 30% moisture and then dry it down, I would be very happy, and could sell 10s of thousands of bales a year and be able to cut at the right times.

The cost of drying the bales would be easy to justify even if it added 40 dollars to a ton of hay - imported canadian hay is a 1000 dollars a ton delivered!

What I envisage, is cutting and baling hay like we currently do for haylage. Rather than baling and wrapping the haylage, I would bring the semi dried hay back to the yard, and start sending it through a dryer to finsih the drying a few days earlier and preserve the hay a bit better.

And the dryer I think could be very simple - very very big fan (100HP+) sucking from a very very big heater (millions of BTUs) then ducted into a big 'trouser press' for bales - blowing air into 2 sides of a bale.

I would either bale the bale in mini hesston (3x3) bales, or maybe small bales packed into bigger bale bandit or arcusin type packs.

The dryer would have to be a batch type affair - maybe 3 lots of 24 space dryers so I could dry 400 ish 3x3 bales in a 24 hour period assuming 4 hours ish to dry each batch to 13% max from 25-30%.

Am i mad?

Anyone do anything similar to this?

I know there are farms in the US with these machines









Any views welcome
Thanks in advance

Jake


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## Greyhorse (Jun 22, 2009)

I remember reading about someone in Sweden doing something similar to what you are proposing.

Found it!

http://www.haytalk.com/forums/f7/question-haysweden-466/


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