The Farming way of life..Making Hay Video Series: Mowing day, equipment details and more!

folks of video you're about to watch is part of a series on mowing hey so whether you're an experienced operator or whether you're a newbie this should help you this should be fun for you to watch you should enjoy yourself and at least enjoy the beauty of the land and this lifestyle please don't forget pound that like button subscribe to the channel and see more sandy ridge farm all right now let's get busy working hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome to the farm blog today I actually snuck around and I got started without you we bailed a little bit of hay we're in a bit of a time crunch for some time here the weather was not playing in our favor so we got over here and we've tried out that hay mining and it seemed to work just fine so we got out and we build up some hay and we've got the rest of the field to cut so I'll show you all that and we'll have some fun today on the blog alright [Music] before we get started let me pre apologize for the wind noise but we're out here in nature it's beautiful beautiful day and we're gonna mow some hay right now we've still got our baler hooked up and what we did we had a big rainstorm that was coming in so we needed to mow a certain section and get it bailed as quickly as possible so I didn't take you along with me on that we wanted to make sure that our hay vine that we got our donor habe on our junker hey vine I actually got in there and worked on it a little bit cleaned it up fixed a few things got some new hydraulic hoses and it works fine so we've got a 9 foot hey vine we're going to take you around this field and we'll start mowing first thing we have to do is disconnect our hay baler then we've got to go over and connect to our hay vine will lubricate it again and then we'll head back out here and move now here's one of our bales that we already bailed the other day and this is a mixture of fescue and lespedeza grass and that's something that's pretty popular around here where I live in North Carolina let me show you the field real quick that we're gonna mow so right back here I already mowed this with the bush hog one time this year and we're going to go ahead and cut it for hay the reason I hit it with the bush hog and didn't mow it for hay the first time was because I wanted to put some green manure green manure back down into the soil basically you have to mow down your grass some times just to help replenish the soil you can't just keep robbing it and robbing it without pouring tons of fertilizer on there I just don't want to do it so if you look back you can see the bales throughout here and you can see the spot that hasn't been mowed we'll get you some cool drone footage and some cool GoPro footage hopefully too let's go over here and we'll show you the lespedeza grass okay so first of all plainly and simply put this is fescue grass and that is what we planted throughout this entire field now the wild grass hmmm fescue is delicious salty maybe I peed on it anyway the wahoo grass is the lespedeza grass and you can see it's just little leaves and that's pretty simple that's pretty much what it is let's get you a little close-up so we'll mow this and we'll Bale it up and it's good for cows it'll help them get through the winter it's great for the goats too now horse people may not find that grass very desirable after we cut this lespedeza grass the fescue will take back over and you can look down here and see the lespedeza has more of a sticky type stem like a stick and the grass the fescue grass is more of a blade so that's the more desirable so the fall cut will be the more desirable fescue and the spring cut here will have a lot of that lespedeza in it pretty cool a little bit of hay science for you let's get over here we'll get busy hooking up the hay baler is a bit complicated I only have one set of remotes on the back and the hay baler takes two sets of remotes now remotes are remote hydraulic system so basically I have one lever that controls the back of the hay baler and I'll show you this and we'll go through this again when we start baling hay but one remote opens this up root and the hay bale drops out the back side and another remote is the tire and basically it feeds the string on the hay baler and there's a little apparatus down here that feeds string you can see the string right here there's a little apparatus down here that moves underneath there and guides the string around the hay bale once you get done with it so you stop you pull the handle it goes back and forth slinging string out onto your hay bale and then you open the back and spit out the hay bale pretty cool now we had to get a little bit creative with our hydraulic system the first set of remotes is right back here and we'll unhook those so there's a remote here there's a PTO shaft here and then we had to take our second set of remotes and make an extra long hydraulic hose to go up here where the loader hooks up so we pull the loader handle and that works the tire and we pull the secondary hydraulic handle and that opens up the back of the baler pretty cool let me show you how these hydraulic lines hooks up it's pretty interesting I never knew this before I had a tractor so I think it's neat to show you there's a little tab right here I'll push the tab and pop out the hydraulic hose push the tab and pop out the hose that was easy sometimes it's not so easy so guys this is the rusty old crusty hey vine that I pulled out of the woods and all I had to do was clean it up a little bit break that cutter bar free the cutter bar was kind of locked up and the cutter bar goes like this right here and that's all I had to do really was just grease it up my pressure washed it got all that old muck off of it Reece it up and you came over here and it started cutting just fine it's lacking in a few departments but the price was perfect free awesome I'm gonna lubricate this thing really good we're gonna get started mo just FYI I don't hook up the PTO shaft before i lubricate so I'll lubricate everything really good and the last thing I do is hook up my PTO shaft and my hydraulics that way I don't take a risk of this thing somehow kicking on and grinding me up into little bitty bits so there's probably I want to say nine or ten lubrication points in here that we have to worry about we've got to take care of those lubrication points so the machine laughs this thing's been sitting outside for at least five years and it fired right up so we soaked the blade down the cutter blade down with some wd-40 overnight just let it soak really really good and everything fired up and worked great I'm going to take you under the machine really quickly and show you what works and what everything does so let's start at the front of the machine okay these little rakes rake as this thing rolls forward it rakes the grass into here into these cutter bars and this cutter bar is right here you can see those little serrated edges like shark's teeth and that right there is what cuts the grass then it feeds it up into some rollers a set of rollers that are right in there now we'll go on the back side and I'll talk to you about those under here are the rollers and basically these rollers are indexed to roll in upon themselves in other words the raised part here rolls in the groove there and that crimps the grass down so it dries quicker and we've got some stuff hung up in here but that's okay no biggie and there's also an adjustment here that you can adjust the height of your window and that's what this is called it spits out a windrow right here and you'll see that in a second right over here is our hydraulic system and this raises and lowers the machine so that hydraulic cylinder goes down and it drops the blades all the way down to the ground so that they cut probably three inches from the ground before we get started in moment I want to let you know that the dogs will be running here along with me and they'll be catching rats and having all kinds of fun out here as we're running this cutter so we've got it all set up and let me show you how it's offset to the tractor and I'll tell you a lot so the hay buying a cutter is offset to the tractor so that you don't run over the fresh grass and mat it down before you cut kind of cool now guys I always wear hearing protection I've done the research down below in the video description will be a link to the best earplugs you can get that's the highest quality you can get I'm going to save my ears now you can see what the hey vine actually does it goes along the ground the edge of the ground and just cuts and leaves this big pile right here and this will sit out over the next day or so and it'll dry then will rake it up into big piles and then we'll Bale it pretty cool so let's get you some cool footage of this thing cutting just a beautiful day here on the farm and play a little music and let you enjoy it guys [Music] [Applause] folks I had to change my hat the Sun was really getting in my eyes so I changed my hat and you're about to finish up here but I just wanted to thank you a whole lot for coming today and be sure and check us out in the next few days we'll be raking the hay and we'll be baling the hay too so we'll have videos about raking and bailing and we'll take you around our rake and show you how it all works and we'll take you around the baler and we'll show you how it works too so thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on Stoney Ridge farm don't forget to pound that like button I appreciate you come on back and see us