15 Hours Of Daylight

Haymaking dominates Vogel’s time during the long daylight hours of a northern prairie summer. “He makes hay now when the sun comes up in the morning until it goes down at night,” said Gloria of her husband. “And we have a lot of long, long days in summer.”

Vogel believes he makes a better bale of hay today than he did a decade ago. His 38 years in farming have included custom harvesting with two combines in the 1980s. Then, about 1992, he helped a neighbor do some baling. Another neighbor also needed baling help, and it soon became a sideline he liked. By 1998 he was finding more and more work and custom baling became a serious business.

He started his custom baling business using an old soft-core baler, which he has replaced with a hard-core machine. “That’s what most people want anyway,” he said. “The quality of hay may be a little better (with a soft-core baler), but a hard core is easier to handle.”

Drought Created Hay Market

By 2002 the writing was on the wall. Western Canada was entering its second year of widespread drought. A serious feed shortage was developing and creating a demand for Vogel’s specialty, large-round bales. Early last year he expanded his mowing and baling capacity with two complete baling systems and two 18-foot wide mower-conditioners in a push-pull arrangement operated by a single Bidirectional™ tractor.

Later in the summer he followed the combines and baled wheat and pea straw. The straw was often so short it made just one bale per acre. “That hurts a little because I charge by the bale,” he said. “It takes almost as long to bale a poor straw crop as it does to bale a good one.”

Baling In November

He was still doing custom baling when the snow started flying in early November. His gauge showed he had made 2,500 big round bales of straw and 11,470 bales total during the entire season. On his best day he made about 350 bales. On the year he had harvested more than 4,000 acres of hay. “I only baled about 3,000 bales the year before, with one baler and one Haybine® (mower-conditioner).”

Vogel’s first question to a customer who contacts him is, “What size bale do you want?” He is able to vary the size of his hard-core bales in 3-inch increments, from 4 feet to 6 feet in diameter. The bale size affects weight and therefore his price for the work.

He has good reason to avoid baling a hay crop someone else has cut. In his experience, most people make the swath a bit narrower than the baler. He wants his swath exactly as wide as the bale chamber. An operator will inevitably move the baler back and forth in an attempt to pick up a narrow windrow, and to Vogel, that’s bad news. “When you weave with the baler, you never make as good a bale as when the swath is just as wide as the baler,” he explained.

Importance Of Tension

In most hay Vogel applies 1,500 to 1,600 pounds of pressure as a bale is being formed. He has baled at the maximum 2,000-pound setting, but thinks that is a little hard on the baler’s belts. He has never baled with a setting lower than 1,100 pounds. The operator’s manual will recommend the maximum tension for each type of hay. It’s a good starting point, Vogel said. Then, he said, go from there with small adjustments for the actual situation you’re in.

Vogel’s main concern was that the tractor would have sufficient power to handle a second header on a hillside. While it is mostly flat near his Weyburn home, he has customers 20 miles southwest, near Radville, where the land is quite hilly.

Haymaking In Hills

His concern about the hills quickly disappeared. “I generally run in second gear and gear down when I’m going up a hill. But it climbs those hills like they aren’t there,” he said of the tractor. “It’s just unbelievable how that tractor handles itself.”

Steering while watching two big headers also turned out to be easier than he had expected. But what about taking such a rig around corners? “To go around corners, that’s nothing,” Vogel said. “You slow down a little bit, then you just steer the tractor around it. That’s easy with the front header. For the back header, you move the hydraulics. It’s on a swing arm, and you just steer it around the corner with your hydraulic system. At each end, I swing the back header over to the other side of the tractor. It works good.”

Of course, he has also learned to get along with little sleep during the haymaking season. If it’s too damp to bale at 6 a.m., there’s enough light to cut hay. And if he quits cutting hay at dusk, which is about 9 p.m. during a Saskatchewan summer, then, “I quite often bale at night,” he said.