Hay season 2021 got off to a ROUGH start. With no rain, and wildly fluctuating temperatures, the grass simply GAVE UP and stopped growing. I had been faced with a decision . . . to cut it ON TIME or to wait it out. Having made the call to "cut it now", HERE is what I ended up with. Would it be worth all of the time and headache? How did the sugar content of my hay turn out? With my New Holland 575 up and rolling smoothly (minus one hiccup), and the TYM 574 grabbing bales and stacking them on the wagon and hauling the whole load home, things FOR ONCE seem like a smooth operation . . . once Erik figures out a better way to use the Maxilator.

The more care and attention you put into raking, the better the baling will go. The whole job of raking should be done with baling in mind. The baler does better with a uniform windrow that is neither too small nor too large. Windrow size will determine your ground speed. Sometimes you need to double rake in order to make a better a windrow size for the baler. If your windrow gets a little light then increase your ground speed; if the windrow gets thick then reduce ground speed. This will give you nice, tight uniform bales/idiot blocks.

Kinda mixed results but compared to the headaches you've sufferred through the last few years, I would imagine you're pleased, hay looked good, and your buyers sure seemed to like it, all in all, more pluses than minuses, well done, Suzanne and Erik

I ran the 1960's version of that New Holland Baler. It's definitely a love/hate relationship keeping one working long enough to get through a whole season. There is invariably ALWAYS something going wrong with them (usually the knotter, or some jam up that snaps the flywheel key). The latter of the two, usually involved hours of digging out a blockage of hay that was just a little too moist to bale