Sending Sunshine Your Way!

The weather here in Southern California has been "Post Card" perfect. We have been in the 80's and even had one 90 degree day this entire week! This really very bad, as we need rain, historically our winters is when we get our rain. Rain and the snow pack in the mountains is what everyone in California drinks, waters the crops with and is needed by all of us. Few no how precious of a resource water is and most of us live in a semi desert region. More and more are actually live in the desert now. February is the month we normally get the most rain and we have had 0.02 inches this year! So for you experiencing all of the winter scenes I'm seeing on the news every night. I'll send you sunshine and you send me some rain. If we don't get some rain soon, we are all going to be saying: "Just give me, water. Can I have some water?".

What does this have to do with us scrapers? Everything we do has the potential of polluting our environment. Especially the air and waterways. Please be a responsible scraper! If not we will all be asking for just water.

Foot and half of snow here and it melts for 2 days and gets replenished for 2 days for over a week now.

Nice and Sunny here too :)
4 F and 35 mph gusts, lots of light fluffy snow drifting around.
6 hours outside was enough for the face and beard to have icicles and snow covered.
Nice and crisp my kinda day:)

Been holding around 65-75 f and really nice for working in the garge down here in central ok

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Originally Posted by NHscrapman

Nice and Sunny here too :)
4 F and 35 mph gusts, lots of light fluffy snow drifting around.
6 hours outside was enough for the face and beard to have icicles and snow covered.
Nice and crisp my kinda day:)

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Pretty much the same here. Hey .... at least the sun was out !

It's all Bert's fault. :cool:

Holy crap .... the blizzard watch is up for this weekend. Depends on who you listen to but they're talking anywhere between 8 - 30" of snow ?

Massachusetts declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard yesterday ?

Water, water everywhere ! We're running out of places to pile it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bigburtchino

The weather here in Southern California has been "Post Card" perfect. We have been in the 80's and even had one 90 degree day this entire week! This really very bad, as we need rain, historically our winters is when we get our rain. Rain and the snow pack in the mountains is what everyone in California drinks, waters the crops with and is needed by all of us. Few no how precious of a resource water is and most of us live in a semi desert region. More and more are actually live in the desert now. February is the month we normally get the most rain and we have had 0.02 inches this year! So for you experiencing all of the winter scenes I'm seeing on the news every night. I'll send you sunshine and you send me some rain. If we don't get some rain soon, we are all going to be saying: "Just give me, water. Can I have some water?".

What does this have to do with us scrapers? Everything we do has the potential of polluting our environment. Especially the air and waterways. Please be a responsible scraper! If not we will all be asking for just water.

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Getting great weather here up north too. I feel you on the rain situation. We had an "ok" storm come through last week, but that has been it for the year. Not looking good at all. Only two rain storms this winter so far. Snow pack is dismal, and the reservoirs are really low.

Looks like we're going to have to cut off southern california, sorry ;)

8 degrees this morning , wind chill -15. Supposed to be like that all weekend. Snow has turned to ice and more on way Saturday night.
I was hoping for a girl named Sunshine in a bikini Burt, what a tease!!!

Mid 60's in Denver.

Brass the girls name was "Sunny", she did wear the bikini for awhile, but that's another long story!

The weather everyone's talking about makes me want to get out of my shorts and tee shirt. I don't think I even own a pair of long john's anymore, don't know if I could work with all those clothes on.

Sitting in my truck tonight, having a cigar. 20degrees here in Virginia Beach. Too cold for a cigar on the porch!

Brrrrrrr!
Brian

Watching the news tonight and wishing I really could send those of you in the North East and West Virginia some of our sunshine. The North East because four feet is enough snow for anyone. West Virginia because the train wreck is going to be a huge environmental problem and it happen in a heavy snow storm too!

Wish I was back in Santa Cruz!

4 feet isn't too bad...back to back storms for a couple weeks kinda stinks.... eh... is what it is
dang it burt every time you post here.;)
-10 F, "cali" sunny, sustained 20 mph winds, gusts in the 40+mph range
It eventually warmed up to 8 or 9
I usually have no qualm with being outside all day and little complaining about the weather....But that was a little rough
Yesterday morning NH had the third coldest location on earth...WOOOO... wadda we win?
Keep the sunshine coming...helps with the cleanup effort :)

An the winner gets a "Eskimo Pie" ice cream sandwich!

Finally "We got Rain", been raining off and on since noon. Right now it is pouring down hard, that is good, as I'm inside nice and dry! Supposed to rain all day tomorrow, this will effect us at work, but right now we need the rain more than the work. In Southern Cal. this type of rain storm is called a "Inside Slider", unpredictable in the amount of rain we will get, just as a pitcher in baseball and the weather people anyway! Happy about the rain!

Burt,

Darn! I was hoping to send some of my excess hay this summer down to you at exhorbitant prices!! Now that you're getting rain, you'll probably be sending some hay my way!!

Last fall there wasn't much excess hay to be had around here because anyone who could scrape together a truckload shipped it south!! Small bales of hay were going for 6-7$/bale, if you could find any, when prior you could get them for $4.

Good luck on the rain. You guys need a lot, to get some snowpack accumulated up in your mountains.

Jon

Jon - My first business was a part time one started in high school. A friend of mine were both working at the local "Piggly Wiggly", on break we were talking about how to make more money. This conversation led to us starting a costume "Hay Cutting & Transportation" company. A partnership between us and our dads. My dad was already growing hay and had the equipment. My friends dad had a logging operation, with idle trucks. Arkansas was getting plenty of rain and Texas was not. We sold our hay to the misfortune ranchers there for a premium price, so yes there's opportunities with a neighbors "Drought".

They do small bales up by you??

I thought that we were the last people who still did them. At least I don't feel so lonely now!

I agree on the philosophy, though. When something goes down, something else will usually rise.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...782cd425c2.jpg

matador: "Sunshine. Lollipops, and Kittens. Or, something sappy like that!"

I do small bales because we produce most of it for ourselves...the wife raises registered Morgan horses. She does the "old line" stuff....the same animals that the US Military used back in the Cavalry days. Not quite as big as what is popular now but D*MN are they tough! No wonder the military used them!

Any excess hay gets sold to small users in the area.

I've only got about 25 acres in hay right now...every year the D6 and bush rake gets a workout to get another 5 or so acres prepared.

The big farms around here are like you say....mostly the big round bales. There's also a guy who brings premium hay in from all over Western Canada. He compresses it, and cuts it into bales about the size of a small square bale, then puts plastic banding on it. He stuffs shipping containers and it goes to Japan. For like $400+/ton! His setup can only use the big square bales. It gets squeezed so hard that water will come out of the supposedly "dry" hay. Apparently, in Japan, you are not allowed to grow crops for animals...it must be used to grow human food.

Amazing what money can be made from.

Jon.

We do commercial straw, but we put it up in small squares. We do 125 acres per year, but we're going to be growing and doing more in the next few years.

Nobody wants to do the work for the small squares. But, you try throwing a large square! :D

Yeh, I don't wanna even throw the small squares. Use a NH stacker wagon. Picks them up ok but doesnt stack them worth a shzt. I put a steel band around each layer to make sure everything stacks up nicely. Gotta find a better way, though.

125 acres...! You must do many thousands of small bales...or hammer them up real tight into 36"+ long bales that weigh 99 lbs each..... Whats the end use of plain straw?

Jon.

We have a bale wagon too, but our old Massey 124 won't make good enough bales for it. I throw them on the wagon by hand. It's basically a funny-looking, hard to load hay rack. We're going to upgrade to an inline baler, though. They should spit bricks out the back, and we can finally use the wagon!! Our bales weigh about 50#, but I hate loading them on. I don't like Doctor Who, so when it's on, I go and pick up straw! :D

We put up about 8000 bales per year, give or take. A lot go for smaller orders- 10 to insulate a dog house, or 5 for gardening. But, a lot of ranchers use it when calving/lambing/foaling. We've had a few customers who load 200 bales on a gooseneck. One loaded 8 high, and got 250 bales on his gooseneck. I'd never want to drive anything that high!!

We have about 200 to sell, so we're almost there. We don't deliver, so when we start doing that, we'll be able to sell more.

Trust me- don't load bales manually on a Stack wagon!

Oh, try sinking posts in the ground. Lean your stacks on them. A bunch of posts look ugly, but they work.

matador: "It's an income source. And my gym membership!"

Not sure why you need a gym membership with 8000 bales to handle....:)

I've drooled over those inline balers. Spendy, though! I have a JD348 which seems to do a decent job. God help you when buying parts, though!! I put an airbag tensioner on mine to get rid of the hydraulic cylinders that were getting old and started seizing.

Would love to find an in-line moisture meter that would mark any bales that have a wet bit of hay in them. Not a huge problem, but would like to be able to step up the quality a notch. Feed any wet stuff first and don't lose anything to mold.

Yeh, the posts went in the ground the first year we used the stacker wagon. Then made large pallets to go under each stacker wagon stack so snow melt can run underneath without wetting the hay. (its triple tarped to stay dry) Then built a 9' fence around the haystack to keep the Elk out... Umh, whats that you say?...when will I get REALLY smart and just build a hay shed? Oh....maybe this year...

Jon.

I don't need the gym membership. Over the last two years, I've lost almost 40 pounds. I'm back to just "slightly heavy". Throwing them isn't easy, and I have to get out of the tractor every 3-4 bales. It's a workout!

The 348s are a nice machine, but I absolutely hate our Deere dealer. It wouldn't bother me if nothing we owned was John Deere. Our White tractor works just as well as the Deere, and our Massey has baled over a million bales. It's just plain worn out. Our Deere equipment has worked well, we just don't want anything to do with the dealer here.

Straw doesn't have as bad of mold issues. Our MF 124 spits out bales that are sometimes well-tensioned, sometimes loose, sometimes trapezoidal, and sometimes banana bales (Or any combination!). We don't have mold issues, though.

Another cheater's tip is to lean the stack against a building if you can. Other than that, you'll have to use a lot of prop poles. Our hand-stacked stacks are much tighter than anything that a bale wagon will ever do.

That's all I can think of right now. Just sell your hay before it falls down. Duh! ;)

Reminds me of being a kid again.
Throwing bales onto that ol trailer at my friends family farm.. Best part after the hay was all stacked swinging from the barns rope swing into the giant pile of hay basically unstacking it all... HA.
$5.50 a bale here up .50 from previous years..
gotta make hay while the sun shines.
oh yeah -22 f.... off to pickup a truckload of steel.

Man I F'd up this weekend...couldn't stand the sound of crunchy grass anymore and turned on the sprinklers the other day. Now it's supposed to snow on and off starting Thursday and not stop for 4-5 days.