Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Yesterday our neighbor who grows our hay for us, Bob R., brought over the first load to store in our new hay barn.  If that building doesn’t look finished, it’s not!  The metal roof started going on today and is now half done, and should be complete by the end of tomorrow.  Then the metal sides will go up on the walls.  We wanted to use wood siding to match the other barns, but for a building this size — 100′ x 32′ — it was just prohibitively expensive.  The roof will be green and the walls white, so it will actually match our house.   (Hey, at least it matches something.)

This is how Bob brings the load over … one big 6-ton stack at a time on his hay wagon.  That piece of equipment actually scoops up the bales from the ground in the hayfield first and then arranges them in a stack on the wagon bed.  By the time Bob is done driving around the hayfield, he has six tons of square bales — 160 bales total — neatly picked up and stacked on the bed.  In this photo Bob is backing up to the rear wall of the barn.  He will power the bed hydraulically so it rises up vertically, tilts back, and then gently sets the stack on the ground.

It’s the same idea as a dump truck, in effect.  Once the stack is in place on the ground, Bob drives forward and the row of tongs slide out from underneath the stack.

We have needed a hay barn of our own for a long time, and this one will easily store our entire hay purchase, which is 125 tons this year.  This barn will be almost completely filled when the last load is brought in.  You can see why this hay wagon sure beats stacking all that hay by hand!

(Click on photos for larger image.)