Rolling Dog Farm Blog

After posting the video of the amazing automated hay wagon and the 14-foot high wall of hay it stacks, some of our blog readers asked:  Well, how do you get bales out of that thing?

The answer:  Carefully!

Vanna White was busy this evening, so I asked Alayne to come out and demonstrate how we break into one of these solid walls of hay.  Here she is doing her best Vanna impersonation.

We pick up one of the poles we use to help hold the front of the stack in place, then pry off the very top bale in the corner of the stack.  We knock that one down to the ground, then the next one over, and so on … but we do this in a stair-step fashion, so this is the one and only time we ever have a solid vertical wall.  In other words, we remove bales from the top down while leaving a few lower tiers of bales in place … and work our way backwards into the stack.  That stair-step configuration helps keep the entire stack more stable.  It allows us to then climb up on the hay stack safely and knock down more bales by hand as we need them.

Once we’ve chewed into the stack several bales deep, we remove some of the rows of bales forming the lower tier in front — or the bottom step.  The best way to describe it is as a moving stair-step, eating into that giant stack of hay.

Yes, you’ll notice we couldn’t quite fit all of that last load completely inside the hay barn.  We still had some hay left over, which is why it didn’t make it all inside … but it will be gone soon enough!