Dump rakes

[Big Muddy rancher]

Anybody still use a dump rake?

I picked one up at a auction sale today, A pretty nice 24 ft. Rowse hydraulic.

The original owners is my brother in laws father he sold it to my father in law . His sons took it to a auction and their neighbor just across the coulee bought it the I bought it at his sale. Spent it's whole life 4 owners in a 10-15 mile radius. It was 4 miles from home where i bought it but had to tow it 40 miles around through the border crossing.
It's in pretty good shape except it might have the original tires on it.

 

[gcreekrch]

Ya want me to cut you a few derrick poles and send them over too?


I helped an uncle in ND put up hay when I was 10. The hay was mowed, raked with a side delivery, and stack in a pipe stack frame with a farmhand loader. To my memory he filled the stack frame in the field and towed the whole thing to the stackyard. Two pins and the frame opened to leave the stack and go back to the field. It seemed a pretty cheap way to make hay.

 

[k_ranch]

We still use them we have three, a 24,36 and 42ft. They work real good for us as we still use a beaver slide to stack hay.

 

[High Plains]

I used a dump rake behind a team when I was in high school, which wasn't all too long ago, mind you. :lol: One of the most fun implements to operate behind a team of horses, as you can really move out fast and you're right in there close to, but above the horses. Almost feels like you're riding them. Too bad my family wasn't real big on photos at that time. I don't have any photos of me and my team to commemorate what will probably be an experience that I will not repeat.

By the way, no hydraulics or rubber tires on that outfit. :wink:

HP

 

[RSL]

That is pretty interesting...
There are no dump rakes in operation in our area but we have been discussing bringing our steel wheeled, pull rope dump rake back into our working lineup of farm machinery. We are also reevaluating a potential role for our farmhand hay sweep.
The older fashioned we get the further ahead we often are...

 

[Denny]

I brought an old steel wheeled dump rake up am useing it for a sign spot at the end of our driveway.

 

[JF Ranch]

Even though we bale our hay behind a windrower, we occasionally use our old, nearly worn out, 36' Rowse rake to collect wind blown windrows. About once each year we'll get a bad wind like that. Otherwise it waits all year in the weeds.

When my sons were coming of age for hayfield use, I trained them on a small tractor pulling an old 12' horse drawn dump rake that their Grandfather used as a kid. I rigged up a light cable from the trip on the rake to a spring-loaded lever mounted on the fender of the tractor. It worked pretty well except on turns. On right hand turns the cable would get too much slack to dump if needed. Turning left it would get too tight and sometimes trip the dump at the wrong time.

Their job was to follow the baler around to catch up the scatterin's. Each of our four sons started this way. After a couple years they graduated to the V-rake and eventually the baler, while the next boy in line took over the scatter rake.

This was dreamed up as only a make work job to give them something to do while learning how to drive. However, on days when they were not in the field, we really missed having the scatterin's caught up and our finished hayfields have never looked quite as good since the method was abandoned. That old rake has reverted back to obsolesence, where had been for decades.

I was seven years old when I started working in the hayfield. We stacked the hay with a slide stacker and like most beginners, I started on the scatter rake. Seven seemed to be the appropriate age, so we introduced our kids to it at that age. Things went pretty well until the day I fell asleep and blindsided my Dad's tractor. For the rest of that year I was throttled back to only half days. When my seven year old drove into the back of the baler, we came to the same conclusion!

 

[Grassfarmer]

Not too familiar with the terminology on this subject but an outfit just west of us put up some hay in a pretty old fashioned way every year. Cut, rake then pile her up with an old (farmhand?) loader on an ancient tractor. They build big loaf shaped piles out in the field (using no frames) then somehow haul them home - maybe this is what gcreekrch was doing as a kid? I always thought it looked kind of goofy as the piles didn't seem weatherproof like the old "pikes" my Dad used to talk about. I am pasturing cattle next door to these folks now and went over and had a look in their hay stack - quite a revelation how little wastage there is on the outside of those big piles even the 2 year old piles. Certainly way less wasteful than most round bales I've seen. I guess when they are loose like that it makes better hay because it can breath too. Not so handy to truck maybe but still a good system for a smaller sized farm operation. Contrast that to the cost of a round baler alone and it doesn't look so crazy.
Still dearer than grazing though.

 

[Soapweed]

Many years ago when we first started baling our hay, we used a scatter rake for a couple years. This sure cleaned up the hayfields, but there was a trade-off. The broken rake teeth that just seem to happen are not very compatible with either balers or hay processors. After a couple bad wrecks with each machine, I figured the hay saved didn't pay for the breakdowns, inconvenience, and down time caused by broken rake teeth.