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How much a bale?

B

Ben H

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 20, 2006
Messages
1,738
Location
Gorham, ME
The guy I'm leasing a pasture for has a 30 acre piece of land near the river he wants me to round bale. They typically get like $0.50 per square bale. I'm doing all the cutting, prep and baling, the bales are 4x5. What would be a fair price per bale to pay for the hay, how do others handle it? It's kind of funny here, nobody sells hay by the ton, it's all by the bale.
 
Around here upland hay is a 2/3 to 1/3 deal with the 1/3 going to the land owner on cash rents we useally pay $5 to $10 per bale stumpage depending on the type of hay low ground meadow hay is $3 per bale or 1/4 share going to the land owner.We can buy upland hay here most year's for $15 to $25 per bale meadow hay $10.Some we pay to much for and some we get for free so it even's out in the end.Convienence always makes it worth more..
 
It depends on who is paying for fertilizer and what yields are.. Basically the guy who is doing the baling wants to "make" as much money in bales as he would have if he just charged for a custom rate.. So if he is only getting 1 big bale an acre he is going to want a bigger percentage than if he is getting 3.....Way back when we did an actual crop share we did it on a 50 50 basis. We haven't done a crop share for a few years now, seems like no one was ever happy with the way it turned out.
 
We used to do it 2/3 1/3 but anymore to make it worthwhile it pretty well has to be 70/30 and that has now become the norm up here. Cost of production has gone up too much.
 
The land owner threw out $10 a bale. Sounds pretty fair. It's way over mature but that's my fault. I got delayed in June for my National Guard Annual Training, last year of that though. Anyway we got 56 bales off 11.7 acres, still need to cut the other half.
 
Ben, the custum balers around here charge 10-12 bucks a bale and that doesn't count the raking and the cutting. Cutting seems to be about 10-12 an acre too and raking I want to say was 5 bucks an acre.. I don't know what it is now as we only bale stalks and I have a chopper and a baler already so all I know is my cost, which is getting down right crazy with the cost of fuel.. All I really know is that it sure doesn't pay to bale the stuff that isn't producing at the top end.
 

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