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| Ill give ya some answers to your questions. A three string bale can weigh anywhere between 100 and 150 lbs, it all depends on what kind of bale your trying to make. I will uslly try to make my first crop alfalfa weigh about 135, mostly for dairys use. Second crop I try to bale on the lighter side 105-110 for the horse hay markett (feed store). Third crop is like first crop and forth crop is my gravey crop these bales can well go over the 150 lb mark. (I think the most I ever got into a truckload avg was around 165lbs, this hay is all "candy" dairy hay. Yes, we dont handle a bale by hand at all, its picked up in the field and put into blocks uslly 64 bales (8 bales to a layer 8 high) those blocks are then picked up by a "squeeze" (big forklift with clamps instead of forks) and placed on trucks and taken off the same way when delevered.
Now for the export markett,,, I used to ship a lot of hay overseas and it was a good deal at the time but I havent shipped any in the last four or five years now. The reason they demand the hay to be so dry is becouse hay that gets shipped uslly is first compressed or even double compressed before being put into a sealed container. A compressor machine takes a regular size bale and smashes it to half its size then puts four strings around it and then slices that half size bale in half with two strings on each "suitcase" bale. This puts each suitcase bale about 60 lbs or so, making it small enough for the end user to handle it. Most all of my hay was used for the dairy industry in Japan (at least thats what the buyers said) now keep in mind that a avg size dairy in Japan is about 7 cows..... Yes 7 cows. So they can get real fussy if just one bale is not perfect.....Now for the cost of export hay at the end user is a lot less then you might think. Overseas freightors need to get back to Japan to get another load of TVs Sterios, cars etc to bring back the the good ol USA so its actully a back haul for them. Back when I was delevering hay to the Port of Oakland for export the freight was about 30 bucks a ton for them to get it to Japan. If they dont fill the ship up with something they have to flood it with water.
I do understand how diffacult it is for you guys in the mid west to put up good hay, but we "here" only get about 4-5 inches of rain fall a year. Combine that with a higher elevation, 4000 ft and its just about a perfect enviroment for alfalfa.....
I hope I answered most of your questions if not fire away.
Boomer
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Questions for Western hay growers
