Looking for tips on tedding

First, a little background:

 

My brother and I are in our 60's, third generation of the family to own our Central NY farm. Our main moneymaker is vegetables, but we also bale 50-60 acres of alfalfa/grass horse hay in small squares to sell retail out of the barn. We learned how to make hay as teenagers from our father and grandfather, and do it basically the same way they did. (Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!) Our customers, and more importantly their horses, all love the hay we make, so we must be doing something right. Our vegetable work prevents us from baling hay until June 10-15, but that's OK because before that haying weather is very iffy, at best. In 2015, June was impossible because of rain, and we really couldn't get much of anything baled until mid-July.

 

Our basic method is this: We cut in the evening with a 9-foot Oliver haybine, spreading the swath out as far as we can. We might mow in the morning if the previous day's activities get in the way, but prefer not to because the haybine works better if things are dry. The hay then sits a full day, and is usually ready to rake with our old John Deere rake around the time the dew is fully off the second day, say 11:00-noon.and is ready to bale 1-2 hours later. We bale with an Oliver 62T baler, no kicker, one of us loading by hand. This procedure varies, of course, depending on the weather.

 

We've never had a tedder, though there were times when we wished we had one. The old haybine tends to gather and drop clumps of hay when the hay gets tall, as it did in 2015. When we mow when it's wet, the hay sometimes doesn't dry evenly. And of course if it gets "rinsed" after it's been raked, it needs to be spread back out to dry quicker. So we wanted a tedder, but financial consederations prevented our buying one.

 

Until now. A neighbor has to quit farming because of age and health, and he has given us his old tedder. He says it's a Fahr, but there's no identifying plate on it. We've identified it as a Kuhn GF 440T, a 12-foot four-basket tedder. It has some problems, but nothing that looks like it can't be repaired. There are equivalent John Deere and New Holland models, with dealers for each brand within 12 miles, so getting parts shouldn't be a problem.

 

But I'm unsure of the best time to use the tedder. Our hay is mostly an alfalfa/grass mix, a bit heavier on the grass, as that's what the horse owners around here favor these days. (25 years ago, they wanted lots of alfalfa. Go figure.) Most of the grass is timothy, but there's some canarygrass, and quackgrass has a tendency to invade after a while. Our grandfather didn't have the canarygrass, but it actually makes a good horse hay if you don't wait too long to cut it. Under good conditions, I think we don't even need to use the tedder at all, but "good" conditions have become rarer in recent years. I'm thinking the best time for us to ted under not-so-good conditions would be on the first day after cutting, soon after the dew dries off.

 

Anybody have any other suggestions?

 

Looking for tips on tedding