We've got an old dairy barn with ~50 tie stalls where Dad's raising steers and dairy heifers. Right now they're being fed conventionally, as they have been since the 1970's, with an upright silo and small square bales of dry hay.
There are two rows of stalls, but tail-to-tail. To further complicate matters, one manger is only about 3-1/2' wide. If the stalls were nose-to-nose, or the manger just a foot wider, no problem... Remodeling the barn is out of the question as it is simply not cost effective.
I'm buying a round baler this spring. The plan is to roll the hay up and see if I can get what we don't need on trucks headed somewhere else in the country that does need it and might actually pay for it.
What I'd like to do is get away from the silo (completely) and small squares (to some extent), and figure out a way to get round bales, both wet and dry, on the menu.
The key is it can NOT be labor-intensive, and has to be reliable and robust. I'm looking for something small scale that can take the output of a bale unroller, chew it up, and dump it into a conveyor, which drops it into electric feed carts for distribution to the cattle.
Anything existing for this kind of job? Ideas of something I could build or repurpose?
Big bales in a small barn
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire