Tipping the Scales

How much does one of these large round bales weigh?

We’ll get to that later. But first, let’s bring them home from the field.

I’ve taken photos of this process in the past. But, I didn’t have anything better to do while Bill loaded the bales on the hauler, so here are more photos.

For this shot, I stood in the bed of the truck against the cab. Bill stabs the bale with the bale fork on his tractor, lifts it up, then motors over to the hauler. As he approaches the back end of the hauler, he lifts the bale at an angle, pulls in close and sets it down.

Then he roars off to get another bale. When he returns, he sets the bale on the rails and pushes it forward until the front end of the tractor is at the rear end of the hauler. He’ll repeat until there are seven bales loaded.

Now it’s time to go home and dump the load. Unless this is the last load, Bill will drive and I’ll ride shotgun. But for the final trip, I drive, Cricket rides shotgun and Bill follows on the tractor with another bale on the fork. On this particular evening, a storm was moving in from the southwest. When we got home, I grabbed the camera and headed to the end of the driveway to catch some photos.

Now, let’s weigh a bale. Actually, we’d already done the weighing earlier when Bill was calibrating the baler computer to figure out what diameter of bale to program. The previous owner of this farm had a scale, but Bill hadn’t seriously used it until now. He set a bale on the platform.

The actual scale weights are housed in a metal box with a drop-down door. You can just see the top of the box over the bale. Now, here’s the cool part—the scale works just like those at the doctor’s office (non-digital variety).

So, how much did this bale weigh? 1,150 pounds!

Bill decided he wanted to check the accuracy of the scale, so he asked Cricket and I to step onboard with the bale. Then, he asked how much I weigh. I mentally subtracted five pounds and told him. So did Cricket! He adjusted the weights to balance the scale and arrived at a total very close to the bale weight plus mine and Cricket’s. “Very close” was good enough for him.

He’ll never miss those ten pounds!