Hello I'm Steve Riley. We are in southern Indiana in a little down called Deputy.
Which we're about 45 miles north of
Louisville, Kentucky.
A lot of people call it God's country, but it's very hard to make it dry hay here. It can happen but the windows of
opportunity seems to be so short anymore that we just can't seem to get anything done.
Now we're pretty much 100 percent wet
hay. Probably the biggest challenge with
the last baler I had, was I just wasn't
getting it ground up the way I wanted it.
It processed wet hay to a certain extent,
but it still wasn't enough. I was losing
a lot at the hay feeders and I felt like I was
hauling a lot back out in the manure spreader.
Steve was using a competitor's baler and he was trying to get the slice.
He was wanting to slice to hay up — that was his main thing, but the competitor baler would not do that.
About 2.8 mile on hour was as fast as I could run that baler without
plugging it up. Same afternoon they brought this baler in, and about 4-5 hours later
we were running at 8.3 miles an hour and
the baler was still cruising right along.
It just didn't have a big enough pony in front of it to keep it running at 8.3 miles an hour
Steve had some humongous windrows. It was green, green hay
and he was getting up there to a little
over 8 miles an hour and he actually got to
8.3 miles an hour in his tractor he just
didn't have enough horsepower.
That was a big thing with me was I wanted something to try before spending the money on it, and
Vermeer was there. They brought it, set it up — you don't like it, you don't have to take it.
They brought it here and demoed it and it hasn't left yet — it's still here.
The main thing that's Steve is after, is he
was wanting to be able to put up more
hay in a package. That way he has less
bales to handle.
On average the bales that we're baling — they're anywhere from 2,000 pounds up to 2,300 pounds.
Depending on what kind of material we're putting in them. On a dry bale we can make a hardcore center,
we can make a soft-core center.
You might have to buy two different balers to do the same thing that this one is doing.
Until this baler, I've never had a baler that's
satisfied me on basically wastage.
With this one, slicing it — the cows are getting no more than they can grab with their mouth.
That's what I'd say the biggest impact that the 504 has had on our operation,
it's that you know we're able to increase the cow numbers.
If I can run, another 15, 20, 25 cows and work no harder at getting the hay processed
and everything — I think the 504 pro is
going to let me accomplish that if I want to go that far.
I'm Steve Riley and that's why I
switched to 504 pro.
