Home-Built Bale Shredder Saves Straw, Labor

Home-Built Bale Shredder Saves Straw, Labor BALE HANDLING Bale Handling (31B) 32-1-32 A home-built bale shredder helps Lewis Hacault use less straw and save labor. "I built it mostly to spread straw at first," the Mariapolis, Manitoba, farmer explains. He wanted to use one large bale for inside and outside bedding areas for his 30 beef cows, but it was difficult to do by hand without wasting straw. More straw meant more time and cost and cleanup time. With his small herd, Hacault knew buying a $12,000 shredder was impractical, so after seeing someone else's shredder, he combined his mechanic skills and some scrap equipment to build his own. He started with a sprayer cart and ground off brackets and unneeded parts. He welded anhydrous cultivator scraps to make a frame and added round pipes on top to support a bale. "Inside the cart, there's a feeder chain that the bale sits on made from an old New Holland baler," Hacault says. "It actually turns the bale to feed it in. The chain is run with a hydraulic motor." He made flails from 2 by 3/8-in. flat iron hinged with 1/2-in. pins welded to a 7-inch heavy pipe from an old John Deere combine to spread and throw the straw into pens, or feed in front of the cows. "It blows straw about 30 ft. with the flails," Hacault says, with a direct drive pto that spins the pipe at 1,000 rpm's. "I have an automatic hydraulic loader so I don't have to unhook the tractor to load bales," Hacault says. Tines slip under the bale, then lift it into the cart. "I do everything from the tractor, and it gets the job done much quicker," he adds. He spent $300 and a winter building it in his spare time, but it was a good winter project, he says, that has worked well for five years. Contact: Farm Show Followup, Lewis Hacault, P. O. Box 73, Mariapolis, Manitoba, Canada ROK 1K0 (ph 204 836-2887; fhacault@mts.net).

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