Bale Leaves With Your Hay Baler

Bale Leaves With Your Hay Baler HAY & FORAGE HARVESTING Balers (6) 5-5-30 Ever thought about rigging up your conventional hay baler to bale leaves? It could open the door to lots of low-priced bedding, and the possibility of doing custom leaf-baling in nearby towns in the fall. "We know leaf baling works. We're doing it," says Fred Elsass, director of the Canton Park Systems, Canton, Ohio. He converted a Ford 520 conventional square baler, purchased from a local implement dealer, into what he calls "The Leaf Gobbler". Elsass had been looking for a better way to handle leaves, both because of new pollution laws that prohibit open burning and the need for new labor-saving methods to deal with the town's annual leaf-disposal problem. He chose the 520 because of its smaller bale chamber, which he figured would help hold leaf bales together better. Tractor pto speed was reduced to 250-300 rpm, and he added extra rubber tines on the pickup for better cleaning. In parks or golf courses, power blowers are used to windrow the leaves. The baler then slowly moves through the windrows as one or two men help feed leaves into the pickup. Elsass says his crews have no problem baling leaves, wet or dry, if they adjust bale tension and length to avoid making bales too heavy when the leaves are wet. The leaves form firm, easily-handled bales which are trucked to a remote area and stacked for composting, or picked up by residents who use them to make their own compost piles. Elsass figures baling provides up to 35 to 1 reduction in leaf volume, and finds it's much faster and simpler than vacuuming and loading trucks for transport to a landfill. A few miles north of Canton, groundskeepers at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, have been using a Ford 532 baler to package fallen leaves. They adjusted the chamber feed fork so it barely enters the bale chamber, tightened the flywheel slip clutch to avoid slipping at a reduced pto speed of 300 rpm, removed hold-down fingers from the pickup, and replaced metal pickup tines with rubber teeth for better sweeping action on sod or hard surfaces, such as streets. and parking areas. They also lowered the star wheel, which measures bale length, for more positive engagement with leaves moving through the baler. Power blowers are used at Kent State to gather leaves into piles or windrows prior to baling. In Batavia, N.Y., public works superintendent Harry Simmons borrows a hay baler from a local implement dealer to remove leaves from the streets. He removes the regular pickup from an International Harvester baler and adds a longer, sloping "shop-made" pickup with plastic teeth on a rubber belt to pick up leaves. After residents rake leaves to the curb, a tractor-mounted rotary sweeper rolls leaves into a windrow in the street. "We make the bales light ù about 30-35 lbs. each ù so people can handle them easily. They can quickly lift them into a car trunk or station wagon," says Simmons. Neither Elsass nor Simmons made any permanent modifications in equipping the balers to handle leaves. They both agree that almost any farm baler could be used to bale leaves if you're prepared to experiment a little. "Several local farmers with many large trees around their buildings have found that baling beats raking and burning leaves, and the baled leaves make fine bedding for livestock," says Simmons. If you have the time, you may be interested in trying some custom leaf baling in town this fall. Simmons cautions, however, that you'd better charge by the hour, rather than by the bale, because you won't get the out-put in bales per hour that you get in the field.

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