"My three home-built bale trailers let one man easily move 100 big round bales 10 miles from field to the farm in a day without ever leaving the tractor seat. It's the most efficient and economical bale handling system I've seen," says Dennis Albright, Eudora, Ark., who used 33-ft. logs to make his three convenient bale transporters.

Albright started with three stripped down 4-wheel wagons. He positioned two logs lying parallel on each wagon and chained them down at each bolster point. They extend 6 ft. ahead of each front bolster and 7 ft. behind. He notched each log and put a spacer board between them front and rear to hold them in place and keep them apart. He sets the front bolsters on the wagon as narrow as possible and the rear bolsters as far apart as possible to make shorter turns when the wagons are hooked tightly together.

Albright pulls the three wagons one behind the other with a tractor equipped with a 3-pt. mounted modified Vermeer bale fork. He stabs the bales sideways to place them end-to-end on the trailers and unloads them by curling the wagons together in a semi-circle and pushing them onto the ground on the side away from the tractor. There's no need to tie bales down when in transport. Each trailer carries six bales and he can carry one on the fork for a total of 19 at once. And Albright says he never has to get off the tractor because he can reach down with an iron rod to hitch and unhitch the tongue on the forward trailer.

"It took me awhile to figure it all out but, other than the tractor, the cost of the fork and wagons, all purchased used, was minimal. Just a fraction of the cost of a single, new self-unloading bale trailer that would handle only one bale," says Albright.