It's simple but it works, says John Poirot, Nashville, Ill., who figures he saved himself a lot of money by building his own bale bunch cart to leave small square bales in groups of six in the field.

The buncher is simply a manually-dumped small flatbed on a single axle. A piece of channel iron along one side is spaced so that 3 bales ride side by side on the cart. One man riding on the front of the cart guides bales onto the flatbed, and then dumps the trailer with a hand lever when it's full. They slide off the back.

Once the bales are bunched in the field, Poirot never has to touch them by hand again. He uses a commercial-built Farm-hand bale grab to handle all six bales at once to load them onto wagons or into stacks.