When Russ Atherton and Tom Morrell went out shopping for a truck to haul haylage from distant fields back to the silos on their Lee, New Hampshire, dairy farm, they found it was going to cost them a lot of money to get what they wanted. And they felt they would need two trucks to keep up with the chopper.

After giving the matter some thought, they bought a truck, but not one for hauling haylage. They bought a used truck equipped to handle those big roll-off refuse containers you see at construction sites.

Then they bought a couple of 50-yard containers. "Those sell for just pretty cheap, brand new," Atherton says.

They chop haylage with a pull-type New Holland 900 chopper and catch it in a Richardson side-dump wagon. Then they dump into a container, which sits alongside the field.

The refuse containers hold 15 to 20 tons of haylage each or 2 dumps from the Richardson wagon.

"It takes only about 2 minutes to drop an empty container and load the full one onto the truck," Atherton says. "I figure one driver should be able to keep up with the chopper most of the time."

The men thought about building a trailer that would hold the containers to pull behind the chopper, so they could chop directly into it, but decided against it. They like the idea of filling the big containers at the edge of the field where it's easier to pick them up with the truck.

Atherton says they also purchased a smaller 25-yard roll-off container for hauling manure to distant fields.