Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 17, 1990 TAG: 9006170136
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But there they are, fields dotted with two fundamentally different shapes - rectangles and cylinders.
They are hay bales, arranged in shapes and sizes to suit each farm's needs, equipment and resources.
Each shape has its own short list of benefits and disadvantages.
Tradition sides with rectangular bales - the kind that's good for sitting on. A dry one weighs 40 to 50 pounds. They're easy to stack in a hay loft, and can be hefted by hand.
But those same advantages can also be disadvantages. Farm labor is hard to find and getting harder. Baling and stacking rectangular bales is a labor-intensive job, requiring at least two pairs of arms. Square bales must be shielded from rain, so they also need to be kept under roof, and many farmers don't have enough barn space to store enough hay to feed their cattle.
Round bales, which have grown in popularity only in the past decade, solve some of the problems but cause others.
"It's the availability of labor. It's hard to get help. High school kids don't do this stuff anymore," said Harlan White, an agronomist at Virginia Tech.
The round bales can be harvested and baled by one person. Weighing from 800 to 1,200 pounds, they are moved about by machine and require only one tractor driver to maneuver.
That solves the labor problem but creates others.
"There's tremendous waste on the big bales. When they first came out, people thought they were great. But if you don't break the surface between the hay and the ground, they act like a wick and pull up all the moisture," White said.
The moisture also falls from above, soaking into the hay and leading to rot.
Some farmers haul the round bales to sheds for protection, others top them with plastic liners.
Round bales, though, can't be stacked.
"You ever try to stack circles?" White mused.
by CNB