To make it easier to transport small straw and hay bales it is important to have the optimal bale length. This article will explain how to utilise the standard truck space to load as many bales as possible and to increase effieciency, save time, fuel and labor during the harvest season.
Utilising the loading space
The “old-fashioned” small bales of about 20 kg will be around for a long time to come. A clever approach to the processing of small bales will save a lot of tiring manual work. In the chain from ‘country to customer’, the small packs are transported at least once on a truck. Trucks are legally no wider than 250 cm. Packs of the commonly used length of 105 cm give rise to the need to lay packs in the length and width of the truck for proper utilisation of the cargo space.
The optimum length of small bales
Most small bales are 100 cm to 120 cm and as already mentioned, almost all bales are transported on 250 cm wide trucks. If you have 100 cm bales, two of them can be transported lengthwise, leaving 50 cm, then one bale is put crosswise between them. Also, if you make the bales slightly longer than 83 cm, then exactly 3 bales can be placed lengthwise across the width of the truck. Furthermore, you can place 5 bales of 50 cm width next to each other, which will make it to 250 cm of truck’s width. You can place these alternately (always turned by 90°) on the car and thus get a solid masonry bond.
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- Loading from the side, packs stacked widthways
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- Loading from the rear, packs stacked lengthwise
Meijer Holland has the collector Limo Hydra 15M and the accompanying clamp Meijer KM 15M in its program for this purpose. These collect and process 3 rows of 5 bales.
Without any manual labour you can effortlessly move thousands of bales per year. If you want to load a truck from the rear, the width of the 5 packs is 5 x 50 = 250 cm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=40&v=Z61s3zq9Qu8&feature=emb_logoBig bales
Large bales have a length of 240 cm or 250 cm in 99.9% of the cases, which is the width of a truck. To load and unload big bales to the truck and from it, Fred bale grab and Rambo bale grabs are great. Fred bale grab is available in six different versions and can grab and stack large straw and hay bales simultaneosly. The Rambo bale grab is available in ten versions and it is perfect to collect and load heavy bales on a truck.
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