Custom Hay & Forage Harvesting on Agnomy

Putting up quality hay and forage is a race against moisture, and most growers do not own every machine the job needs. Custom operators bring the full haymaking chain to your field: mower-conditioners and swathers to cut, rakes and tedders to speed dry-down and build the windrow, and balers that put up round, small square, or large square bales sized to how you feed, sell, or ship. When the crop goes up wet as baleage or silage, they add bale wrapping and self-propelled forage harvesters that chop and blow directly into trucks.

Hiring a custom crew turns a large capital purchase into a per-acre or per-ton cost, and it puts experienced operators and late-model equipment on the crop during the narrow window when tonnage and quality are decided. That matters most on alfalfa and grass hay, where a rain event between cutting and baling can drop a cutting a full grade, and on corn and sorghum silage, where chop length and moisture at harvest set how well the pile ferments and feeds.

Custom haying is usually priced by the operation. Cutting and conditioning and raking run by the acre, baling by the bale with round, small square, and large square each priced differently, wrapping by the bale, silage chopping by the ton, hour, or acre, and bale hauling and stacking by the bale or the load. You can hire a single step, such as just the baling, or the whole cut-rake-bale-stack sequence as one job.