I bought 2 bales of straw at Lowes for a seeding project. Surprise the bale was bound with baling wire and not string. I am 60 years old and never seen baling wire used and I worked on the farms a lot as a youngster.
What type of modern combine uses wire? Is it a regional thing?
Used to be used here in Idaho years ago was mostly abandoned when they came out with sisal then plastic twine cows got "hardware" disease from ingesting scraps of wire left in the hay
No type of combine uses wire. Combines harvest grain. Hay and straw are baled with a baler.
Here in central Indiana, at least, it's pretty common to see wire-tied hay. Don't think I've ever seen wire-tied straw, but then, we always bought our straw from the same farm, and he had a string baler.
You'll probably get much more detailed answers over at misc.rural.
I would not go so far as to say no type of combine uses wire or twine. I know of several combines fitted with balers on the straw outlet that drop baled straw right out of the combine. They didn't leave the factory that way, but have been operating in the fields that way for quite a few years.
We don't raise much wheat, oats or the like here. Or if we do it is well beyond my 40 year ago experiences.
Excuse my ignorance. I thought combines stripped the seed from the harvest and then baled the straw; an all in one process.
Do they discard the straw which is then baled by a different baler? A regular hay baler. That seems somewhat more labor intensive than I would have thought modern farm machines would be.
Two of the replies are close enough to Ky for me to accept that what I bought from the BORG was not really all than unusual. Just something I had I had not seem before.
Oh well the wire will come in handy for all sorts of home repairs. -:)
Not, exactly, the bales come out of the baler _attached_to_ the walkers outlet of the combine...so I'll still say the combine doesn't use it. :)
W/ the advent of cellulosic ethanol and stover-fired generation plants there's a lot more of this sort of thing altho for those applications generally small bales aren't the ticket because of transportation so what they're doing/trying is pulling a 4x6 square baler behind instead of trying to attach a small square baler.
Why would they call it "baling wire" for heaven's sake if it wasn't for baling?
String tie is cheaper but whoever baled those may simply just have a wire baler or prefers wire just as we have folks who want net wrap and others that don't on rounds.
When I was young I saw them both. Wire lets you pack a tighter bale, which let you load and store more. Rodents won't cut it, and it won't deteriorate as plastic can. But it's hard to dispose of, can kill an animal if ingested, and needs gloves.
Wire costs a lot more. Nixon applied price controls in 1971. By 1974, the supply was running out, and many balers needed wire. The price tripled.
Lowes has probably found that they can charge an extra 40 cents without losing sales. With wire, they need less space and bales are less likely to break.
Nope. They strip the grain, dump it in a hopper, shear the stalks off, and spew them out the back.
That's often not relevant. Come harvest time, the emphasis is on getting the grain harvested and on its way to market as quickly as possible. Baling the straw as the wheat is harvested takes time and manpower away from the much more important task of harvesting the grain. There's plenty of time to come back and get the straw later when the wheat is taken care of.
You can buy that wire by the thousand-foot spool at places like TSC.
A lot of folks won't bale the straw at all, preferring to turn it under to improve the soil. I depend on the few who will, for animal bedding & tree mulch, fortunately I have found a few grain farmers who will round bail straw. For what it is worth I prefer the string, the mesh seems to always get caught under the bale & then becomes part of the ground & takes forever to break down. The wire is handy for repairs, as a companion for duct tape, but is rare these days.
Here in Southern Utah, the ranchers used so much of the baling wire that when they took it off the bales, they tossed it in piles to keep their stock from becoming entangled in it. I have seen piles of it larger than four pick up trucks, and ten feet high. At first, I couldn't tell what they were, so got out of my truck to go investigate. I do not know if they sold it for scrap, or, like any rancher, didn't throw anything away. On some ranches, there are four to six of these humungous mounds.
But I, like you, thought that they used twine now instead of wire, probably for cost considerations, as well as safety for the stock.
I do some farming myself. Balers bale hay and straw. Combines strip the seed from crops like corn, soybeans and oats. I have never seen a combine that can do both, but I only do small scale farming with old machinery. Some of the new machines (which cost a million dollars) can do anything and everything. Heck, they now have GPS operated tractors that are supposed to be able to plant and harvest crops without the farmer even steering the thing. I guess they still require the farmer to be in the tractor in case something goes wrong. Good grief, I'd hate to think of one of these 50 ton machines losing control and destroying people, livestock and buildings.
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