Our First Horse

One of the first things we wanted to or needed to do with our new tractor is to move hay and it’s one of the reasons we used to justify having a tractor. Our round bale experiment was successful and now we feed mostly round hay bales to our horses throughout winter. Until now we’ve been pulling our car hauler full of round bales into our muddy pasture and then pushing a round bale off as needed. Now that we have a four wheel drive tractor, it was time to put it to work. But we needed one more thing: a hay spear. Unfortunately our tractor doesn’t have a quick-disconnect bucket. We could buy a hay spear implement for the arms but it would be a pain to unbolt and remove the bucket each time we needed a bale. While we do plan to convert our arms to use a quick-connect system, it’s a bit of a hassle up front. We’d need to buy a system and then have someone weld a bracket to our bucket. For now, we’ve opted to use a spear that connects to our bucket. We found a nice used setup on Craigslist that attaches in a way that spreads the load across a good portion of the bucket to minimize bending and yesterday we got to test it out. I’ll need some practice but it went well (see pic). At 800 or so pounds, having a bale up high like that makes the tractor a little unsteady. I left the bush hog on the rear for counterweight and lowered the bale when I cleared my trailer.

Once we have it down, I think the process will be smoother using a tractor. Do you have any experiences (good or bad) with a clip-on hay spear?