Round Bale Mover

by Brad Mummery of Minnedosa, MB, Canada

I read a letter in your last issue about hauling round bales and it seemed to me that the person was going to an awful lot of trouble to haul a single bale. I’m not by any means a professional writer or teamster but I will give this my best shot to explain what I’ve come up with.

First of all and maybe most importantly, I cannot take credit for this contraption as the idea came to me from my friend and mentor Wes Ferguson. I bought the original spike from him, then improved on it somewhat. To my knowledge, there are only two like this in existence, and I had a hand in building both of them. Anyone with a welder and some basic metalworking skills can make one of these. The trick is to make sure it is balanced properly to handle large bales.

I usually use heavy horses to haul the bales and my record for one day is sixty 1200 lb bales with a pair of heavy horses, however, I have hauled forty-five in an afternoon with light horses. This contraption is an excellent opportunity to train your horses to back up, as well as gee and haw. First I line up the spike, then back the horses up until the spike is buried in the center of the bale. I use at least a 3000 lb electric winch with two 12 volt car batteries geared down with pulleys so that it takes a little less than a minute to lift the bale. On my own spike I also added a solar panel to charge as I go. The reason my record was only sixty bales in one day is because I was using my friend’s spike that ran the batteries down. Sixty is a pretty good day for any pair of horses anyway and I usually haul about 10 – 12 bales per hour. What I’ve been doing with it is hauling from all over the field into rows for the semi to pick up. I’ve also learned how (thanks to my friend Crystal King) to lift up a bale on its end with the spike so as to get the strings off and put a feeder over it.