With the price of hay up this year and the wet season last year I am looking for a way to reduce hay spoilage for this coming winter in WI.

The flooding late last August meant that about every bale sitting outside in W WI may have had 20" of rain on it between baling and usage. Maybe more.

I found that by late winter I was having to discard much of the outside foot or so of 6 ft diameter round bales due to mold. The outside foot on a 6 ft diameter bale has about 44% of the hay in a bale! I don't have a hay shed so I thought I'd try these bale sleeves that are about $3.80 per bale.

Problem I ran into the other day is that the fellow I buy hay from makes very nice big high density bales but they evidently are a bit bigger than 6 ft in diameter. I ended up slitting the sleeves and duct taping the bottom. I have a bunch of scrap pallets and thought I'd set the early bales on them until I run out.

It took about 10 minutes per bale to get them on and set on the pallet.

Question is - is it worth the effort?  Is the hay going to be noticeably better come late winter with these covers on compared to the regular net wrap on them already? These are 5 x 6 ft bales. Anyone with experience with these in a wet, cold climate?

Here's a picture of my first attempt at using bale sleeves.

Jim at Dawn

(Bale Sleeve IMG_0968_1.JPG)

Bale Sleeve IMG_0968_1.JPG (69KB - 596 downloads)