Plan the whole hay workflow

Make a sequence, not a single estimate

For your proposed hay operation, list cutting, any conditioning or tedding, raking, baling and moving the finished bales. Penn State’s forage guidance describes equipment used through this sequence. The relevant stages depend on your crop, equipment and harvesting method.

Turn that sequence into a worksheet. Each row needs a machine, an operator, an input condition that must be met, and a destination for the output. Leave an unknown visibly blank rather than substituting a generic value.

Find the scheduling constraint

Which machine or operator is shared between stages? Which work must wait for a field condition rather than an available tractor? Put those dependencies on the schedule before adding up hours. Five hours of machine work does not necessarily fit into any five-hour slot.

Use the field-capacity calculator for area-based passes such as mowing. Do not use acres per hour as a direct prediction of bales per hour: bale output needs information about the material and baling process that this calculator does not collect.

Plan the last movement

Specify the bale format, the handling attachment and the storage location before committing to a baler. Check the chosen tractor, loader and attachment instructions for the actual handling combination. A PTO-powered machine and a loader ask different questions of the tractor.

Write down who will move the bales, which route they will use, and whether storage access can accommodate the machine. A plan that ends at the baler omits a task that still consumes people and equipment.

Compare complete offers

When requesting contractor prices, use the same stage list for each offer. Mark included and excluded work, supplies, transport and weather-dependent rescheduling. The useful comparison is the cost of delivering the agreed finished job, with omissions visible.