06/10/2025
So why do we bale at night?
We are chasing dew, or more specifically toughness of the forage. The leafs are where all the nutrition and palatability of a plant come from. To dry they shatter and fall to the ground as dust, too wet will cause mold/heat/fermentation when pressed together.
For dry hay you are aiming between 10% & very low 20's% moisture. Big bales you can push the dryer end, little bales you can push the wetter end.
So when is the hay in the proper range? Depends, what is the day time high? the low? Humidity? Dew point? Wind? Is it overcast?
As a general rule May-August our windows of the right condition is somewhere between 7-10 in the morning and 10-3 at night. Now remember it's the transition from too wet to dry or vice versa.
In the morning it is very common for the bottom of the window to be too wet and the top to be too dry. Making it very difficult to hit that goldy locks condition, and sometimes it's literally only a few minutes long. This can make constant adjustments in bale tension necessary and you still come out with a variation in bales.
At night it is a much slower transition, making a much more consistent bale. You go until the dew sets in, which you can literally feel when you are out there. Now if you have a wind at night that dew never settles and you can go all night long.
Interesting side note on dryland in a heat event. Once dried down below 10% there can be such a low humidity that the hay literally isn't balable anytime for sometimes weeks. One way to go around that issue is if we know we are going into a more than a week long high heat event we literally try to bale it on the dry down from being cut. Another narrow window.
Then on the opposite side of the spectrum late in the season, everything is so wet that the windrow has to be raked in the late morning to get the bottom off the ground. We bale in the driest part of the day we can, 2-6ish. And if you don't get any part baled, it has to be raked the next day to dry out again.
There is a lot that goes into something as simple as your hay including up to several weeks with less than 4hr sleep average.
They say you have to make hay when the sun shines...... We think the moon works well too.
