Advantages Of Bailing?

[FarmerLee73]

I am curious.. I would be interested to know the advantages (if any) over bailing to just storing in a silo as it seems to me that bailing is just more cost and equipment. In my mind which admittedly is a very space place, if you decide to bail you have to buy the bailer, buy something to transport bails, buy something to pick the bails up and also buy some type of shed to store said bails if you want to keep things tidy, oh and I guess also a straw blower.

So why do all that when you could just store lose in a silo, which seems much easier and cheaper? Am i missing something here or is it just a case of it gives you something else to do? I know some will say silage but we have fermenting silo's so again it negates the point.

[juf.de]

Personally i stick to bailing, as it's much easier to organize with courseplay (or i just *censored* at creating CP courses for filling a silo with only one open side). Also with a decent shed you can store way more hay and straw under it thant in the hay barn. For feeding purposes i use the mixer wagon for straw blowing. And with bales i spend way less time shoveling, as even a small tractor with a rear weight can transport 4 bales (or 16000 L) at a time.

[SJ_Sathanas]

Yeah you can store and transport a lot more material when it's bailed rather than loose/bulk.

[FarmerLee73]

Really? I just don't see it, I can use a trailer that stores 80-100k loose, we now have placeable items that make TMR. If i needed to give the cows straw for example, I would have to do multiple trips with bails of straw, then add to a blower. With a trailer it's all done and dusted in much less time and effort, or am I doing it wrong!! I just can't get my head round why a business would chose the long way round and more expensive way of doing something. Maybe I am just looking at it in the wrong way.

[Phigo]

Maybe it is just because in real life it is like that. Ingame I can put 500k Liters of straw and hay in a loft and it uses pretty much no space on my farm. Try that in real life and it would be another Story.

one gameplay-reason could be Silage: I hate making Silage in a bunker and with the right Tools it is more easy to sell Silage bales than loose Silage...

[FarmerLee73]

I did wonder if it was just about being authentic.

[Husqvarna TS 352]

I find baling more fun and adds a realistic element to the process

[OlavEmil]

Being authentic is definitely a big part of it (although, my family's farm actually uses a silo to produce silage). Also, with Seasons, you are finally not able to sell straw and hay in bulk. This means that if you decide to store everything in bulk, you will be stuck with it once you have a surplus. Storing it all in bales, you can sell off the surplus once you start next year's harvest, again, much like it would be in real life.

[wombles]

I can see where your coming from Lee, loose with the silos that except it sure is handy. For my OCD it's just to much , I like my hay and straw in bales, and if I'm on a big farm say Oakfield with a lot of diary cow's then I use the silage pits, if I'm on a small farm like Meadow Grove with only up to hundred cattle, i'll do every thing in bales.

[FarmBoss]

It's just a matter of choice, and as you figured, to give you something to do.

[kahfs]

If the mass density of loose straw/hay is unrealistically high, then loose straw/hay will fill a volume comparable to the baled material. In that case there probably is no advantage of baling, except realism. As an experiment I suggest making a straw bale of a known volume. Then cut it open and collect it with a forage wagon. Now see if the volume of material in the wagon equals the volume of the bale. The volume of the loose straw ought to be several times larger in my opinion.

[aklein]

If the mass density of loose straw/hay is unrealistically high, then loose straw/hay will fill a volume comparable to the baled material. In that case there probably is no advantage of baling, except realism. As an experiment I suggest making a straw bale of a known volume. Then cut it open and collect it with a forage wagon. Now see if the volume of material in the wagon equals the volume of the bale. The volume of the loose straw ought to be several times larger in my opinion.

That's the thing the volume is not realistic in game. A bale is compressed so it will always take less space for the amount of material in it but if you take 4000L of loose and put it on the ground it will consume a massive amount of space compared to the bale not because its uncompressed just because heeps and windrows are unrealistically large in game anyway.

To some degree it comes down to how you want to play. If you play with seasons as has been said you can not sell bulk hay or straw. Seasons prohibits the sale of grass even in bale form so for this purpose were only talking hay or straw. Growing up we baled things. We did not deal with loose/bulk material. We had no place to store such things but had plenty of room to stack bales in barns, put them on trucks and sell them to horse people and other purposes. Landscaping contractors where a big customer of the straw bales. In general there far easier to handle and store and transport. With respect to feeding the act of baling compresses the material in such a way that you can feed slices of a bale.

So for me its more or less I bale things because that is just how it is done.

[fenixguy]

If you're only bailing to sell silage and straw and not feeding, it's a lot faster to bale. A baler/wrapper combo is basically a money printing machine and even though it can get tedious, it's still much faster than packing in a bunker, fermenting, and selling loose silage.

And the Anderson 24 round bale autoloader holds 96,000l of material. Or if being a bit lax with the realism, the autoloading trailer mod holds something like 30 round bales and can be hooked together. Two of them carry over 200,000l worth of material.

It's all up to personal preference really. I like bailing sometimes and I like storing loose sometimes.

[FarmerLee73]

Thanks all, seems like it's a preference thing which is what I suspected, guess it's a bit like using and oven vs microwave, result is the same(ish) just depends on what you prefer or are used to!

[wombles]

Thanks all, seems like it's a preference thing which is what I suspected, guess it's a bit like using and oven vs microwave, result is the same(ish) just depends on what you prefer or are used to!

Whoa dude that's going too far, the micro wave can't put a nice brown colour on top of your pie's.