Tractor Plus Silage Baler: “Everything I Need To Do My Job”

“It rained for two weeks. We were gonna have two nice days, and then rain for another week,” says Tom Waitt, owner of Dandy Breeze Dairy in Sheridan, Indiana. His 200-acre farm features a herd of 90 Jersey cows who produce high-quailty creamline milk for premium markets and feed on pasture when the weather permits. Haying windows are always tight, but nutrient content is especially important to Tom, which means baling as wet as he can.

Just maybe not this wet.

“We had to bale it. It baled really wet,” he says, holding a handful of dense, rich clover. “We had to get it done, and that baler baled it. I couldn’t believe it.”

Tom Waitt

“That baler” is a Massey Ferguson RB4160V, a silage baler that produces 4- x 5-foot round bales and surprised its new owner with its pickup, among other features. “I don’t even worry about plugging it up,” says Tom. “With other machines, I was always worried about the next clog, always on pins and needles… this is too much. But this machine is not going to get stressed.”

Waitt was already moving bales, feeding and doing other jobs around the farm with the MF4707, a 70hp workhorse on the Global Series platform that had impressed him with its visibility. “It’s a nice cab; you can see the drawbar, see what’s in front of you, left and right. And there’s plenty of power for what I use it for.”

Still, he wanted something bigger to pull the RB4160V. “This baler is a very heavy baler, weighing in at over 8,000 pounds,” says Dave Hoard, salesman at Roudebush Equipment in nearby Westfield. “To process that wet hay, it takes a lot of horsepower.” Enter the MF6713, another Global Series tractor with the weight and horsepower to handle Tom’s haying needs.

Tom converted from New Holland products, and was happy to see how the MF6713 and the baler worked together. “It just seems like a really good match,” he says. “You don’t even know the baler is back there,” he adds, commenting on the tractor’s pulling power, but the cab worked better for him, too. Expanded monitoring capability means Tom can adjust bale density from the comfort of the tractor rather than at the baler itself. And Tom likes a dense bale. “It has a setting of 1 to 10, as far as how dense the bale is,” says Hoard. “When you set it up there pretty dense, you can’t even stick your finger in the side of that bale.”

A denser bale means less work and more time in the day for Waitt. “I’d throw a bale out last year (baled with previous equipment), and it lasts two days; now they go to day five.” Meanwhile, the feed quality is what he needs to maintain his premium product. “It keeps the leaves on everything. You’re basically feeding (the cows) pasture, which is great.”

He says his Massey equipment is ideal for Dandy Breeze. “If you’re not big and huge and you don’t have a $350,000 chopper, and you want something to make some dry hay and cut it, make some wet hay and feed it… I look at it as the small guy’s combine. It’s everything I need to do my job.”