A WELGER round baler has proved a faithful workhorse for a Goulburn Valley hay and silage contractor, reports MARK SAUNDERS

Agricultural contractor Ashley Dempster has been making hay since he was able to first drive a tractor on the family farm at Tallygaroopna.

"My dad was one of the first farmers in the Goulburn Valley to own a round baler about 30 years ago, so I probably caught the hay-making bug back then," Ashley said.

Now Ashley makes about 20,000 round bales of hay and silage a year, for farmers in the Goulburn Valley.

"I will also travel to NSW and southwestern Victoria if the work is there," Ashley said.

A qualified diesel mechanic, Ashley likes his machinery to be reliable and robust.

That led him to buy a Welger fixed-chamber round baler about eight years ago.

"It's turned out to be a fantastic machine. I've made more than 70,000 bales with it and it's pretty much been bullet-proof," he said.

Ashley fondly refers to the Welger as his "little pot of gold", due to its ability to keep running with low maintenance.

"Being a fixed-chamber baler, there are no belts. There are four grease nipple banks and virtually anyone can operate the baler.

"I had belt-type balers in silage before the Welger and you would spend $4000 or $5000 at the end of each season replacing parts, but the Welger is unbreakable."

Another good test of the Welger's toughness was when Ashley travelled to Nyngan in NSW about five years ago to bale canola, which is renowned for its tough stalks.

"The canola baling was extremely hard on the gear, but the Welger took it all in its stride," he said.

"It has also been used to bale rice straw and it does an excellent job of that."

Ashley has developed something of a niche business with the rice straw. He adds Big N (anhydrous ammonia) to it, to improve its feed value.

In a similar system to that used to make alkalage, the anhydrous ammonia is added to the wrapped straw bales, at a rate of 2 to 4 per cent by weight.

The rice straw is mowed and baled and wrapped on the same day and "gassed" about two weeks later.

"We have found that by adding the ammonia, the protein level goes from about 4 per cent to 7 per cent and the digestibility goes from 45 per cent to 55 per cent," Ashley said.

The energy level also increases by about 1MJ, to 8MJ per kilogram.

"Adding ammonia to the rice straw makes it softer and more digestible for the cow. As a ration, cows will not lose weight on the treated rice straw."

Ashley said the gas also killed virtually all bacteria in the straw.

"Two weeks after gassing the straw is safe to use and will have a shelf life of about two years."

The Welger is still going strong and this spring racked up another 3000 bales with no problems, according to Ashley.

It also has the ability to chop pasture or crop to 45mm, with a 23-knife rotor.

"The shorter the chop, the more dense the bales and the better fermentation of the silage," Ashley said.

His bale-wrapper of choice is a McHale HS2000. It has wrapped about 50,000 bales.

There are another three balers in Ashley's fleet, including a brand new Gallignani GAV9 model, which he said had performed well.

"The Gallignani makes bales that measure 2m diameter by 1200mm wide and it's a bells-and-whistles variable chamber baler," Ashley said.

"What I like the most about it is its ability to produce very dense bales, but you can easily control the density from the cabin.

"It has a three-stage density control.

"That means there is no sudden horsepower drain on the tractor when the bales start to form and the bale is very easy to roll out, with no solid core in the middle."

The Gallignani produced about 6000 round bales of hay this spring.

Although Ashley has been relatively busy this spring making hay and silage, he said a lack of irrigation water, pasture and dairy-farmer confidence had reduced the amount of hay made in the Goulburn Valley.

"We are usually baling until Christmas, but we don't have to worry about that this year," Ashley said.

"The heatwave in November really knocked the pastures around and there were many dairy farms that locked paddocks up, grazed them and then had no follow-up growth."

For mowing, Ashley has recently added a Fella linkage mower conditioner to his equipment. The 3m mower has six discs.

Ashley said he went for a linkage mower as it folded up very easily, which made it much safer for road transport and access to paddocks.

"I use it with a front-mounted mower and I find that system leaves very little hay standing in the paddock," he said.

"One of the first paddocks I used the Fella in was a 10ha oat crop. It yielded 400 round bales and it handled that no problems."