Soy Bean Bales ?

There is an advertisement on my local C/L for 4'x5' round bales of soybeans (net wrapped). I'm trying to figure out what/who would use bean stems for anything . I can't imagine it's for bedding, what an itchy/stringy mess IMO .

I think I'd rather stack small squares of oat straw without a shirt, wearing shorts and flip-flops than mess with bean stems . The ad gave no description of what the intended use was, I never heard of bean hay, but did make oat hay one summer for the dairy cows; it got a little too ripe though(seeded in the pod), what a mess in the mow mid winter .

Soybean straw bales remind me of a man I know who round baled some soybean straw to sell. Neighbor had some beef cows and was short on feed so he wanted to buy some bales. Man I know was honest about them and said take one home and try it. After a week of trying to starve his beef cows into eating the bale he gave up and bought alfalfa hay! I do have a friend who fed Holstein Heifers on soybean straw bales. He chopped them and mixed them with corn silage,a little haylage and liquid molasses . They did good on this ration and extended Richard's forage. To feed them in place of sole source ofhay I know of no one with any success. One fellow and his son small square baled soybean straw and burned the bales in their outdoor wood burner. Jr. said they worked well and he thought easier than cutting firewood.

people buy them to grind up for cattle feed. I baled my bean straw one year and sold the bales. then I saw that it was more beneficial to leave the straw/stems in the fields due to the nitrogen content. it would be a lot better to bale corn stalks/shucks for bedding/feeding/burning than bean stubble. a lot of farmers bale or have their cornstalks baled around here, they sell the bales to some company that hauls them to northern IA or southern MN for power plants.   

About 30 years ago, a woman stopped at the farm and wanted a 6 acre field of beans we had to use for hay in small squares. We baled it in late August when it was starting to pod. It was terrible to get dry, very dusty, heavy bales. She was using it for sheep, maybe milk I believe. She came back the next year and wanted to do it again. We didn’t do it, but she payed big money for those bales. I’m sure others have done the same somewhere.

I've seen Navy Beans baled after they were combined.

Think how dusty and dirty that barns would become after being having their floors covered in soybean dried stems. The back of the Gleaner is NOT a place you want to be when she is running in soybeans on a windless day. That dust hangs in the air. 

allisrutledge wrote: I've baled beans for hay , did the add say it was combined or cut green?

Around here some growers chop it in the field, others bale it, I asked who uses the soybean straw and was told not a big demand but pig farms and goat keepers pay well for it - they eat it, rather than use it for bedding. I didn't know that before I asked many years ago. I just accepted it at face value and never pursued it any more after that.

Edited by Kansas99 - 15 Apr 2020 at 8:28pm

A couple years ago in a wicked drought, looked into baling or chopping soybeans for cattle feed.  The research showed very poor economy, you'd have to be super desperate and super bent on keeping every cow on the farm.....which at times I see that, just saying.  Even as screwed up as prices yields and weather was that year, you were better off to combine what was there and use the money to buy expensive hay or something than to feed the beans.

allisrutledge wrote: Tbone95 wrote: A couple years ago in a wicked drought, looked into baling or chopping soybeans for cattle feed.  The research showed very poor economy, you'd have to be super desperate and super bent on keeping every cow on the farm.....which at times I see that, just saying.  Even as screwed up as prices yields and weather was that year, you were better off to combine what was there and use the money to buy expensive hay or something than to feed the beans.   As for round baling my stems....I don't see it ever happening.  I like to leave it in the field run through the straw chopper.  Between the nutrients it returns and the wear and tear on the baler belts and mostly the TIME to bale at that time of year and if the straw were ever dry enough to bale would be a miracle.    If it does pack tight as concrete, well, that's just proof that it is very absorbent.    So, how many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop? Seven

Hahahaha......Yes, definitely a memory for useless stuff.  Coworker while on a business trip together told me, "Boy you sure do know a lot of stupid don't you?"  While probably true, we were talking about why there's a fuel economy difference between manual and automatic transmissions.....so I thought that didn't qualify as stupid ?