Best small baler

[norse]

I'm looking for a second-hand small baler for use on about 10 acres a year. Used to have International 440 which we sold before moving, but now we have sheep again small bales are so much better for feeding. Any advice on good buys and what to avoid?

We have run a few different small balers over the years and would say that the New Holland 276 was one of the better ones for hay ,It made a perfect bale and the harder that you pushed it the better it went 300 bales an hour in hay! We had a MF 128 at the same time and although it had a wider pickup so could cope with larger steaw swaths the NH could go faster and was more reliable and we only bought it as a standby baler for £450 with broken needles in a sale,mended them freed off ramstop and happy days!We later ran JD 456A and then 459 good strong balers but would make hay too heavy if you were not careful, were a lot more expensive machines than the NH though.

 

[AndyD]

Thanks to all for your advice. As some of you have deduced we haven't got a limitless budget so we'll now start looking based on the comments received. Yes, with the benefit of hindsight maybe we should have kept hold of the IH440 but we had no real need to keep it and we moved counties - it was going to cost us more to transport than it was worth to us at that time. We do all our own mowing and tedding but get a contractor in to bale haylage for the cattle, but finding someone who even has a small baler (never mind whether we could get them when we want it doing) is another matter. Luckily my uncle is an excellent engineer so we might be able to find something that's basically sound which needs a bit of work.