We’ve been saying it for years as a bit of a friendly joke of an elevator pitch. “Hay goes in big, comes out small, cow goes moo.” It’s the shortest way I know to explain what a HayBuster does for a living. It is also not the whole story, and if you let it be the whole story you will end up with the wrong machine.
I get asked the same question almost every week from somewhere in the world. Which HayBuster is right for me? Sometimes it comes from a 300 cow dairy in Hungary. Sometimes from a 20,000 head feedlot in Mexico. Sometimes from a biogas plant in Germany that wants to shred corn stalks into a digester. The answer is never the same, but the questions I ask to get to the answer are always the same.
So let’s walk through them. If you are a farmer, a contractor, a biogas operator, or a dealer trying to help a customer, this is the conversation I would have with you on the phone.
First question. How small do you actually want it?
This is the fork in the road and it decides everything else.
If you just want to shred and spread a bale, pop it open, drop it in the bunk, use it for bedding, maybe chop it into 15 to 20 cm pieces, you are not looking for a tub grinder. You are looking for a bale processor. Different machine. Different job.
If you want the material to come out smaller than four inches, usually 2 to 4 cm for feeding or bedding, you want a tub grinder with a BigBite hammer mill. That is a completely different machine that does a completely different job. The mill is the heart of it, and the screens in the mill are what control the particle size.
If you try to do fine feed particle work with a bale processor you will be disappointed. If you try to just shred and spread with a tub grinder you will be spending money you didn’t need to spend. Decide this first. Everything else flows from here.
If you’re going with a bale processor
The BaleBuster line is built to shred and spread. Now we have two more questions for you.
Round or square bales? Self loading, or loading with another machine?
The BaleBuster 2800 is what we call the “all bale” machine. It has hydraulic squeeze bars on the back and it will pick up anything you put near it. Round bales, small squares, big squares, it doesn’t care. If you have a mixed operation, or if your customers run every shape of bale, the 2800 is the one I recommend. No second machine, no second operator, one unit handles everything.
The 2660, 2665 and 2574 models will also shred square bales, and they do a very nice job of it. But they are NOT self loading for square bales. You need a telehandler or a front end loader to put the squares in the hopper for you. If you’ve already got a telehandler running, that is no problem. If you don’t, you are signing up for a second piece of equipment and a second operator, and I would steer you back to the 2800.
With or without a blower cannon?
If you are bedding free stalls in a dairy barn or bedding a poultry house, the blower cannon is a game changer. It throws the material exactly where you want it with nobody on the business end of a pitchfork. If you are feeding cattle in a bunk, you usually don’t want the cannon, you want the material placed, not thrown.
Simple decision. But it’s one worth making before you buy.
If you’re going with a tub grinder
Now we are talking about the BigBite mill, and now we are talking about the machines that have built this company since 1966.
All of our BigBite hammer mills will grind hay, straw, corn stalks, cane trash, almost any type of baled material. All of them will also grind grain, right down to almost flour if that’s what you need, as long as you put the hopper on them and the smaller screens in the mill. 10 mm and 5 mm screens for grain. 5 cm and 10 cm screens for hay. The screens are interchangeable and that is the whole trick. You change the screen, you change the particle size.
All of the BigBite mills except the H-1000 are also approved for shredding manure for biogas digesters and wet materials. The H-1000 is a great machine, probably the best value machine in the lineup, but the mill sits at the front of the unit and the discharge augers are longer. For this reason it is NOT the right machine for wet material. Anything over 20 percent moisture starts to fight it. If your job is biogas feedstock or wet corn stalks, you want the H-1030 or bigger.
Here is the output you can expect, dry hay or straw, with the right screens in:
If you are grinding grain instead of hay, a good rule of thumb is to double whatever the hay number is and that will get you close on grain tons per hour. Corn is just so much heavier per cubic meter than hay is. Moisture matters a lot with grain, so take that number as a starting point and adjust for what is actually coming out of your bin.
That is the output side. Now comes the part where most customers get themselves into trouble.
The sizing trap
Here is where I spend half my phone calls with new customers.
A customer says, “I need to grind 30 tons of straw per day. That’s 6 hours of work for the H-835 at 5 tons per hour. Perfect. I will buy the H-835.”
No. That is not perfect. That is a trap.
What the customer just did is create a brand new 6 hour a day job for one of their operators, every single day of the week. That operator is now chained to the grinder instead of doing the ten other things the farm needs him doing. You didn’t gain any efficiency. You just moved a job onto a new piece of equipment and called it progress.
The way to think about sizing a HayBuster is not per hour, and not per day. It is per week.
The farmers I talk to who are the happiest with their HayBuster are the ones who grind for about one day a week. They set aside a day, they run the machine hard, they stockpile a week’s worth of chopped hay or straw under cover, and then for the next six days nobody touches the grinder. The operator goes back to the other ten things he needs to be doing.
Contractors work the same way. A good contractor stops by a farm one day a week, grinds their weekly supply, and moves on to the next job. That is how you build a route and make real money with a HayBuster. That is how the machine pays itself off in 18 months instead of five years.
So if you need 30 tons of straw a day, that is 210 tons a week. You are not looking at an H-835. You are looking at an H-1135 that will knock that out in a single 10 hour shift on a Tuesday and sit quiet the rest of the week.
Right sizing is not about matching the daily tonnage. It is about giving your operator six days of his week back.
Why this whole thing matters
Let me tell you the part of the pitch that my customers actually get passionate about once they have owned a HayBuster for a year. It’s not the tonnage. It’s not even the particle size on paper. It’s what happens at the feed bunk.
Waste is real, and it is much bigger than most ranchers admit. The research is not kind to open bale feeders. An Oklahoma State extension fact sheet puts hay waste at open bottom feeders at up to 21 percent of the original bale weight. A Michigan State study of ring and cradle feeders clocked waste between 6 and 15 percent depending on the design. A 2021 study out of Sexten and the team at Missouri showed hay waste went from 20 percent with a typical ring feeder down to 6 percent with a basket feeder. On a 1,500 lb round bale, 20 percent waste is 300 lb on the ground. That is the math ranchers already know in their gut. Chopping it with a HayBuster takes that number closer to zero, because once it’s been through the balebuster and in the bunk the cattle cannot kick it, trample it, or bed on it.
Sorting goes away when the ration is homogeneous. Every dairy nutritionist has used the Penn State Particle Separator, the three tray box with 19 mm, 8 mm and 4 mm screens. The whole reason that box exists is because cattle sort their TMR if the particle size drifts too long. When they sort, they eat the good stuff and leave the fibrous stuff, the fibrous stuff gets pushed up on the bunk, and milk production suffers. Published numbers out of the dairy research community show milk can drop 3 to 8 pounds per cow per day and butterfat can fall 0.3 to 0.6 points when TMR particle size drifts off target. That is a lot of money leaving the farm.
A HayBuster with the right screen in it puts your forage into the 2 to 4 cm range on purpose, every single day, the same way. That consistency is the whole game in a TMR.
Dry cows actually eat more when the forage is chopped. This one surprises people. The Nutrient Requirements of Dairy Cattle research shows that shorter chopped wheat straw in a high-straw dry cow diet improved dry matter intake and reduced sorting. Dry cows are the hardest group on a dairy to keep eating because they are bored, they are not being pushed, and they will pick through a ration all day long. Chopping the straw fixes it. Intake goes up, body condition holds, and they transition into lactation cleaner.
Bad dust comes off in the mill. This is one of those things you don’t realize until you see it. Outdated hay, hay that was rained on, hay that has been sitting in a stack for two years and smells off, hay that your cattle are turning their noses up at. Run it through a HayBuster and the dust, the spoiled outer leaves, the stems that are past their prime, a lot of that gets broken up and blown off in the grinding process. What comes out the other side is material you can mix into a ration and the cattle will eat it like it’s fresh, because they can’t sort it anymore. Feedlots love this. Biogas plants love it even more. Material that would otherwise be a total loss turns back into feed or feedstock.
You add all of that up. Less waste at the bunk. More consistent TMR. Higher dry cow intake. Feed you would have thrown out turning back into feed. And the operator only runs the grinder one day a week instead of every day.
That is why people buy HayBusters. The tonnage per hour is just how we decide which model fits. The reason they keep the machine for 20 years is what happens after the hay is in the mixer.
The short version
If you take one thing from this, take the per week math. Don’t size the machine to your daily need. Size it to your weekly need so you grind one day and get on with your life.
If you take two things, take the per week math and the particle size point. Fine chopping is not just about making the hay small. It is about killing sorting behavior, recovering waste, and getting more dry matter into your cows without buying more hay.
And if you’re not sure which machine fits, call me or email me. I will ask you these same questions in about ten minutes and we will land on the right one. I would rather tell you to buy the smaller machine and be right than sell you the bigger machine and be wrong.
But now you know the rest of the story.
Best Regards, Nick · Built to Grind. Built to Last. Since 1966.