I tend to cringe when I hear of wet baled harvests, primarily due to molding concerns.
Change my mind.
Yeah, me too.
The all knowing one has this to say when asked about “mold anaerobic”
Mold are aerobic organisms and cannot grow well under conditions where oxygen is limited.
…and I’ve heard tell of “smells like alcohol” when those wet bails are fed through a screw press to dewater them months after harvest
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I should note that wrapped bales are few and far between here on the east coast. Most baled crops out here typically just get stacked and tarped.
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“we’re fermenting those bales on purpose” said the blind man to the deaf dog.
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We use compression bails flooded with nitrogen here in Canada & its way cheaper that cold storage. Tho we have not had them in the bails for more than 90 days as we use a 500lb/hr chinese conveyor dryer & only need a couple months storage time
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How thick are you running the biomass on that dryer? We were only able to process 120lb/hr dry output.
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I saw a barn explode and burn to the ground from wet hay being baled and stored.
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Its supposed to be done with a high pressure compactor not a baler. The biomass gets compressed at 4000 lbs/sq inch and then wrapped with several layers of plastic. Should not ferment when done proper and is a great option for huge farms who need to harvest but no options exist for drying all at once.
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Saw some wet bailed product a few weeks ago, and it was one of the scariest things I have seen brought into a lab. The product was black (all plant parts were the same color), and apparently you could “shake the whole plant off the stock” when it came out of the bail. Farmers called it a time saver; I call it biohazard. The amount of botrytis and PM was through the roof. Took everything in my power to convince owners we wanted no part in processing that lot.
I keep hearing it can be done right, but I have yet to see it actually not scare me to process.
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pre fermented ready to go right into beverages.
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our neighbor dries hemp and got 20 of these bales in too. they smelled like fish oil and dead crickets.
I get that mold cant grow with zero oxygen but what happens when these bales get a small hole poked in them during loading, transport and unloading??
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If a bale is punctured, we rewrap it.
Like @cyclopath said, mold isn’t the only worry lots of Anaerobes that can grow under those conditions, and not all of them are things I’d like to breath in
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Yeah wonder what other products the Anaerobes are busy making, acetic acid maybe?
Have extracted some stuff that was wet baled and then whole plant shredded run thru a commercial dryer. I was not impressed by the crude yields we got out of it when compared with material that was field or hang dried & debucked.
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approx 5 inches, the speed of the conveyor is the biggest factor of getting to 10-12% moisture in one pass
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We ran about 8-10" with a 2.5hr resonance at 126F. Thinking we need to run thinner and faster next year.
FWIW we run at 120f-140f depending on leaf-flower, our residence times are very close to 2hrs and we typically only see 10-20% decarb.
All our stock out of that machine goes to distillate so we dont much care about the conversion as long were not burning away mg’s . Next harvest I plan on cranking it up to see just how close we can fly to the sun lol
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I suggest going on Instagram and checking out @theclearscientist. Truck after truck of bales rolling up to that monster lab for fresh processing. @Myrrdin clearly knows what’s up. In my humble opinion, the best compactor baler is from Orkel in Holland. It’s called the MP2000. They run $500k each. Like extraction, farming is about eliminating choke points. Drying is a choke point. Baling allows us to postpone drying and gives us the option to supply labs who run bio fresh and skip drying altogether.
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Ive never met a wet bale I wanted anything to do with.
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