New Holland Round Baler Buyer's Guide

Neil from Messick's here today coming to you from Round Baler Row. This is all the different variations of New Holland's round balers that we have in stock. You may think that one baler is like another, but my goodness, there can be a lot of different features and functionality in these machines that can drive their costs from being literally one machine being less than half the price of another.

We're going to go walk through these different balers here today and show you some of the things that differentiates one from another. Maybe if you're shopping for a round baler, we can help you narrow in on exactly what model might be right for you.

Now before we start on the differences, let's talk about some of the things that all of these balers have in common. When we are talking with customers, one of the biggest things that people seem to value would be quality equipment engineered and made for your field conditions with good parts support and reliability. One of the things that I feel like sometimes is overlooked with New Holland, this big multinational company that sells equipment all over the world, is that much of the equipment is actually designed, manufactured and engineered less than 45 minutes away from our store here in New Holland, Pennsylvania.

You will see these machines being developed here. There are prototypes of these before they come out running around these fields. The manufacturing facility, the plant that builds them is, like I said, 45 minutes away from here. We know too from being through those plant tours and talking to other companies and stuff in the area that the supporting companies, say the places making castings and the foundries and some of the machine shops and stuff, the support and equipment manufacturer are also in this geographic area.

We talked about these balers as we were going through all the supply chain disruptions that we saw through COVID. This is one of the products that held up for us the best because of these aspects. You probably can't find a product out here on our lot that is more Central Pennsylvania than what these balers are. We're going to start at the beginning of New Holland's product line with the RB450 Utility Plus. This is a new baler here in New Holland's product line.

We cover all kinds of changes in all of these other ones, but we tend to overlook this guy here a little bit because for us, it's one of the less popular balers in the line here, but it's not necessarily not drowned. important. You're going to notice the physical size here of this baler is quite a lot smaller than the rest of the balers that are out here. It's still making that familiar 4x5 bale that the rest of them do. It's just physically a smaller machine. There's less steel and less iron in this baler.

You're going to notice the hitches are a little lighter. The PTO shafts are a little smaller. They pick up a little bit more narrow. You can have laced belts on it. It's a little bit-- Call it the starting point. It's an economy less expensive baler for the guys that are only putting up a couple hundred bales a year or doing this on the side as a hobby. There's a lot of features and functionality and benefit in the larger series of balers out here, but you don't have to come in expecting to pay a huge price tag to get into a new baler. You'll see these things sometimes selling at the price of a nice used one, so it is an attractive option to have.

This is a new baler for New Holland here in that this utility plus baler is built at the New Holland factory down here in New Holland, PA. That has not always been the case for New Holland's entry-level balers in the past. Some of them were imports from other factories, particularly over in Europe, but this one here is domestically made, and so it's cool for us to be able to look at this baler and plan on the same reliability and parts support and local engineering that we've had from these other products.

Beside me here is the first of the full-size regular RB450 balers, and you're going to notice that even though this is still a 4x5, it is a significantly larger baler than the utility plus that we were just looking at. That's because this larger frame is going to accommodate different features and stuff that we're going to cover here in other balers. You're also going to notice a lot more heft in the hitch, larger PTO shafts, just an overall larger, more capable build.

Now, this baler can be configured a mind-blowing number of different ways. This one you're going to notice here is a silage special. This is the most common baler in our market, but it is not the cheapest and only configuration of this baler. You can get this in a few different ways. You can get this in a few different ways, in a dry hay only configuration. It doesn't have additional fancy feature names that you're going to see floating around on the sides of the hood, but it's going to be a dry hay baler for that kind of customer.

Our market doesn't tend to call for that all that often, and so we tend to sell mostly these silage special versions. That's going to add endless belts, scrapers on the back of the roll to take off that wet debris to be able to keep the rolls clean so they don't get down underneath the belts, and a little bit larger, heavier pickup. In our market here in South Central PA, a silage special baler is our most popular version of the RB450.

The next variation of the RB450 is this one right here, the RB450 cropcutter. This is going to add an assembly back here behind the pickup that's going to take the hay coming into the baler and drag the hay across a set of knives. Those knives are going to cut the hay stems into smaller pieces and then bail that up. It's going to give you a much tighter, denser bale by breaking down that hay down into a more flexible material.

It's also a step forward if you're going to be taking these bales and running them through a feed mixer. When they go into that mixer, that hay is going to mix up a lot easier because you're dealing with overall shorter material. It's a very useful feature to have on a baler like this, but it can be a little costly because you're buying all of these blades and the teeth assemblies in here. There's a lot of added iron in here and those knives do also wear over time, which is why New Holland offers another variation.

Now, if you like the sound of the RB450 crop cutter, but the additional horsepower requirement and expense of that system drives you away from it, the Bale Slice variation of it might be worth talking about. This is still going to have a knife system in it, but it's a little bit different. The knives are going to drop down over top of the pickup and it's going to score the hay as it goes by, as opposed to physically cutting it. That's going to give you some of the benefits of the quicker dry down and the being easier to mix, but this is going to be a simpler system that's not quite as costly.

This is a style of baler that is exclusive to New Holland. You won't find it offered from other companies. Usually, you're going from a traditional pickup to a full-on cutting system, but this Slice here gives you some of those benefits without necessarily having all the costs. A great option if you're going to be dropping your bales into a feed mixer. This is a Pro-Belt 450. Isn't this thing huge? This is still a 4x5 baler, just like the 450 Utility Plus that we started with at the beginning. The difference here comes down to duty cycle.

This is a baler that has enormous chains, enormous bearings. It's made to have thousands upon thousands of bales put through it. It's going to offer many of the same rotor intake options and pickup options that we've had on these other balers, just in a extremely overbuilt package. We're going to go through and look at this baler and say you could buy two or more of those Utility Plus balers for the cost of this thing.

If you go and look at it in terms of upkeep, reliability, and just sheer ability to pump bales out day after day after day, this right now is the best that the market has to offer in a round baler. Now every baler that we've covered to this point is a 4x5 round baler. New Holland's model number tells you that. This 450 model number, 4x5. This behind me here is an RB560. This is a 5x6 round baler. These are going to cover much of the same features as what the 450s do. It's just not particularly popular in our market for two different reasons.

The 4x5 size bale is able to stack too wide on the back of the truck and the resulting bale weights are very easy to be handled by most of the equipment that we find on a lot of our farms, skid steers, utility tractors, and that kind of thing. A 560 is going to make a much larger, much heavier bale. It's going to have more material in it. It's going to take less trips in and out of the field. You're going to want to make sure that you have equipment that's large enough and heavy enough in order to use these bales and manipulate them.

Most of the time, it's not going to be a bale that's going to be sold to somebody else. It's going to be used on the farm that it's produced on. That's a little bit of all the baler variations out here in baler row. You may look out here across all of these and just think round baler, but there's very specific features for very specific types of customers. I appreciate the care that New Holland takes to understand the different applications that these hay products are used in and to engineer equipment that's made specifically for that customer.

If you're shopping for used balers, you've got to be a little careful about what you're buying. That's why sales specialists like the folks here at Messick's are such an asset to making sure that you're purchasing exactly the right baler to go out onto your farm. If you're shopping for a piece of equipment that we can help, or if you have parts or service needs for machinery you've already got, give us a call at Messick's or available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.