After cutting the hay the next step is the curing process, length depends of several factors: moisture in the air, dry weather, sunny or overcast. It takes several days to make sure the hay is ready to bale.
Tedding
The objective with a Tedder is to fluff up the hay to accelerate the curing process.
We use a Mc Cormick ground driven kind which throws the hay up, and when the hay comes down on the ground, the air can circulate for a better curing.
We have a single horse Tedder that we can hook to the fore cart and pull with our Brabant horse, which allows my other working team to rest after the cutting and before the raking process.
There is a new ground driven rotating spider like tedder model on the market today called the Grimm, equipped with four seven feet horizontal bars.
Raking
We first used a dump-rake which works fine to gather the hay in big piles before the baling process. It is hard to control the volume of hay though, but it works fine for loose hay.
We now use a John Deere side delivery rake attached to the fore cart.
