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Hay heat monitoring

I wasn’t looking for this, at least I didn’t know I was looking for it, but stumbled across it when I was hunting something up for work. No idea of the cost or whether it would be worthwhile for small time horse people, but for those with larger operations, especially those that have to store hay where horses live (lofts, adjoined areas of same building, etc.)

The only way I knew of monitoring hay bales before I found this was to hammer steel rods in and physically check the temperature of the rods every day.

https://en.prevtech.ca/haytech

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the base kit is about $2,500 per their on line ordering statement

I was attempting to find some of the manuals on the product after you posted this. I was wondering since the system can track up to 500 probes how the system tracked a specific probe’s location

I may meet the Ontario rep (I think rep - might be part of some other part of the company for all I know) next week. If conversation can happen, I will ask. My best guess would be some sort of RFID thingy like on cow’s collars? Would that make sense?

Seems like maybe a FLIR camera would work? It would be less than $2500 too. The handhelds start at about $350. They also sell security camera ones that look for heat and fire continuously.

I believe the heart of this system will be the software program and its ability to notify to a specific location and understand what it has detected.

I have worked with RFID chips since the early 1980s, these have come a long way but most often the ability to communicate/exchange the data from point to point can be interfered with by unseen problems (usually high voltage/magnetic interference or blocks such as steel walls) .

These days they work well in steel barns and well(ish) in old stone barns these days. That said, I am not sure if it is RFID tech that’s used for higher tech stuff that can pinpoint a certain cow in a specific area of a barn and includes cool stuff like movement, resting time, rumination, etc.

question would be does the system do periodic handshakes between probe and controller to make sure the link is still there

The equipment we sold that was used to tack assets had a verification between the probe and the controller (ranged from a few seconds to ten minutes, depending upon value of asset)

I’m guessing this system may be based on systems for animal monitoring which send farmers texts for every tiny little thing and cannot fail (or animals die) so, yes.

you should inquire about the timing of the system’s failure to see a specific probe. our software would go into an alert mode if a transponder failed to be seen (could have been cause by a weak battery in the sensor)

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If I do get a chance to chat, I will definitely ask!

It seems kinda redundant to me. If the hay is dry when baled, it stays dry and does not heat up in storage. If you put wet hay in the barn, in a stack especially, yes, there’s a chance it will ignite. But taking out all the stacked bales after the fact before it ignites… where are you going to put it? “Outside” is the answer. How do you get to the wet bale if it is deep in the stack? Take them all out? Do you have to have a probe in each bale in the stack? But if they were dry when you put them in there in the first place, this wouldn’t be an issue. Don’t put wet hay in a barn.

We have a hay probe to check for moisture content. It’s a hand held probe, with a battery in it. You stick it into a bale. It reads temperature, and moisture content in about 15 seconds. If you get a wet one, or hot one, you don’t put it in the stack. Problem solved. If it’s a small square bale, you can put it outside in a low humidity high temperature situation, and often it will dry itself out. Or you can feed it right away.

This probe was not expensive to buy… $200? I don’t remember for sure, we’ve had it for a while. I used it yesterday. It’s great. No computers or wifi needed, and the barn doesn’t burn down either.

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I guess if you’ve never had a large bale that you thought was dry, that all the other bales off that field WERE dry, try to take down your barn, it would seem redundant. OTOH, I’ve been the person to accidentally open that bale of straw and have to call my boss back out from breakfast to get it the hell out asap. Although it was at the very farthest from the bank (upper entrance), and caused a good deal of PITA to get it out, it was worth the effort to save a heritage building and a hundred or so cattle.

Yes, there would be a probe in each bale. Yes, if the hot bale was deep, you’d move all the bales outside or to a different area if space allowed. It’s not as easy as don’t put wet bales in a barn though. When hay and straw are coming off on large operations, it’s all hands on deck and often a race against the weather.

And then there is the issue of it staying dry. Not always so - even a small persistent roof leak can turn bales into combustibles over time.

I’m in an ag heavy area and even the best farmers can/have lost buildings/stacks of hay/straw. It would be an unusual year if someone’s forage or bedding didn’t go up in smoke, or nearly so.

At any rate, I’m glad you have a system that works for you. May it continue to do so!

here there have have been compost piles of large barns catch fire during droughts, fire departments have to bring in bulldozers to get the fires out

Yup, bulldozers and high hoes are fire fighting tools for sure and it can be a struggle for rural volunteer departments to get an operator on site fast enough. And then, there is the issue when a farm has been annexed by a city/town and their fire services get changed from rural to urban. I think co-operation between urban and rural volunteer forces is getting better in my area. A few years ago, not so much. It was a struggle and more buildings and animals were lost because the urban guys just didn’t know enough about fighting ag fires, let alone who to call that could get there NOW with the right equipment.

That was a large dairy barn and they rebuilt pretty quickly, but boy was there a lot of talk about how that fire was handled!

My own experience was with some idiot burning rubbish during a drought. I happened to be at the neighbouring horse farm. We started moving horses out of their paddocks, and across the road up wind (NW) when the (city) fire department showed up to the giant grass fire. By the time someone went over and above them and got someone there with a large loader tractor to build a berm, the highway (to the SE) was ON FIRE. The highway. On fire. That was an interesting day :o All animals and buildings survived by the wind being in just the right direction. The highway did not fare as well, but at least asphalt patches up pretty good. lol