A 73-year-old French farmer can keep farming thanks to the Hustler Unrolla LM105T bale feeder!

Maurice Porcel bought a Hustler Unrolla LM105T feedlot bale unroller to help him on his farm in Salles, France because he loves farming so much that he won’t retire any time soon despite his 73 years of age.

“At my age, I have health issues with my shoulders and couldn’t unroll a bale,” so his Hustler helps. His farm has a raised feed table and the side chute on the LM105T was built exactly for those kinds of conditions. “The machine is ideal,” he says about it, and we hope it allows him to continue farming for many more years!

Maurice is a young 73-year-old farmer who “can’t stop farming because it’s something I like and I need this,” he said when we met him for the first time on his farm in Salles in southwestern France, not very far from Bordeaux. The region is well-known for its large and diverse agri-food industry.

Maurice and his wife have been farming their whole life. When Maurice retired from dairy farming, he decided to carry on with beef cattle and is now breeding Aubrac cattle, a French heritage breed. When his wife suggested that he could simply stop farming, he just said “No, no, no, sitting on a chair doing nothing, no, no way.” 

And this is when Maurice decided to invest in a Hustler Unrolla LM105T bale feeder to help him to keep going!

“I needed something that would allow the hay to fall right onto the feed table”

The Hustler Unrolla LM105T is a bale feeder designed to unroll a bale directly onto a trough or a feed pad bunks thanks to a side elevator providing additional reach. Like in most of the beef and dairy operations in France, Maurice’s cattle are housed indoors during the winter months. The animals access to feed through feed rails and the feed is laid out on a concrete feed table.

However, somewhat unusually, Maurice’s feed table is considerably raised up (as would be a feed trough for instance) and a conventional 3-point linkage bale feeder would probably not be able to reach it.

In the past, this configuration wasn’t an issue for Maurice. “Before we were dairy farmers and when we stopped dairy production, we stopped making pit silage, and today we make a few wrapped bales,” he explained. Maurice was used to using a TMR mixing wagon to feed his dairy cows and the wagon was high enough for the feed table. “That’s why I bought the Hustler bale feeder,” he said, “I needed something that would allow the hay to fall right onto the feed table.”

“For me, the machine is ideal”

Maurice loves the simplicity of the Hustler machine. “It’s a very simple machine, you can feed out with just one tractor,” he continued.

Before finding the Hustler, Maurice looked at several options. Unrolling the silage bales by hand was out of the question because “now, at my age, I have health issues with my shoulders and I couldn’t unroll a bale,” he detailed. 

“There’s nothing left, there’s no waste”

Maurice didn’t want to simply drop a bale on the feed table and let the cattle sort it because it would create too much waste.

With the Hustler Unrolla LM105T, they “don’t have any waste, we feed out, the feed is there and that’s it. It’s not like when you drop the feed into troughs or bunks without unrolling it, there’s always more or less waste. Whereas here, there’s nothing left, there’s no waste,” Maurice insisted. 

For Maurice, the Hustler bale feeder was the “ideal” machine. Strongly built, the unroller is backed-up with a 4-year warranty for peace of mind.

“The chains are brilliant”

The French farmer also appreciates the quality of the zinc-plated chains rated to 24,000lbs combined strength. The machine is designed to make it impossible for the chains to jump off the sprocket and they run on a roller at the main elevator pivot, eliminating any further chain wear.

The fully enclosed front and rear bale chamber reduce feed falling out of the cradle. This also enables the operator to feed out maize bales or finely chopped silage. the floor is made of one single sheet of thermoformed polyethylene.

“I strongly recommend it”

“I strongly recommend it, no problem with that!” Maurice concluded.