Rough Hay Fields: Smooth Them, Roll Them, or Just Bale Slow?

By the XES Netting team — bale net-wrap manufacturer · Updated August 22, 2026 · ~15 min read

Every hay producer has a field like this. The grass is good. The ground is a washboard. You spend the whole afternoon at 2.5 mph with your teeth rattling, watching the mower conditioner scalp the high spots and float over the low ones, and by the time you are done you have decided you are never doing it again.

Then next June the grass is good again and you do it again.

"One of the fields I baled this yeas was rough.. I was basically pissed the whole time I was in the field, ans swore i wouldn't bale it again. The flip side is the grass is great, and we didn't bale enough for our horses this year. It's only two acres, and this won't get us all that we need, but it would help. I'm just not sure beating up my equipment and myself is worth the few hundred bucks of hay I'll get out of it."

— CDennyRun · HayTalk thread 51530

That is the whole problem in one paragraph, and the answer is not the same for every field. Below is how to work out why your ground is rough, what each fix actually does, what the research says about the most heavily marketed option, and how to decide whether a given field is worth fixing at all.

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What rough ground actually costs you

Before spending money on leveling, it helps to be honest about what roughness is costing, because the bill is bigger and more varied than most people tally.

Broken iron

This is the cost people notice, and it is not trivial. Sickle-bar and pitman-drive mowers are especially unforgiving:

"It doesn't take too long to cut, rake and bale two acres, but it did take probably twice as long as it should have last time, because of how slow I had to go. It didn't help that I brush hogged it several months prior, to get rid of the two years of growth. I use a sickle bar mower, and those things glog up in a heartbeat when they hit clumps left behind from brush hoggin. I think it took me four hours to cut that little field, and I broke two pitman arms."

— CDennyRun · HayTalk thread 51530

Four hours and two pitman arms on two acres. Custom operators face the same arithmetic on a much larger scale, and one describes the failure that ended a job:

"Yep, the joys of pitman mowers. I used to run our Ford 501 mower on the old Jubilee, until it had about had it from old age, and started running it on the Ford 6600. Busted a LOT of pitmans on there!"

— luke strawwalker · HayTalk thread 51530

Disc mowers survive rough ground better than sickle bars, but they pay in other ways — scalped high spots, cracked skid shoes, and a cutterbar that gets shock-loaded every time it drops off a terrace. If your disc mower is showing symptoms you cannot explain, our disc mower troubleshooting guide separates the problems caused by the machine from the ones caused by the field.

Ground speed, and therefore capacity

Halving your mowing speed halves your acres per day in a weather window that does not care about your field conditions. On a two-acre horse paddock this is an annoyance. On forty acres it is the difference between beating a rain and not:

"One of my leased fields is rough and I dread cutting it. The previous owner cut it up with a 30 foot main tillage disk and never went back with a leveling disk. He also did not disk with the contour in an attempt to knock the terraces down. I cut in the direction of the furrows I just go slow. This means I have to go up and down the terraces rather than running with them. It is 40+ acres and takes forever to cut. I just go slow. Good hay and I can get 100 rolls if we have rain."

— Tim/South · HayTalk thread 51530

If you hire the work done, roughness shows up directly in the rate — most custom operators price a bumpy, awkward field above a smooth one, and the good ones will tell you why. Our custom baling rates guide covers how that gets quoted.

Dirt in the hay

This is the cost almost nobody accounts for, and for anyone selling hay it may be the biggest one. Rough ground forces two compromises that both put soil into the bale. First, you cut high to save the machine, leaving yield in the field. Second, when you rake or ted across a washboard, the tines dip into the low spots and pick up dirt along with the windrow.

"The grass its self looks good, but not growing all that great. I baled it in early June (cut it sky high because of how rough the field is), and it's only about 16" tall."

— CDennyRun · HayTalk thread 51530

Soil contamination shows up on a forage test as elevated ash. Forages carry a certain amount of internal ash naturally — grasses somewhat less than legumes — and analytical labs generally treat total ash well into double digits as a signal that soil has been picked up during harvest rather than grown in the plant. Ash is not digestible, so every point of it displaces energy in the ration and knocks down relative feed quality on a test your buyer is reading. It also grinds away at conditioner rolls, rake tines and baler pickups.

Two related guides worth reading alongside this one: merger versus rake versus inverter covers which handling tools pick up the least dirt, and what causes dusty hay covers what happens to that soil after it is in the bale.

Bale shape and wrap performance

A round baler fed from a bouncing pickup gets an uneven windrow, and an uneven windrow makes a barrel-shaped or lopsided bale. Those bales shed water badly, sit unstably in a stack, and are harder to wrap cleanly because the net has to bridge a shoulder that is not there. If you are chasing bales that will not hold their shape, the field surface is a more common cause than the baler.

Work out why it is rough before you decide how to fix it

The right tool depends entirely on the cause, and there are only a handful of causes worth distinguishing.

It was established badly

The most common and most frustrating answer. Someone worked the ground once, never leveled it, and seeded straight over the top. Nothing that happens afterwards will fix that except starting again:

"Nope, it just wasn't done right. A guy plowed it with a three bottom plow a few years back and didn't use any kind of harrow. He just seeded over that. Fun times!"

— CDennyRun · HayTalk thread 51530

The same failure at field scale is the unleveled tillage disc and the un-knocked-down terrace described above. If you are the one doing the establishing, the lesson is that the smoothing pass is not optional and is much cheaper before the seed goes in than after. Our guide to establishing a hay stand covers seedbed preparation in detail.

Rodents and burrowing animals

Pocket gophers, voles, badgers, woodchucks and moles all leave mounds, and mounds are the single most common source of roughness in an otherwise well-established stand. Their timing matters: a mound thrown up last month is loose soil that a harrow will scatter. A mound thrown up four years ago has grass roots holding it together and behaves like sod.

"I am in the process of trying to reclaim approx. 35 acres of grass hay that has been fallow for a couple of years now and was not in great shape before that. The worst of my issues is how rough the fields are from gophers and woodchucks. The hills are all grown in and impossble to level with just a drag."

— BunkasBarnyard · HayTalk thread 13479

Leveling mounds without addressing the population is treating a symptom. Our guide to gophers and voles in hay fields covers control and how to harvest around active damage; do that work first or you will be dragging the same field every year.

Anthills and fire ant mounds

Common in the South and easy to underestimate, because an established fire ant mound is a dense, baked lump that will chip a mower blade. These respond well to shallow disturbance — see the disc-and-harrow method below.

Wheel ruts, hoof damage and wet-ground traffic

Ruts cut into a wet field set like concrete when it dries, and the cure is always cheaper before the ground firms up. One producer got his forum handle from being the person who went back and fixed them:

"(BTW: my username RuttedField is a misnomer. I got that because if we chopped fields when the field was wet, I would go back over the ruts and flatten them with my dozer or flat of my tractor bucket. I was a little over the top at ensuring my fields were dead smooth."

— RuttedField · HayTalk thread 51530

The related sin is spreading on wet clay, which leaves a set of ridges that outlive everyone involved:

"The neighbor rented a roller that is normally used on grass runways to run over his hayfields this spring. Can't remember how much water it held, but I think his 80hp FWA Kubota had all it wanted when it was half full. Course if this guy would learn not to spread manure when the clay is wet, he wouldn't have needed the roller."

— mlappin · HayTalk thread 13479

Note the tractor requirement in that quote. A water-ballast roller big enough to matter is a serious draft load, and a half-full runway roller had all an 80 hp four-wheel-drive tractor could handle. Budget for that before you rent one.

Rocks and frost heave

In glaciated and freeze-thaw country the field genuinely does grow new rocks every spring. That is its own subject, but it interacts with everything here: a roller that pushes a rock down has not removed it, and the next tillage pass will bring it back up.

The four fixes, ranked by how much they disturb the stand

1. Drag or chain harrow — least disturbance, least effect

A chain harrow, spike drag or similar will scatter fresh mounds, break up manure and knock the tops off soft irregularities. It is cheap, fast, does almost no damage to the stand, and can be run after every cutting. What it will not do is touch anything with roots in it, and that limit is the single most common disappointment in this whole subject.

Weighting helps. One producer added an improvised drag behind his harrow:

"After plow and disk I still would have like a little better result. The next time I will use a drag blade or something, the chain harrow with a dog kennel panel behind it helped some, but not enough..."

— Dolphin · HayTalk thread 13479

Use it when: mounds are fresh and loose, or as routine maintenance after the field is already smooth.

2. Leveling shoes on a cultivator bar — the specialist tool

This is the purpose-built answer for mound country and it works better than anything improvised. Angle-iron shoes replace the shovels on a wide cultivator frame, shearing the tops off mounds and spreading the soil, with chains on the rear rank to smooth what the shoes cut:

"We run a 24foot JD cultivator with angle iron shoes in place of shovels and run them over rough land in spring before the plants are growing and it makes a huge difference with gophers and badgers. On the last row of shovels it has chains between each shoe to spread the dirt out. It also has a mounted harrow on the back of the cultivator but its pretty inneffective really compared to the shoes."

— JustinShepherd · HayTalk thread 13479

Two details in there are worth pulling out. The mounted harrow is described as largely ineffective compared with the shoes — the cutting action does the work, not the dragging. And the timing is spring, before the plants are growing, which is the general principle we come back to below. The same operation had previously improvised with crawler tracks laid on their side behind a telephone pole, and found the cultivator both heavier and easier to move.

Use it when: you have persistent mound pressure and enough acres to justify a dedicated implement.

3. Tandem disc at minimum gang angle with a drag harrow behind — the best all-round method

If you only take one technique away, take this one. It is the method with the most convincing first-hand account in the corpus, and the settings matter as much as the implement:

"If you wanted to mess around with it and try to smooth it out, after you've taken a cut and the stubble is short, you might try running a tandem disk over it, preferably pulling a drag harrow behind it. Our bermuda field was ATE UP with fire ant mounds a couple years ago and I put the double disk on with two seven-foot drag harrow sections chained behind it, and set the gang angles as straight as they'd go (lowest angle for less soil disturbance-- didn't want to plow out the grass, just stir the dirt some and knock down anthills). The disk did a good job of cutting into the soil a couple inches or so, slicing through anthills and flipping them over, and then the drag harrow behind crumbled up the dirt and anthills and dragged it out. I disked the whole field straight longwise and then on the bias at an angle and it was smooth as a pool table when I finished."

— luke strawwalker · HayTalk thread 51530

The recipe in order:

1. Wait for short stubble, immediately after a cutting.
2. Set the gangs to the shallowest angle they will go. The goal is to slice and stir, not to plow out the crowns. This is the setting people get wrong.
3. Chain a drag harrow behind the disc so the crumbling and spreading happens in the same pass.
4. Run it lengthwise, then again on the bias. The second pass at an angle is what actually produces a level surface rather than a corrugated one.

Two honest caveats. First, species response varies a great deal. Bermudagrass thrives on it, because cut runners root at every joint. Cool-season bunch grasses and legumes do not have that trick, and the same author flags it — not all forages respond the same way, and the rule is to avoid completely tearing out crowns and roots.

Second, and this is the caveat that rarely makes it into equipment marketing: opening the soil surface is also an invitation. In the same thread, a producer in timothy reported that discing gave weed seeds bare soil and sunlight to germinate in, and that it did not work for him at the time of year he tried it. If you are running this on a stand with a weed seed bank, plan the follow-up — see thickening a thin hay field for the overseeding side of that.

Use it when: mounds are old and grown in, or ant mounds are established, and the stand is vigorous enough to recover.

4. Tear it up and start over

Sometimes the answer really is a full renovation, and the tell is when leveling attempts start moving intact sod around instead of soil:

"The old mounds that are grown in with grass and roots are the problem. I have tried discong and leveling but end up basicly rolling sod."

— BunkasBarnyard · HayTalk thread 13479

Rolling sod is the diagnostic. When the disc is peeling and pushing rather than cutting and mixing, no amount of extra passes will help, and you are into full tillage and reseeding — which is the moment to actually level the ground properly, because you will not get another chance for a decade.

The honest case against land rolling

Land rollers are heavily marketed to hay producers, and the pitch — flatten the rocks, flatten the mounds, save your machinery — sounds unanswerable. The evidence is a good deal more mixed, and it is worth knowing before you spend the money.

What the research found

The most useful replicated work comes from Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota, summarised in Land Roller Use: Challenges and Benefits by Al-Kaisi, Holmes, Hanna and DeJong-Hughes. Their findings:

• No yield advantage. Iowa and Minnesota trials found no yield benefit from land rolling at any timing or growth stage tested.
• Infiltration collapsed. ISU research documented water infiltration on rolled ground dropping by more than three times relative to the unrolled control in a one-year evaluation.
• Surface sealing. Rolling destroys surface soil aggregates and can seal the surface, leading to ponding, runoff, erosion and nutrient loss — and it can undo the structural benefits built up under no-till.
• The rocks come back. The article puts it plainly: pushing rocks into the soil is a short-term solution, and the next tillage operation brings them back to the surface.
• Timing matters where rolling is used. North Dakota State work in 2003–2004 found no yield loss from rolling, but crop injury increased when rolling was delayed to the first-trifoliate stage.

An important honesty note: that body of research is in soybeans, where rolling is done to press stones down ahead of a low-cutting combine header. Nobody has run the equivalent replicated trial on established perennial hay ground. So treat those findings as strong evidence about what a roller does to soil, and as suggestive rather than conclusive about what it does to your hay yield.

What experienced hay producers report

Where the field evidence is genuinely useful is on the mound question, and it directly contradicts the marketing:

"And we have some customers who roll their land and while it can push rocks down I find it only packs the gopher hills and makes it very bouncy to run at higher speeds haying."

— JustinShepherd · HayTalk thread 13479

That is a mechanically sensible observation. A roller applies vertical pressure across the whole surface. A soil mound with roots in it does not flatten under vertical pressure — it compacts. You end up with a harder bump than you started with, and you have compacted the surrounding stand as well. Shearing implements cut the mound off; rolling presses it in.

When rolling does make sense

Rolling is not useless. It genuinely helps in specific situations:

• Firming a new seeding. A cultipacker over freshly worked ground improves seed-to-soil contact, and this is a well-established practice for small-seeded forages.
• Pressing loose surface stone ahead of a first cut on new ground where you accept it is a temporary measure.
• Settling frost-heaved ground in early spring, before growth starts.

What it does not do is level an established, mound-damaged hay field. For that job the money is better spent on shearing implements and rodent control.

The timing rule nobody mentions: your leveling pass is wheel traffic

Here is the point that gets lost in every discussion of which implement to buy. Whatever you drag across that field, you are also driving a tractor across a living perennial stand — and there is solid multi-state data on exactly what that costs.

University of Wisconsin–Madison Extension compiled wheel traffic yield-loss trials on alfalfa across Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, Nebraska and Oklahoma. The trials compared traffic applied at different intervals after cutting, and the pattern is consistent and striking. In the Minnesota 2001 data, traffic two days after cutting cost about 11% of yield; the same traffic five days after cutting cost about 29%. In New York the following year, traffic at two days cost about 3%, and at five days about 25%. Iowa seedings showed the largest overall losses, in the 22–30% range.

The mechanism is straightforward: immediately after cutting, the crown buds have not yet pushed. A few days later they have, and a tire snaps them off. The plant then has to start the regrowth cycle again from stored reserves.

The practical rule for this article:

• Do your leveling pass immediately after a cutting is removed — not a few days later, and certainly not into regrowth.
• Or do it in early spring before growth starts, which is exactly what the leveling-shoe operator quoted above does.
• Combine passes where you can. Every separate trip is another dose of traffic. A disc with a harrow chained behind it is one pass, not two.
• Do not level a field in mid-regrowth because you happen to have the implement hooked up. That convenience can cost more yield than the roughness does.

Those specific percentages are alfalfa data, and grasses are generally more tolerant of traffic than alfalfa is. But the direction is the same for every perennial forage, and the rule costs nothing to follow.

When the right answer is to bale it slow

Leveling is not automatically worth doing, and the forum consensus on small productive fields is refreshingly unromantic: go slow and bale it.

The strongest argument for leaving a rough field alone is opportunity cost, and it is the one experienced growers actually use:

"I've baled to many rough fields. They're all on my schedule to break up and reseed but it always seems the hay is nice on the rough stuff so other fields that have poorer production get broke up first. Also hay some native stuff that don't want to break up but sure is getting rough."

— IHCman · HayTalk thread 51530

That is the correct instinct. Renovation money should go to the field with the worst production, not the worst ride. A rough field growing excellent hay is a comfort problem. A smooth field growing thin, weedy hay is an economic problem. Fix the economic one first.

The second argument is that some ground should not be broken up at all. Native prairie and long-established permanent stands lose something when they are tilled that a reseeding will not give back in your lifetime, and on erodible or thin-soil ground the tillage itself is a risk. If the field is also on a slope, read baling hay on steep ground before adding tillage to the equation.

And the third is simple cash flow, put well by the custom operator quoted earlier: it is a trade-off between cash and time. If you are short of time, spend money and smooth the field. If you are short of money, spend the time and go slow.

If you do go slow, make it deliberate rather than resentful:

• Raise the cutterbar and accept the yield loss rather than pay for it in steel.
• Cut in the direction that crosses the least roughness, even if the pattern is inefficient — perpendicular to furrows and terraces rather than diagonally across them.
• Set rake and tedder tines a notch higher than you would on smooth ground. This is the single cheapest way to keep ash out of the bale.
• Use the older mower if you have a choice, and keep spare pitman arms, skid shoes and shear bolts in the truck.
• Bale a little softer. Chasing maximum density from an uneven windrow is how you get misshapen bales and wrap that will not stay put.

Triage: which field to fix first

A practical ranking when you have several rough fields and one budget:

1. Poor production plus rough — top of the list. Full renovation, and level it properly while the ground is open.
2. Good production, rough, and large — worth a shearing pass (disc plus harrow, or leveling shoes) after a cutting. The capacity gain alone usually pays.
3. Good production, rough, and small — go slow. Two acres of good horse hay does not justify a tillage program.
4. Active rodent damage — control the population before any leveling, whatever the field's rank. Otherwise you are buying the same job again next year.
5. Native or erodible ground — do not break it up. Manage around the roughness.

And if the field is leased rather than owned, factor the term of the lease into every one of those decisions. Leveling is a multi-year investment in someone else's dirt.

Where net wrap fits

Rough ground makes bales that are harder to wrap well, which makes wrap quality matter more, not less. Uneven windrows produce bales with soft shoulders and irregular diameter; net that is too narrow or that lacks reliable edge-to-edge spread leaves those shoulders exposed, and an exposed shoulder is where water gets in and where the bale starts to slump in the stack.

Three things help on rough-ground hay specifically:

• Full-width net that genuinely covers the bale edges, so the weakest part of a barrel-shaped bale is still protected.
• Consistent wrap count. If the bale shape is fighting you, do not also shave turns.
• Checking for pickup damage. Soil and stone coming in off a rough field wears pickup teeth and can nick net as it feeds. If wrap is failing on the bale, why net wrap breaks on bales walks through the causes.

None of that fixes the field. It just stops a rough field from costing you twice.

Frequently asked questions

How do I smooth a rough hay field without killing the stand?

Run a tandem disc with the gangs set to their shallowest angle and a drag harrow chained behind, on short stubble immediately after a cutting. Go lengthwise first, then on the bias. The shallow angle is the critical setting — you want to slice and stir the top couple of inches, not plow out the crowns. Vigorous stands generally recover and often come back thicker; go easier on bunch grasses and legumes than on sod-forming species like bermudagrass.

Does a land roller flatten gopher mounds?

Experienced hay producers report that it does not — a roller compacts a rooted mound rather than leveling it, and the result can be a harder bump and a bouncier ride than before. Rollers apply vertical pressure; leveling a rooted mound requires a shearing action. Use leveling shoes or a shallow disc pass for mounds, and reserve rolling for firming new seedings.

Is land rolling bad for hay ground?

It carries real costs. Iowa State and Minnesota trials found no yield benefit from land rolling, and ISU research measured water infiltration dropping by more than three times on rolled ground in a one-year evaluation. Rolling destroys surface aggregates and can seal the surface, causing ponding, runoff and erosion. Note that this research was conducted in soybeans, not established hay, so treat it as strong evidence about soil effects and suggestive about forage yield.

When is the best time to level a hay field?

Either in early spring before growth starts, or immediately after a cutting is removed. The reason is wheel traffic: multi-state alfalfa trials show traffic two days after cutting costing a small fraction of what the same traffic costs five days later, once crown buds have pushed. Never level a stand in mid-regrowth.

Should I bale a rough field or break it up and reseed?

Rank your fields by production, not by ride quality. Break up the field with the worst yield first, even if a bumpier field is more annoying to harvest. A rough field growing excellent hay is a comfort problem; a smooth field growing thin hay is an economic one. On small acreages the arithmetic almost always favors going slow.

Why is my hay testing high in ash?

Elevated ash on a forage test usually means soil got into the bale during harvest rather than that the plant grew it. Rough ground is a leading cause: rake and tedder tines dip into low spots and scoop dirt, and cutting close to the ground on uneven terrain scalps soil into the swath. Raising the cutterbar and setting rake tines higher are the cheapest fixes, ahead of any leveling work.

What does rough ground do to my equipment?

Sickle-bar and pitman-drive mowers suffer most — broken pitman arms, drag links and driveshafts are routine complaints. Disc mowers survive better but pay in scalped high spots, cracked skid shoes and shock-loaded cutterbars. Rakes, tedders and baler pickups wear faster from ingested soil and stone, and ground speed drops enough to cut your daily acreage roughly in half.

Will discing a hay field bring up weeds?

It can. Opening the soil surface gives buried weed seed bare ground and sunlight, and at least one producer working in timothy reported exactly that outcome. If your field has a significant seed bank, plan the follow-up before you start: time the pass so the existing stand closes the canopy quickly, and be ready to overseed desirable species into the disturbed ground.

The bottom line

Diagnose first. Fresh mounds need a harrow, old rooted mounds need a shearing implement, badly established ground needs starting over, and rodents need controlling before any of it. The single most effective technique on an established stand is a tandem disc at its shallowest gang angle with a drag harrow behind, run on short stubble straight and then on the bias — and the most oversold is the land roller, which the research links to no yield gain and a large loss of infiltration, and which experienced producers say packs mounds rather than leveling them.

Whatever you choose, run it right after a cutting or before spring green-up, because the pass itself is wheel traffic and the yield cost of getting that timing wrong can exceed the benefit of a smoother field. And on a small field that grows good hay, the honest answer is still the one the forums keep giving: raise the cutterbar, keep spare parts in the truck, and go slow.

Sources

• Al-Kaisi, Holmes, Hanna and DeJong-Hughes, Iowa State University Extension Integrated Crop Management, Land Roller Use: Challenges and Benefits — yield trials, infiltration data, surface sealing, rock management.
• University of Wisconsin–Madison Division of Extension Team Forage, Wheel traffic yield reduction data — multi-state alfalfa trials, traffic timing after cutting.
• HayTalk, Rough field (To bale or not to bale) — 26-post discussion of triage, equipment damage and the disc-and-harrow method.
• HayTalk, Smoothing rough fields — leveling shoes, rollers and grown-in mounds.