The Iowa Farmer Who Pioneered the Modern Round Baler

In 1971, a cattle farmer near Pella, Iowa, told Gary Vermeer he was ready to quit. Putting up hay by hand took too many people and too many hours to keep up. Vermeer decided to build a machine that could do the job with one person and a tractor.

A Fellow Farmer's Breaking Point

Vermeer already ran a small equipment company in Pella making augers and wagon hoists. He wasn't a hay specialist. But the complaint stuck with him: haying was pushing good cattle producers out of the business entirely.

He set himself a simple goal. Build a baler that rolled loose hay into a single large, tightly wound bale, without a second worker stacking or hauling square bales behind it.

Six Weeks on the Factory Floor

Vermeer and engineer Arnie Mathes chalked the first design straight onto the factory floor. Early tests failed, the hay wouldn't catch and start rolling into a bale.

Vermeer fixed it by jamming a fence post into the machine to kick-start the roll, then ordered cardboard tubes and built finger mechanisms to grab the hay properly.

A working prototype came together in about six weeks. It rolled bales roughly 6 feet wide and 7 feet across, far bigger than the small square bales most farms were making by hand.

On the Market by 1972

Vermeer wasn't the first person to try a round baler. Allis-Chalmers had sold a smaller version, the Roto-Baler, since 1947, and university researchers in Iowa had tested large round designs a few years before Vermeer's prototype.

But Vermeer's machine, sold as the 706, was simple enough for one person to run start to finish. By 1972 it was on dealer lots, and the design helped pioneer the large round baler as farms across the country know it today.

Other manufacturers eventually licensed similar designs. Within a few years, the tightly wound round bale, built to shed rain and hold its shape outdoors, had replaced hand-stacked square bales on countless farms.

Rolling Through Every Summer

Vermeer Corporation is still headquartered in Pella, Iowa, and still builds round balers there. The company rolled out a new lineup of hay and forage equipment for the 2026 season, more than fifty years after that first prototype.

Every big round bale sitting in a field this summer, the kind you pass on a highway and barely notice, traces back to one farmer's six-week fix for a fellow farmer's problem.