If the hay industry is built on trust and relationships, it is easy to see why Mark Horst has been an integral part of growing the hay industry. For years, he brokered hay to the U.S., then designed the Bale Baron and grew the Marcrest brand and manufacturing facility to provide the industry with hay dryers and innovations for small-square baling. 

“Be good for your money, and good for your word,” says Mark. He expects the same decency from other people, but also admits that some of his most difficult customers have taught him the best lessons about a good attitude and quality of service.  
Mark grew up with a farming background and started working for Frey Welding in 1980, building loaders and later for Horst Welding building wagons and loader attachments. He started as a welder and then got into design and prototyping the HLA attachments. He married in 1986 and bought a farm, growing veal and hogs, then getting into broilers in 1993. By 1998, he left Horst to farm full time. 

When his uncle Ivan from Pennsylvania asked him if he would export hay, at first, he turned him down. He didn’t want to become known as a “wheeler dealer,” but when he asked him again, he said he would do it, but on his own terms: as a broker to support a quality product with fair prices.  As hay testing and quality standards can be a moving target, Mark instead guarantees the hay on arrival and says that it will likely be fed to livestock within a few weeks.

As he began to broker Ontario hay into Pennsylvania, he stopped renting out his own 100 acres and started growing hay for small squares for the Florida market. As most farmers had moved to large round bales or large square bales, he was still doing the hand labour involved with loading small squares because that’s what the horse hay market was demanding. 

Bundling small bales 
It was on an overnight haul to Pennsylvania in 2003 that Mark started thinking seriously about the design of a machine that could bundle small squares in a large bale that a tractor would handle. 

He shared his ideas with Eli Wideman, a friend with a welding shop near Fordwich. Eli said, “I want to be a part of that,” and began welding the parts for Mark to assemble. Four years and a lot of tinkering later, they had redesigned the bale bundler unit to have a rotary table feeding system and farmers were wanting to buy even their first few prototypes. 

While there were other companies that had the same idea, including Bale Band-It and Arcusin, Mark’s design didn’t infringe on any patents and solved many of the issues in the competitor’s models that were giving farmers grief. 
Starting in a global recession, they sold nine Bale Barons in 2007, 15 the next year and 27 in 2009, when they did their first sales overseas. They had a buyer from the Netherlands, another from Belgium, and an exceptionally keen farmer from the U.K. that liked the machine so much he insisted he become a dealer, and he is to this day. That year there were also a few Bale Baron machines heading to Australia, and Mark dropped what he was doing to spend a few weeks there to help set up his new customers. One of them surprised Mark by organizing a field day for a few dozen growers while he was there, and the orders started coming in.

At first, the small square hay brokers didn’t like the fact that they couldn’t see each bale individually, but over about 15 years they changed their mind. Now they demand small squares be bundled. 

As for Mark’s export brokering business, it was about that time that he had to let it go. In the last year before he passed it off, he had arranged 500 trailer loads in the U.S., now sending dairy hay across the Northeastern part of the U.S. 
Mark had built the business as Marcrest Manufacturing and continued to do the assembly on the farm, adding an additional bay and a few more employees every year as the consistent demand for the Bale Baron grew. In 2018, Marcrest moved to its current facility on Highway 86, between Listowel and Molesworth, which was nearly triple the size of the shop they had been using. At that time, there were about 35 employees and since then, they have doubled that. Relying on five local welding shops and two fabrication facilities, the parts are assembled at the Marcrest facility; each machine takes about 200-250 hours to complete, and they manufacture about 250 a year.  This year, they are also bringing a 45,000 square foot paint shop to the facility. 

In 2023, Marcrest celebrated 20 years of the Bale Baron, as well as the 2000th machine sold. Mark remembers early on that someone had come into Eli’s shop and saw the early prototype of the Bale Baron. They had said if it worked, it would save the small square bale industry. It looks like it has. Even Mark is surprised by the sales, but he is proud that he can support a part of the industry. 

“This really opened my eyes to the extent of the small square market,” says Mark. “It’s not going away, so long as we can supply it.”  But it isn’t displacing the other types of bales either, because round bales will continue to work for the beef producers that run with one farmer and a tractor. It is just a separate market.   

Growing quality hay

Before Mark hosted a lunch at Marcrest for the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association’s post-conference tour, the group wanted to see his new hay shed and hay dryer. 

The shed had been built in 2020 on a 100- by 200-foot pit silo and can fit 70,000 small squares. He added ventilators to the top, put asphalt over the concrete floor to stop it from wicking moisture from the ground and added bird netting along the rafters and eaves to prevent nesting. 

The Marcrest hay dryer has been developed over the last few years and is a different concept than the Chinook hay dryer (see pages 15-16).  This dryer is a chamber that loads 18 bales with a live bottom floor and dries bales with low temperature and high air speeds. Powered by a propane engine, a 140 HP engine drives a four foot centrifugal fan and there is no added heat, just that of the engine that keeps it at 50°C. For bales at about 20 per cent moisture, it can take 18 bales to eight per cent in six hours. 
“We over-dry in order to get it all dry” Mark says. Because of this, the dried hay doesn’t need any more time to cool down and can be put directly into storage or a trailer for export. “It is like a fast cure, eliminating the sweating process,” he adds. “Although the dried hay is drier than normal, it has a softer, more palatable texture than field-dried hay and the animals love it.”
The biggest issue for hay dryers is that the moisture in a bale isn’t often consistent. That consistency can only come from the fieldwork and proper tedding and raking.  

To grow premium quality hay, the goal is to reduce the window of time between cutting and baling, he says. And it can’t be rained on, he stresses. In the heat of summer, he can bale just 30 hours after cutting and any more drying or curing the hay needs can be done in the hay dryer. Because of the low heat from the dryer, the bales in Mark’s hay shed are as green as the day it was cut.

Using a hay preservative is a good idea if a farmer won’t be able to bale the hay in good time. Whether by an acid, inoculant, or microbial mode of action, Mark stresses it is important that the hay doesn’t start to spoil before it is dry. Mark used a propionic acid product before he used the hay dryers although he did have a few concerns from buyers that the bales might have a slight vinegar odour to them.

Next steps for Marcrest 
Marcrest has diversified from the Bale Baron with bale handling and transport options. As well, they sell a line of both Power Linx and Swing-Max dual power hitches that can run two balers from one tractor, using auto-guidance and LiDAR to sense the row of hay.

The next big step is their much-anticipated high-capacity Marcrest 210 baler that can match the speed of their Bale Baron 5250. With 10 demo units out last year and some of them already sold, they began taking orders at the Louisville Farm Show last year for 2025 production. 

Weighing in about three times heavier than a conventional baler, the Marcrest baler uses three strings and more power to build a stronger, denser bale. And baling up to 23 U.S. tons per hour, it does it faster than anything else on the market. 
Mark is proud that it was his son, Keith Horst, that was the brains behind the baler over the last few years. He has had three of his eight children, Carol, Jonathan and Keith, decide to work at Marcrest and buy in as shareholders to the company. 
“I didn’t want to invest all this time and money into a business just to have to sell it to someone else,” says Mark, who is happy to see his children develop and blossom in their roles in the company in much the same as other employees, but says it feels good to keep the business in the family. It feels better knowing that there is a strong future for the company and for his family,  employees and for customers as well.◊