Search

When shopping for hay, a list of its features such as crude protein or pounds in a bale may or may not be available, making valuation of hay difficult, if not impossible. This can be easily remedied by asking for a hay analysis and a bale weight, or testing and weighing it yourself prior to purchase.

Not long ago, cheap commodity prices made it easy to look at hay as just filler. Nutritional deficiencies could be inexpensively corrected by feeding a supplement. Those days are gone, and quality hay has real value when compared to a commodity feed, but the value is in nutritional quality.

Pre-hurricane-Katrina fuel prices had more than doubled, and nitrogen prices had increased about 26 percent over last year's price - it's gotten our attention, and now everyone is hurting. Farmers and ranchers find themselves trying to stretch every dollar even further than they normally have to.

For many livestock producers, the haying season has arrived. It is now a race against time to reach hay production goals and capture some level of forage quality in the process.

Nutrition, namely hay and concentrate feed, accounts for about 40 percent of operating costs in a cow-calf production system. This fact causes some producers to try to cut cost of production by cutting corners in the area of the nutrition program. It doesn't take long to figure out you don't want to skimp on nutrition; however, you can be more efficient if you put together a strategy for feeding hay this winter.

The ranching industry has become an even more challenging business lately due to unpredictable weather, rising costs and cattle cycles that no longer seem to follow a typical 10- to12-year trend.

Much of the hay baled this spring was either mature when hayed or may have been rained on during the haying process. Therefore, testing the quality of your hay becomes extremely important. Some hays will require little, if any, supplement, and other hays will require substantial supplementation to meet the nutritional requirements of the livestock being fed.

With the increase in fertility costs, I thought it timely to revisit the subject of hay and see what the value of a 1,200-pound round bale might actually be.

The market price of hay varies substantially from year to year, making it extremely difficult to determine its price in the future. Fundamental economics tell us that the future price of a particular good will be determined by expected supply and expected demand.

There are many advantages to buying hay, but one of the drawbacks is finding hay that meets your expectations of quality - here are a few hints to assure that the hay you buy is a good value.