littlearab said:
I take a issue with the remark that most farmers do not know how to put up good dry hay...... if a farmer does not know how to put up hay who does??? I do not know a single farmer who wants to put up poor hay....thats just a dumb remark.
Cows will not eat spoiled or moldy hay either.
If you get poor hay do not blame the person you got it from blame yourself for not knowing what to look for and taking the time to look.
You get what you pay for....
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Well, perhaps there are many farmers who do know how to put up good hay, but in this area a good lot of them either don't know how to put it up in good shape....or they just can't be bothered to make the effort to bale it "just right". If you think that every farmer is an expert on baling perfect horse hay...you are sadly mistaken. So, don't be pointing fingers at "dumb remarks" please.
Here very few farmers even make the small square bales any more--of those that do, there's a good number who do not get the hay up in good condition. I can't tell you how many times I've called about hay, been told that it's just ideal horse hay, then gone to look & discovered that it is anything but horse hay. I went to get some a couple years ago, tried a few bales & told the guy no, this just isn't good enough--there were spoiled patches all through the bales & I couldn't use it. The farmer just couldn't figure that one out, because his neighbor had taken the same hay for his horses, and they cleaned it right up. Yeah, well, some people don't much care what they feed to their horses, and hungry horses WILL eat spoiled hay.
Honey I've lived on a farm more years than you've been alive, and cows WILL eat spoiled/moldy hay--sure, they'd rather have good hay, but the important point here is, the spoiled/moldy hay won't hurt cattle the way it will a horse. Around here, any hay crop that gets rained on ends up getting rolled up as cattle feed; if it's baled tough & doesn't keep (and that is very common!) it's sold as cattle feed. I've seen plenty of bales that are white with mold right through, and the farmers still feed them to their beef cattle. If it's too bad they're likely to put it through the chopper, mixing in some good/better hay/green feed/grain, and chopped & mixed that way the cattle clean it all up. And yes, that's beef cattle; dairy cattle of course need a much better quality feed.
It is much more difficult to judge quality of the round bales; it's simply enough when you look at the small squares to have a couple bales cut open so you can see what they're really like inside, or you can often manage to pull some hay out of the middle of the bale without opening it. With the round bales, what hay you can get to from the ends of the bale or the outer part of the roll may very well be good, but the deeper you get into the bale, with it being so hard packed & totally not exposed to the air it can be completely spoiled. Unless the seller has a bale out that he's feeding to his own animals, most times he isn't going to be too happy to have you demand to cut open a bale and roll it out so that you can inspect the center part of it. I try to avoid round bales unless I can get one from a neighbor who will say try this bale & if it's no good inside let me know, I'll come & get it.
As for getting what you pay for, hay is like everything else--that just isn't always true. I'm paying $3/bale for 80 lb bales this year--good horse hay; a big horse owner just down the road bought some less than wonderful hay for $5/bale & it's smaller bales than I'm getting. She was desperate for some hay & the first load the guy brought her was good. After she said yes, she'll take the hay, the next batch he brought her was the poor quality stuff; he put it in the barn, took her money & ran. She definitely didn't get what she paid for IMO. The hay seller had to know that the 2nd batch of hay was poor quality--if he didn't then he's incredibly stupid, but I know this guy & I know his reputation for being a crook.
I agree with Danielle, good hay is good hay, regardless of what kind of bale it comes in. But, in this area it's a fact that you're more likely to find good hay in small square bales than in big round ones or in the big squares.