Posts Tagged ‘grass hay’
Hay Challenges
It wasn’t supposed to be complicated. Hay to feed the horses is supplied by This Old Horse, and it is up to their managers to procure the bales from anywhere they can. Our liaison, Maddy, checked with the previous farmer who delivered to us, but he was out of grass hay.
She found another source who delivered 85 bales yesterday. An hour after we’d stacked it in the hay shed, the Nutritionist arrived to check on the condition of the horses. She was following up after having switched the horses’ feed from grains to processed pellets of Senior Feed last summer.
The good news is that she found all the horses are doing very well since the diet change. The bad news is that she didn’t like the looks of the new hay bales at all. Her concern is that the nutritional quality of the new hay looks so poor that feeding them this at this time of year will leave them short of their daily needs.
That leaves poor Maddy in the difficult position of needing to find another source and figure out what to do with the 85 bales now in our shed.
Just to mess up the day a little more after that, the farrier was running behind and asked to move our appointment from the afternoon to first thing this morning.
One bright spot I particularly enjoyed during the Nutritionist’s visit was the surprisingly social demonstration by the horses as we stood in the paddock and talked over their body condition scoring. All four horses brought their heads together around us, peeking over our shoulders and standing close without issue for an uncharacteristic amount of time.
Eventually, Mix brought things back to normal by getting snippy with Mia, forcing her to move away, which prompted the rest of us to break our little huddle. It didn’t spoil how precious it was to see the horses being so present in the moment together and tuned in with us as we chatted.
It was a nice exclamation point on the fact that their body condition scores were ideal for their ages. It means a lot to us that they not only look good physically, but their behaviors reflect that they are doing pretty well emotionally, too.
Now, if we could find a way to give them some better hay to eat this winter, that would be just grand.
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A Portrait
The author, in a rare moment of leisure.
Cyndie took the picture of me reading while keeping an eye on the fire last night. See, I was still working. I was tending the fire so it would be hot enough to cook burgers when company arrived. Oh, were those burgers good! Probably made even more so by the homemade buns that Cyndie freshly baked moments before.
Earlier in the day, Cyndie had hosted guests who had some lawn games out and it inspired me to improve the croquet setup. I made my own little “sport court” out of grass. It is set up for croquet, but could just as easily double as a bocce ball space.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to find time for that much leisure.
I need to move composting manure to make room for piling the fresh collections. Production never slows, despite my running out of space to cook it.
Before I can get to that project, we need to head out with the trailer for another load of hay to be purchased. We will be silently chanting, “No rain, no rain, no rain” the whole way there and back.
With our lawn growing faster than I can tend it, it’s a shame I can’t bale it up and save those clippings for feeding the horses in the dead of winter.
Our experience with trying to acquire good quality grass hay for horses this year, hoping to improve on the several years of less than desired content we’ve previously had, has been enlightening. We initially dove into the task of getting hay with such naiveté.
We have discovered that what constitutes “good,” when it comes to baled hay, can be a very individualized opinion. On top of that, what nature provides and farmer skills harvest, in terms of moisture content, involves a very narrow target range. Too dry and the nutrition value to animals drops considerably. Too wet and it will mold and/or spontaneously combust in a conflagration that destroys storage buildings and turns planned food stores to ash.
Different livestock have varying needs from baled fodder. One version of hay does not work for all cattle, sheep, goats, and horses. Some of the local farmers are growing hay for their cows and are kind enough to offer to sell some of it to us if we want to feed it to our horses.
It can work, but it’s a bit of a guessing game. We ended up with a batch that had too much foxtail grass which caused mouth sores in our horses. We’ve had some with an annoying amount of sour dock weed and woody stems that the horses labor to work around when grazing. It creates a mess and interferes with them getting what they want. Both horse and human get irritated.
This year we found a batch that looked like ideal grass bales. They turned out to be too wet. Then we found an even better batch, and got caught in a downpour bringing it home.
We are hoping the third time’s the charm this morning. Then maybe I’ll sneak some time to finish that book later this afternoon.
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Another Source
The air is completely still outside this morning. Maybe that is why my internet connection is more stable today than it was yesterday. The signal is not being disrupted by waving tree leaves.
The calm is in contrast to the disruption swirling in my mind. We have been stretched into another batch of new experiences over the last two days, taking us places we’ve not been, introducing us to new people, and giving me an opportunity to pull a flatbed trailer behind our sometimes trusty old pickup.
I’ve never done that before.
Luckily, I didn’t need to do any backing up.
We own horses. We need hay. Over the now several years that we’ve been on this equine adventure, that’s the key priority that pushes me into doing tasks for which I have no previous experience.
Last year I was feeling pretty smug over having found hay to purchase and hauling it myself in small batches with the truck, and augmenting that with bales from our own field. Now I have come to understand that what we purchased wasn’t considered prime quality fodder by our horses, and we’re admitting to ourselves that our field isn’t yielding much better.
Cyndie checked with new acquaintances and then made a connection with another hay grower. Grass hay is the term used to clarify what we are after for our horses.
I was on the far side of our property yesterday, trimming the 4-foot tall weeds that have grown along the southern border of our back pasture, when Cyndie and Delilah appeared and interrupted me. The new hay source was available immediately and leaving town for a two-week vacation tomorrow. We had to act now.
Suddenly we are checking maps and venturing down dead-end roads among farms that don’t get many visitors, looking to connect with someone we won’t know when looking at them. Kids on bikes check us out immediately, when we pull in a driveway and try to figure out where to go.
We are not surprised to discover Lonnie is friendly guy, and the kids are his grandchildren who live across the road and they love to help with hay. Mostly, they like to talk while we toss and stack bales. Lonnie offered up his flat-bed trailer to allow us to haul a hundred bales in one load and off we dove into another of my firsts.
I relied on his method of stacking and strapping to secure the load. He generously offered to come rescue us if any of the tires went flat on the trip there or back. How reassuring. I noticed he put a registration sticker on the trailer before we hooked it to the truck. I guess it hadn’t seen any road use for some time.
We made it most of the way home before a middle bale worked loose and dropped off the front. I had just turned off Highway 63 onto a rural road, so the drama was moderately reduced. I know now that we should have used that 3rd strap he considered putting across the load, but didn’t.
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Relative Something 