Last Chance To Buy Hay
Sometimes your best source of information is your horse friends. One of ours found a new local supplier and passed on the lead to us. I went over, bought a few bales and the horses loved it. His prices are fixed, even when supply is low and demand is high. The man who runs the farm said he’s concentrating on developing long term business, not trying to make a quick buck. He is also willing to hold onto hay for us if we pre-buy. He had a couple hundred bales a few weeks ago and thought it would last months but I called him this week and discovered that his regular customers got spooked by the low supplies elsewhere and have been buying up all of his remaining hay. He had about 20 small round bales available and didn’t expect to sell hay much longer this season. That’s when I realized that even though I didn’t really want to spend $500 from this paycheck on hay, this may be our only choice. And that’s what owning horses is like! I have a tip on someone else who may have some but we’re running out of time. Thankfully we have almost all we need to last until the first cutting. I think we can get by with 15 more round bales. Now I just need to find them.
One thought on “Last Chance To Buy Hay”
One of the best builds we’ve done is our hayshed, for sure. 12Wx25Lx16H with tin roof & sides enclosed down to 12″ from the ground but for the 6′ access door which allows plenty of room for loading in.
The hay is stacked on top of pallets to keep it up off the ground & air circulates in from the open space @ the bottom & all around the stack as no hay is up against the walls. My husband says we leave the room all around for the MousePatrol.
The access door is hung with tarp from the inside of the shed, keeping out snow or rain.
We haul & stack about 50 small squares into the feedroom @ a time, but the shed can accommodate somewhere between 5-600 bales, stuffed full.
We try to calculate to have about 50 bales left in the shed when the pastures are ready for grazing, & each year we rotate any year old bales to the front of the stack so that they’ll be used first. As we rotate we also pick up the pallets and clean out all the shake from underneath so that air keep circulating and to discourage rodents — I honestly don’t know if this is why we often don’t see a single mouse during clean up OR if our cats are just. that. Good. The high demand for Temptations Treats would seem indicate that we prefer to believe the latter. 🙂
Another really good investment for anyone, like us, who stores & feeds small squares, is a bale elevator. Having one means that when in happens there’s only one man around to do the job, or to finish a big job, he can handle it on his own. He’ll still be tired as hell (if he’s as old as MY man, anyways), but he won’t be groaning in pain for the next week.
I’m in the market for a new manure dump wagon to pull behind the quad; our metal one has been welded and soddered and repaired in a dozen different ways a dozen different times. I’m told I can buy a poly wagon for about $200… agh that seems like a lot.
What are some of the things you could really use, or that you could not or would not want to do without?