Buying hay - what do I need to know?

[TreeDog]

The usual hay supplier for my DIY yard has run out of small bales. I've helped yo find another supplier who can deliver to us but I've never arranged a hay delivery before. Is there anything in particular I need to know or ask the seller? Or that I should check when it arrives? Where would we stand on rejecting it if the quality is clearly bad? I don't want to end up with loads of rubbish hay especially when I'm trying to do a favour by organising it!

 

[doodle]

No idea but if the supplier is confident the hay is good quality they are not going to mind you opening a couple of bales to have a look.

 

[Melandmary]

With it being a new supplier can you not buy a couple of bales to check the quality and whether your horses eat it before you commit to a big load. My old YO once ran out of hay and bought 6 round bales off a new supplier. It looked lovely hay.... Not one single horse on the yard would eat it. Turns out it his hay crop had been sprayed with pig sh#t during a dry summer and it hadn't washed away. With a new supplier I tend to try before I buy if it is going to be a bulk order

 

[TreeDog]

I might be able to go look at it but probably wouldn't be able to take any back to the horses for them to try it as my oh has hayfever and might refuse to get in my car for a while if he knew I'd had a hay bale in it! Unless you have any advice for putting a bale of hay in a small car without getting bits of hay everywhere!

 

[doodle]

Put it in to an old duvet cover?

 

[ownedbyaconnie]

Check whether they unload and stack or not.

As for bringing a bale home line your boot with tarpaulin then out hay bale on top and cover with rest of the tarpaulin (or old duvet cover as suggested above).

 

[Quigleyandme]

I would ask if the hay was made Summer 2020. If it is meadow hay suitable for horses and if they are good, heavy bales and as Kamikaze advises open a couple up and have a good sniff and rootle through. It is late in the season to be buying hay and you don’t want to be buying the dregs.

 

[TreeDog]

I've just asked and he said fine to get a sample bale and fortunately they're pretty much on my route home from work too. I think I'll just have to do that to be sure the horses will eat it, I'll worry otherwise as we've not used this supplier before. Tarp is a great idea I've been needing to get a big one anyway.

 

[PurBee]

Ask what grasses are in the hay.
Ask if there’s any weeds
Ask if its mouldy
Ask if it was made in good weather
Ask the weight roughly of each bale
Ask if theyll take it back if youre unhappy with it.

After youve received lies to all of the above, youll trek for hours with your 4x4 and trailer, see the hay which will be a ‘show bale’, pristine, green, mould-free they’ve pulled from their own personal supply, and you load up your trailer with 200 small bales, trek home, unload, and spend many days/weeks/months berating the sod that managed to con you as you daily pick through varying quality bales, housing multicoloured mould spores, clumps of mud, weeds and weighing barely 14kg, giving you around 10kg per bale after youve thrown the crap off it!

I wish you far more luck than i‘ve ever had finding ‘decent‘ hay under 15% moisture, smelling wonderful.


If you need to ask what you need to ask to buy hay, maybe use a hay specilaist that trawls the country looking for the best made hay.
These guys in the uk are good. Price per tonne minus haulage around 100 quid 3yrs ago for excellent quality multi-species hay. With them you at least have the guarantee if you dont like it or theres a problem theyll rectify it.

http://www.abbottwessex.co.uk/

 

[JackFrost]

I might be able to go look at it but probably wouldn't be able to take any back to the horses for them to try it as my oh has hayfever and might refuse to get in my car for a while if he knew I'd had a hay bale in it! Unless you have any advice for putting a bale of hay in a small car without getting bits of hay everywhere!

Use two plastic bin bags, one on each end-they overlap enough to give good protection.

 

[TreeDog]

Ask what grasses are in the hay.
Ask if there’s any weeds
Ask if its mouldy
Ask if it was made in good weather
Ask the weight roughly of each bale
Ask if theyll take it back if youre unhappy with it.

After youve received lies to all of the above, youll trek for hours with your 4x4 and trailer, see the hay which will be a ‘show bale’, pristine, green, mould-free they’ve pulled from their own personal supply, and you load up your trailer with 200 small bales, trek home, unload, and spend many days/weeks/months berating the sod that managed to con you as you daily pick through varying quality bales, housing multicoloured mould spores, clumps of mud, weeds and weighing barely 14kg, giving you around 10kg per bale after youve thrown the crap off it!

I wish you far more luck than i‘ve ever had finding ‘decent‘ hay under 15% moisture, smelling wonderful.


If you need to ask what you need to ask to buy hay, maybe use a hay specilaist that trawls the country looking for the best made hay.
These guys in the uk are good. Price per tonne minus haulage around 100 quid 3yrs ago for excellent quality multi-species hay. With them you at least have the guarantee if you dont like it or theres a problem theyll rectify it.

http://www.abbottwessex.co.uk/

I'm guessing you've been conned in the past! Good point about the 'show bale', I guess it'll be a red flag if I can't just pick one from the bulk storage. I've bought a few small bales in the past, but literally only a few each time. Once was absolutely lovely stuff from a stables and another was ok ish from a farm, both times it was obvious from the storage what the quality was going to be! Both were the same price so it's not even a case of get what you pay for

Thank you for the link, I'll call the local agent number tomorrow. The difficulty is we're not a huge yard and don't have much storage so don't want hundreds of bales, and most suppliers I've spoken to are either out of small bales or won't deliver as too far

 

[holeymoley]

Ask what grasses are in the hay.
Ask if there’s any weeds
Ask if its mouldy
Ask if it was made in good weather
Ask the weight roughly of each bale
Ask if theyll take it back if youre unhappy with it.

After youve received lies to all of the above, youll trek for hours with your 4x4 and trailer, see the hay which will be a ‘show bale’, pristine, green, mould-free they’ve pulled from their own personal supply, and you load up your trailer with 200 small bales, trek home, unload, and spend many days/weeks/months berating the sod that managed to con you as you daily pick through varying quality bales, housing multicoloured mould spores, clumps of mud, weeds and weighing barely 14kg, giving you around 10kg per bale after youve thrown the crap off it!

I wish you far more luck than i‘ve ever had finding ‘decent‘ hay under 15% moisture, smelling wonderful.


If you need to ask what you need to ask to buy hay, maybe use a hay specilaist that trawls the country looking for the best made hay.
These guys in the uk are good. Price per tonne minus haulage around 100 quid 3yrs ago for excellent quality multi-species hay. With them you at least have the guarantee if you dont like it or theres a problem theyll rectify it.

http://www.abbottwessex.co.uk/

Had to laugh at this ??

I love my hay man. He replaces if there’s a bad bale.

But yeah, you want to ask what grasses are in it and when it was made. Those are your main queries.

 

[Lady Jane]

Our farmer has more than 1 type of hay and brings us sample bales to see what our horses like. One year our previous farmer supplier ran out and our current farmer supplier came with me to the feed place round the corner to get hay (he hadn't got any for us that year). Oh my goodness - Peter would you like to choose the bales!! Dear Peter rejected quite alot - its annoying when they know who knows.....if you see what I mean?

 

[asmp]

I remember about 12 years ago when there was a bit of a shortage going to a farm who was advertising hay for sale. I picked up a bale by the baling twine to see how weighty it was and it practically folded it half! I didn’t buy any.

 

[Pinkvboots]

I always sample it first best way to get it home in a sports car is open it and put a few slices in old feed bags and tie them up.

 

[TreeDog]

I managed to bring a bale home in my car, it looks lovely soft and green and not dusty, supplier said it's organic meadow hay, he also showed me some other stuff that was much stalkier yellower and looked like rye so I don't think I want that. Will find out tonight if horse approves, however I weighed a few slices at about 1.5kg each, I counted 11 slices so the bale is only 16.5kg these are £5.50 a bale delivered whereas everywhere else is £6-6.50. I think I'm just going to buy it if horse likes it, rather than stress about trying some from another supplier when they could be just as light as these bales anyway, and also risking horse not liking it or it being poor quality. What a minefield!

 

[tristar]

hay production is a specialist area, in large quantities, and many businesses cater especially for horse hay

good hay is never expensive, but rubbish hay is, and then you have to dispose of it,

i would google or ask at studs , yards, till you find a decent source, some farmers are super at hay, some are not,

we always have large rounds produced especially for horses, never have a problem its well worth hunting around for future as well as now

 

[holeymoley]

I managed to bring a bale home in my car, it looks lovely soft and green and not dusty, supplier said it's organic meadow hay, he also showed me some other stuff that was much stalkier yellower and looked like rye so I don't think I want that. Will find out tonight if horse approves, however I weighed a few slices at about 1.5kg each, I counted 11 slices so the bale is only 16.5kg these are £5.50 a bale delivered whereas everywhere else is £6-6.50. I think I'm just going to buy it if horse likes it, rather than stress about trying some from another supplier when they could be just as light as these bales anyway, and also risking horse not liking it or it being poor quality. What a minefield!

If it’s organic you will pay more for it anyway. It sounds really nice. The stalkier stuff sounds more like timothy grass? That’s quite spikey. Rye is normally fairly soft.

 

[PurBee]

I managed to bring a bale home in my car, it looks lovely soft and green and not dusty, supplier said it's organic meadow hay, he also showed me some other stuff that was much stalkier yellower and looked like rye so I don't think I want that. Will find out tonight if horse approves, however I weighed a few slices at about 1.5kg each, I counted 11 slices so the bale is only 16.5kg these are £5.50 a bale delivered whereas everywhere else is £6-6.50. I think I'm just going to buy it if horse likes it, rather than stress about trying some from another supplier when they could be just as light as these bales anyway, and also risking horse not liking it or it being poor quality. What a minefield!

Well it could be worse, shoite hay @ 5.50 for 16.5kg!
I just hope that lovely green bale was from a stack you saw, and every bale was like that!

it is a minefield, but there are great hay makers out there, so finding a goodun’ is worth the effort!

One farmer one year had lovely green bales - the whole stack - so we went and got 200 bales. Tho’ they were 13kg bales.
He said he makes the squares out of round bales in his yard.
Upon using them i kept finding flakes which were pure black and mouldy in the middle of the bales.
He had mixed in the outer leaf of the round bales, which had got wet and turned black with mould, with the inner round bale lovely fresh green hay!
It was a nightmare sorting through it daily....i gave up when i got down to 30 bales left and threw them on the compost heap.
He evidently wanted to use every kilo of hay from those round bales no matter how bad the outer leaf was, and made an effort to hide chunks of it in with the green hay, when making up the small squares out of the round bales.
Otherwise if he’d have just unrolled the rounds and put it through a small square baler there would have been some bales all black from the initial outer layer of the rounds going through - but there weren’t any, he kept the mouldy outer leaf to one side and ripped off sections and threw them in with the green stuff! Expert conman! ?

 

[TotalMadgeness]

Ha! I remember once organising hay for a yard. I duly found a farmer who's entire business was making hay/haylage etc and who dropped off a set of 'free' bales for us to try. The hay was magnificent AND very fairly priced so we all bought loads of it. Delivery day arrived but I wasn't at the yard when it came. When I got to yard I discovered the hay that had been delivered was awful dusty grey crap. Absolutely nothing like the gorgeous sweet smelling stuff they'd shown us previously. I was mortified! Needless to say I was never asked to organise hay again and we never used that farmer again either.

 

[PeterNatt]

Firstly ask for a tester first to check your horses will eat it!

 

[Foxy O]

I used to buy hay straight off the field, my first year I did this I was inexperienced, the farmer told me I could load up the trailer with all the bails around the edge of the field, as it turned out it hadn't been the driest year and that hay was still a bit damp but as it was due to chuck it down that night the farmer had decided to bale it anyway so we had a few hours to collect it. I bought 280 bales I ended up throwing about 80 bales at least out as they grew blue mold spores. I was fuming. The next year the farmer called to see if I wanted his hay lets just say I didn't bother as I wasn't going to fall for that old chestnut again

 

[Tarragon]

I have a lovely arrangement where I buy 10 bales of hay at a time. I ring up day before, leave the storage area swept and some money out, and come back to find 10 new bales stacked for me. I only get through about 10 bales every 4 weeks so this system works. He does make good hay from good hay fields. I have only just stopped getting bales from 2018! That was an exceptional year for quality and quantity. When he was getting low on 2018 bales, I cam back to find a mixed buffet of 3 x 2020 bales, 3 x 2019 bales and 4 x 2018 bales, all separately labelled. Ponies turned their noses up at 2019 so we have now moved on to 2020 bales. I do pay £6 per bale (it went up from £4.50 in 2018 when hay became scarce and never returned to £4.5) but I am happy to pay for the excellent service. One of the advantages of only getting a few bales at a time is that I think his hay storage barns must be ideal for storage, and probably much better than whatever a horsey person would have access to, so better to leave the hay there as long as possible!