Large bales of hay - how many haynets do you get?

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Welshie95

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I know this is more of a "how long is a piece of string question" regarding weight of the hay. But roughly how many haynets do you get out of one bale/how long does one last you for one horse eating 1-2 pretty stuffed standard size haylage nets per night?
Trying to work out if it would be cheaper me buying them rather than small bales for 5/6 months worth of feeding.
 
I doubt if anyone will be able to answer this question but invariably it is cheaper to buy hay in large bales rather than in small bales. The main issue is will you have the means to handle/move large bales at your yard? We are on a small yard with 4 horses eating haylage. We buy large bale haylage, 10 bales at a time because this is far cheaper than small bales but me have a tractor with a bale grab to move them to where we need them.
 
Not sure how many nets, but as a rule of thumb a large bale is around the same as 10 - 12 small bales. So if you would normally get 6 haynets out of a small bale, a large one should do 60 - 72 nets. When we had big bales they would last a week between 3 horses, but we did get quite a bit of spoilage as the bales were prone to unfolding once we'd started on them and a lot of hay would get blown around the open fronted shelter.
 
On a previous yard I got 30 haynets approx from each bale. This was using a medium sized haynet (7kg) and a small haynet (3kg).
Mine were fed ad lib in the field but I took hay out every day. I put approx 15kg out per day. Ponies lived out.
 
Hard to answer but when I worked on a yard there were 30 horses stabled day and night!! and a new huge bale had to be opened every single day. So about 60?
 
A big bale feeding 2 nets a night and 3 on weekends when my old gelding was in earlier usually lasted me about 3-4 weeks. It works out astronomically cheaper for me to buy a big bale at £45 than to feed small bales at £5 a go, I only get about 3-4 nets from them.
 
A big bale of haylage is £30/35 and lasts our five just under a week. They have 20lb each over 24 hours, so that's 100lb a day...

We feed ad lib hay as well.
 
Sorry to be a boring pedant, but this depends on sooo many things:

- How big is "big" . . . my farmer currently delivers big-ish bales - four strings - about two thirds the size of the BIG bales
- Size of horse/pony
- Good or poor doer
- Level of work
- Quality of grazing
- Amount of time in/stabled
- Clipped or not/how rugged

Yard I'm currently on has an insane amount of grass - and even now there's still something in it. Honestly, I've never seen anything like it. Previously, at this time of year, my 16.2hh Polish WB (reasonable doer but drops weight in the winter/when grazing is poor and burns calories for fun) would be eating one of those HUGE black/red nets (we call the body bags on our yard) stuffed full of hay per night - so the bales I get from my farmer would last me about three weeks. At this yard, on the grass we have (seriously, it's insane) with his reduced workload, the same sized-bale is lasting me nearly five weeks!

P
 
Just had our first go with big bale hay and can't believe how long the first bale has lasted. Hard to count it up cos they aren't in every night, but I would say it's easily lasted as long as 6 regular bales and probably a fair few more. Wouldn't be terribly surprised to see it equivalent to 12 bales in total as I think we are feeding more no autumn is here. We paid £25 for the big bale so they only needed to be equivalent to 5 bales to break even for us. The downside is filling nets takes longer, it is dustier (though not sure if that is cos the only small bale I could get locally is excellent quality) and moving them is a nuisance, 2 of us can roll one, but they are not easily maneuverable and mud would have been a problem for rolling it between the trailer drop off and the barn if we had the delivery arrive any later in the year. Hoping to time a winter delivery after a long frost!
 
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