The work that goes into making hay versus the cost!!!

[chocolategirl]

I finally got my 1 1/2 acre paddock cut for hay by a lovely young guy who has set up a paddock maintenance business! He has been brilliant, turning up on time etc but it has totally made me realise the amount of work and stress that is involved! It was cut on Sun am, tedded on Monday, flipping rained on Wednesday but tedded again on Thursday pm, rowed and baled on Friday. I now have 94 bales of pretty good meadow hay but it has worked out at about £3 odd per bale. I will never moan about the price of hay again after being on hand to see what is actually involved! How farmers can sell small bales for less than £4, I don’t know!

Couldn’t agree more? So many consumers are sadly ignorant about the cost and amount of work that goes into making hay. Constant stress too when you’re always watching the weather 🤦‍♀️ The field we make our hay off we have to leave all year, can’t graze it because obviously it needs to be completely clean, so the lost income alone of leaving it all year is another factor folk just don’t think about 🤷‍♀️ We make hay for ourselves and our liveries and it’s delivered daily to their bays for the princely sum of £4 per bale. Been that price for about 12 years as we don’t allow hay to be brought in from elsewhere 😏

 

[Mari]

Could you rent it for grazing sheep??

Apparently 2 acres is too small unless only a few sheep!

 

[Polos Mum]

Apparently 2 acres is too small unless only a few sheep!

My neighbour brings me 5 - 8 sheep at a time, they do really well in my small paddocks. I've one field that's 0.6 acres and he has 4 on there for a couple of months and they come out looking lovely (and so does the field)

 

[blitznbobs]

Ours is £2 I feel guilty about paying so little now but we didn't set the price!
That said, I've cut some of our own surplus grass by hand (Poldark style with a scythe) for my small animals, and it is back breaking work; I'd rather pay extra to have someone else do it with a tractor. 😂

Do you have Poldark’s abs then?

 

[Chinchilla]

Do you have Poldark’s abs then?

Alas, no 😢🤣

 

[Orangehorse]

I have 2 acres of good grass every year & cant find anyone to make hay for me. No one wants to do small acreage not even if I give it away free to anyone who’ll do the work - I just want it cut & taken away as I have far too much grass every year.

I'm surprised you can't find someone to make hay from that sized field. Look in feed merchants/local Facebook as there are usually people around to specialise in the smaller patches, like the Paddock maintenance guys.

As for haymaking I find the whole thing extremely stressful and I only relax when the hay is safely stored in the barn ready for the winter. For the first time I am having to use big bale hay and straw as OH simply didn't have time to get the small baler out as we had so much extra hay to make for various people.

We were contemplating opening up a big bale of straw and feeding it into the small baler, but it sounds like a lot of hard and dusty work, so I will just have to work out a method of getting enough straw out of the bale into the stable without doing multiple trips.

 

[tallyho!]

Well... you could always use your own horses to mow and bale it yourself?

Would anyone go back to the "good old days"? Imagine the time and power that cost? I'm not begrudging the time and effort to get hay in these days I really am not. however, these machines were made and sold to be be time-saving/money-cutting revolution in farming yet costs continue to soar...

Perhaps people have forgotten how hard it was when the only balers were the small bale ones (silage was trailered in and siloed) and how many people (ahem* sorry - volunteers!) it took to haul the lot in by hand might I add and it were dusty work. Nowadays it's tractors and telehandlers everywhere - no one lifts a finger really and its £5 a bale!

Sorry - so what has technology given us exactly? Lazy men and expensive dusty large baled hay - thats what.

 

[tallyho!]

Just to add - a friend of mine down the road has enlightened me somewhat.... she doesn't cut hay anymore for her horses (buys it in obvs). She does something called foggage.

If it's just for horses - we should all do it if you have land. Don't cut, leave standing. I used to think that was complete madness putting horses on winter pastures... but watching her grazing over the last five years has made me think...

 

[southerncomfort]

Just to add - a friend of mine down the road has enlightened me somewhat.... she doesn't cut hay anymore for her horses (buys it in obvs). She does something called foggage.

If it's just for horses - we should all do it if you have land. Don't cut, leave standing. I used to think that was complete madness putting horses on winter pastures... but watching her grazing over the last five years has made me think...

That's what I'm doing this year. Although having attempted to walk across the field yesterday their is SO much grass I'm not sure how I'm going to get the ponies through the gate. Might have to get them helicoptered in! 😂

On the plus side it is very dry and stalky so hopefully won't be too rich for them. Will definitely have to strip graze though.

 

[MotherOfChickens]

Sorry - so what has technology given us exactly? Lazy men and expensive dusty large baled hay - thats what.

well its given us these huge, hind gut fermenting luxury leisure items and the lazy men have a right to make a living. Not yet met a lazy farmer and if we had to volunteer to bring in the hay, we'd not have time for aforementioned luxury leisure item.

foggage works great-its hardly a new idea and have been doing it myself for around 9 years.

 

[milliepops]

yup same, I have even been able to have foggage on little patches at livery

If the hay crop comes off early enough in a good year it's possible to do both from the same field, my oldies had foggage on the hay field last year as only one early cut taken.

Also can't really see where laziness comes into it, I know a few of the local contractors & farmers round me and they bust a gut all summer getting it all made and stored. OH does all his haymaking around his proper job so I hardly see him in the summer months!

 

[honetpot]

Well... you could always use your own horses to mow and bale it yourself?

Would anyone go back to the "good old days"? Imagine the time and power that cost? I'm not begrudging the time and effort to get hay in these days I really am not. however, these machines were made and sold to be be time-saving/money-cutting revolution in farming yet costs continue to soar...

Perhaps people have forgotten how hard it was when the only balers were the small bale ones (silage was trailered in and siloed) and how many people (ahem* sorry - volunteers!) it took to haul the lot in by hand might I add and it were dusty work. Nowadays it's tractors and telehandlers everywhere - no one lifts a finger really and its £5 a bale!

Sorry - so what has technology given us exactly? Lazy men and expensive dusty large baled hay - thats what.

I have no idea where you get the idea of lazy men.
Farms are businesses, and the workers often have to work until 2 in the morning to get things before the weather changes. They invest in machinery, like any factory invests in machinery to make a product, whether it be wheat or grass.
Profit is made when all your costs are included, wages, fuel, cost of machinery, loaned money etc.
There is very little profit in small bale hay. If you make ‘big eights’ that require about the least handling for small bales, because they can be lifted in eights with a bale grab, and loaded straight on to a trailer the chances are they wouldn’t be able to sell them direct to the public because they weigh more than 25kg. Most small bales weigh about 22kg, they cost more in man hours to make and end up being hand stacked.
If you are running a business that hopefully pays you a living wage you are going to charge what it cost. If it’s dusty, maybe it was baled too early, or maybe its that it had been rebaled from a round bale, or maybe there was no good weather to bale it in.
I spend about £2k on hay a year and I buy several types depending what I am feeding.
Very rarely is a bale dusty, even the hay that is bought in as cattle hay,I can not believe I am just lucky.

 

[southerncomfort]

Our hay farmer brought us some bales up on a Sunday once. I'd said to him he needn't fetch it at the weekend and we were fine for a few more days. He laughed and said Sunday is just another working day for him. He only ever takes xmas day off! 😮

 

[tallyho!]

Whoops! Didn’t mean to incite anger at my post... was just having a rant at some experiences I’ve had personally... perhaps I shouldn’t have tarred every man with the same brush! Apologies! Was supposed to be tongue in cheek somewhat but, can understand.

 

[ester]

we make hay then do foggage.
We've also borrowed sheep for an acre (they were from the previous hay guy but he never did smalls, current guy does smalls and loads them in the barn for us with the 8 bale grab, included in the £1.20 a bale price).

We have had 4 'farmers' stood round a small baler before now hmming at it.

 

[Xanthoria]

Just out of curiosity but how much do UK square bales weigh on average these days?

I moved to California a long time ago, and they weigh around 100-120# (45-54kg) per bale, and cost about $20-25 each, retail. (£16-20)

 

[MagicMelon]

We used to bale our field, we'd get a local farmer to do it. It was a nightmare. Every summer we'd be panicking about the weather for days, then we'd have a mad panic trying to load all the bales up into the horse trailer to ship them to then stack them all up neatly to the rafters in the shed. Lugging about 250 square bales was quite a feat for me, my mum and dad. Always remember that feeling of joy once the last bale was stacked though!

Where I am now, I dont have the land to do it anymore but its so much easier not to. There's no stress, I remember with ours if it ended up raining on it and wasn't great then it was tough, I had to use it. Whereas now I can actually select the hay to a degree (although Im very lucky to have a brilliant local farmer who brings round bales to me as I need it, always excellent quality).

 

[milliepops]

Just out of curiosity but how much do UK square bales weigh on average these days?

I moved to California a long time ago, and they weigh around 100-120# (45-54kg) per bale, and cost about $20-25 each, retail. (£16-20)

normal small 2 string square bales would be half that. (if that... depends how they are baled, obv)

 

[Snoozy]

normal small 2 string square bales would be half that. (if that... depends how they are baled, obv)

and in France the norm for small bales seems to be 12-15kg. I paid €0.75/bale this year and mine are at least 15kg. That’s cheap though, most of the hay I’ve seen for sale locally is €1.50-2.00.

 

[southerncomfort]

The other idea I had (and quickly discarded!) was maybe buying 3 or 4 older ewes to pop in to a paddock ahead of the ponies to eat it down a bit.

However, hay farmer advises that sheep have 101 ways to accidentally kill themselves. Thinking this might be even more stressful than hay making!

 

[Tiddlypom]

We borrow sheep to graze the hay field down in winter, that way they’re someone else’s responsibility! No money changes hands either way, it suits both parties.

 

[MotherOfChickens]

The other idea I had (and quickly discarded!) was maybe buying 3 or 4 older ewes to pop in to a paddock ahead of the ponies to eat it down a bit.

However, hay farmer advises that sheep have 101 ways to accidentally kill themselves. Thinking this might be even more stressful than hay making!

I don't necessarily agree that they die easily but they are quite high maintenance-drenching, prevention against flies, shearing, dagging, feet trimming, paperwork, ectoparasites-far better to use someone else sheep.

 

[DD]

Apparently 2 acres is too small unless only a few sheep!

propably not worth the paper work you need a CPH number even only a tempory one because of traceability