This year's hay - when can I feed?

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Flicker

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Nasty haylege that our yard has made is going through my horse and my friend's horse like a wire brush. Haylege Balancer not doing anything. She's managed to sort some lovely hay to mix in which has definitely helped my lad in the past.
Thing is, I woud wager that the hay will be this year's cut, as I very much doubt there'll be any of last year's left.
Question: how soon will we be able to feed this? Is there a set number of weeks between cut and feed? Our friendly hay farmer should be able to tell us when this batch was cut. I don't want to feed too soon, but conversly, I want to start feeding hay as soon as possible because having to hose off my boy's back end every second day is really starting to get me down.

And yes, I know that I should be speaking to YO about this, but YO has seen and heard the cow pats emanating from my horse's rear end, and she is has been left in no doubt what is causing it. Three other liveries have all had to buy in their own hay for the same reason and their complaints have fallen on deaf ears, so I'm not holding out massive hope for a reduction in livery to cover the additional hay...
 
Sounds nasty. It is horrible when your horses back end explodes :(

You can feed hay now but You could initially mix your hay with straw and change gradually if you think it is too much still

:)
 
6 to 8 weeks after it has been cut if it's been cut and baled at the right time and stored correctly if you wanted to feed new hay that early, but it's really down the individual horse/pony and the hay, for example I wouldn't feed the above to pony that is prone to lami.

But you should be fine now, although if your horse suffers from the squits, new hay won't do it any favours, so the older the hay (as in if you can still feed last years), the better.
 
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