How Do I Know if I'm Buying Good Hay?
Okay, this is supposed to be a tractor channel, but if you move to the country and buy a tractor, someday you may be planning to have livestock, and if you do, you could at some point be shopping for hay. It's not much fun. I grew up around hay and could never really tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. I asked my dad one time how to tell great hay from mediocre hay and got a really vague answer.
We'd get beautiful green bales that smelled great and looked like a cow's dream and they wouldn't eat it. Then we'd get some stuff that looked awful and they'd clean it up. I could never think like a cow to tell what they liked and didn't like.
My wife and daughter have horses and we struggle with the same thing. We buy hay from a neighbor, some bales they love and some they don't. They all look alike to me, I guess I'm not good at thinking like a horse either.
For most of my life I've been too embarrassed to admit that I can't look at hay and tell if it's any good or not. You're supposed to know that stuff if you grew up on a farm. I vowed that if I could ever find an excuse for asking someone how to buy hay I'd do it. This channel gave me that excuse.
In this video I speak with Eldon Cole, Extension Livestock Specialist based in Lawrence County, Missouri. Eldon is an extremely well-respected expert on all livestock and hay issues. When I was on the livestock judging team in high school, I gave "reasons", or the justification on why I had ranked a class of hogs the way I did, to Eldon. He must have been fresh out of college at the time. He's been around a few years and he knows his stuff.
For years, there has been a hay show at the Ozark Empire Fair in Springfield, Missouri, and Eldon is the judge. Producers from the area bring their best hay in and Eldon judges it and names the top hay producer. So, when I ran into Eldon at a recent event, I begged him to do an interview and reveal the secret to knowing what good hay looked like. Today you get to find out what he told me.
In the video, Eldon tells what constitutes hay quality and admits that he can't look at a bale and tell you if its any good. REALLY? Wow, if I'd have known that all these years I wouldn't have felt so guilty. Bottom line, the only way to know for sure is to have it tested, and the test is only around $20.
The guy here locally that we buy from admitted he took his first hay sample in to get it analyzed recently. He farms the bottom land you pass if you're headed south to Branson, Missouri on Highway 65 right around Ozark. It's some really good hay ground. He was proud of the premium hay he had raised, thinking it would test out as outstanding, amazing alfalfa. To his surprise, it didn't even meet the minimum requirements for good dairy cow hay. So, you never know until the test results come back.
Truthfully, most of us will never pay for the hay test. We'll continue to buy the cheapest hay we can find close by and live with the waste. There is a better way...
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