Column by Hal Walter
Livestock – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
If there’s anything I don’t like about my small-time dealings in the stock market — the livestock market — it’s dealing with hay.
The basics are bad enough. The stuff is heavy and getting it, especially a decent supply of it, to my place is problematic. I drive to where the hay is, and in my case the empty rig is always going downhill. When I get to wherever I’m buying the hay, I have to unstack it, then restack it in my truck or trailer.
Then I have to drive uphill toward home with the stuff weighting down the rig and the gas gauge plummeting. It’s almost always hot, and even though the hay is riding behind me, if I unroll the windows a fair amount of it will find its way into the vehicle, and ultimately up my nose.
Once home, it’s time to unstack the hay and restack it in the barn. It’s another opportunity for back-wrenching exercise. Then I spend the next two or three days exercising my sinuses, blowing blackish-green stuff out by the bandanaful. Now I get to unstack the hay at a relatively leisurely rate as I feed it to my animals, but not so slowly as I would like.
Meanwhile a certain percentage of hay ends up on the barn floor or on the ground as I carry it to the feeders. Once in the feeder, the ever-present Wet Mountain zephyr carries away more of this precious commodity than I care to think about. Talk about throwing your money up in the wind.
The final insult is when I shovel up the fully digested hay and wheel it to the manure pile where it stays because even friends with gardens don’t feel it’s worth the gas and time to drive all the way out to my place to take it for yet one more ride.
But I could overlook all these minor hassles with hay if the stuff just wasn’t so expensive and so damned scarce. This spring and early summer, hay, if you could find any for sale, reached hysterical prices. I was lucky enough to have some sympathetic friends in the farming business, so was spared total bankruptcy as I bought a summertime supply of hay to supplement my parched and dormant pasture. But prices of $7 to $8.50 a bale were rumored locally, and reports from major cities indicated feed stores were selling hay for up to $11 a bale.
Those are hay horror stories, but the truth is, I’m afraid that’s just a glimpse of what we’ll see this time next year. The problem is really a triple whammy. There’s a hay shortage now, and people with livestock are using up the current stockpile because pastures have been devastated by the drought. Many ranchers and farmers, with no irrigation and no rain in site, know they will not be able to produce any hay this summer and have turned their stock out onto their hayfields to graze what little stubble is left.
Just how bad is it? One rancher I know who usually farms several hundred acres of Wet Mountain Valley grass hay with senior water rights is only irrigating 13 acres this summer. Despite the name, neither the mountains nor the valley are even a little bit damp this year. It all amounts to virtually no hay production.
In the fall, ranchers who produce any hay at all will likely assess how many animals they can feed over the winter with whatever hay they have stockpiled, then take the remaining livestock to the sale barn. Beef prices will drop initially and then skyrocket. Any hay sold to small-time operators like me will be at a premium price and in rationed amounts.
This is not news to anyone who has hay-eating animals or who grows hay. Those who have the storage capacity and lots of money are buying hay, or anything like it, as fast as they can. Some are even having semi-tractor loads hauled in from other states. A few weeks ago I was in the local feed store and noticed a big stack of a product called “chaff hay” stacked in plastic shrink-wrap bags. Chaff hay is basically hay that has been chopped and mixed with molasses then bagged. A week later I went back to the feed store and asked where all the chaff hay went. I was told someone had bought it all.
It was then that I began to take this hay shortage seriously. This summer my pasture is basically clumps of sun-burned grass amid the sand and dust. Here and there a scorched Indian paintbrush punctuates a landscape that looks more and more like the African plain with every dry and windy day that passes.
I feed four burros, and a horse who recently had a mule foal. The standard rule, according to the classic text Feeds and Feeding by Frank Barron Morrison, is to feed light horses one pound of roughage for every 100 pounds of bodyweight. This means a 1,000-pound horse eats its own weight in hay every 100 days. The burros, being more efficient in both metabolism and energy production, can get by on less.
One study found that the digestible energy requirements of donkeys is about 75% that of horses. Given that most donkeys are smaller than horses, this backed up my own experience that I can feed three good-sized burros for roughly the same as I can feed one horse.
I buy some grass hay and some alfalfa hay for my animals. The weight of the bales varies widely but generally I figure about 30 bales, more or less, per ton. The grass hay is grown in the Wet Mountain Valley and the alfalfa hay comes primarily from Wetmore and the irrigated farmlands east of Pueblo. But with grass production minimal and rumors that even Pueblo alfalfa farmers might only have irrigation water for one cutting, I began to wonder what if I really need to buy some hay and there just isn’t any?
One thing I looked into right away is “hay cubes.” These are little cubes of hay produced by dehydrating and pressing alfalfa. At Sweeney Feed Mill in Pueblo you can get a discount if you buy a half-ton or ton of cubes. I bought a half-ton at $5.67 per 50-pound bag, figuring that as insurance this was still cheaper and infinitely more available than baled hay at this point. Although this is more expensive than what I am accustomed to paying for hay, I sort of like the cube concept in that the bags were much easier to transport, there was no dust, and waste to the wind is nil.
It also occurred to me that there have been a lot of donkeys in the news lately, in places I would guess that baled hay is non-existent. Some research on the Internet actually turned up some interesting information, the most notable being a research paper called, of all things, “Feeding donkeys” published by the Botswana College of Agriculture. This study suggested that donkeys be fed 5% of bodyweight, as opposed to 10% for horses, in hay or straw daily. The study further emphasized that donkeys are much different than horses in many ways and should not be fed in the same manner. Donkeys’ feeding behavior, the paper said, is characterized by high intakes of forage with low nutrient extraction.
The use of straw as feed was something I had not considered. The paper also mentioned the use of hay cubes, and basically seemed to favor the idea of feeding a mixture of hay and straw, along with some concentrated protein such as the cubes or grain.
As an aside, the study also mentioned that donkeys could harmlessly go for up to three days without water in times of shortage, a good thing to know in dry times like these.
I found some barley straw for $3.25 a bale, which sounds like a real bargain until you consider that the bales weigh not much more than half as much as a bale of hay. But I also found that the straw really is a bargain for burros. Fed along with some hay and grain, it provides the animals with something that they can chew on to prevent boredom. It’s high in fiber but low in nutritional value so they will not likely gain weight on it.
As the study said, chewing is an important feeding behavior in donkeys, as they are adapted to eating large quantities of low-calorie forage in the desert. This would explain why you see so many overweight donkeys in pastures, especially in Colorado. The donkeys are only doing what’s natural — eating constantly — but in a normal year the forage here, and even the hay, is just too nutritious for them.
So where does all of this leave me? Looking for both hay and straw. If there’s anything positive that’s come from all of this, it’s that I’ve learned a lot about alternative forage for my burros and the alternatives may actually be healthier for them and more thrifty.
But the downside is that I’m likely to be stacking, hauling, restacking, coughing up, and paying for a lot of types of forage before the effects of this drought — which will be with us long after it finally rains — have passed.
Hal Walter is looking to buy 10 bales of hay every time he takes his truck anywhere.