Here is a new idea in hay sales, as far as I know. Curious as to whether hay dealers/feed stores would find this a profitable model, and if horse owners would pay for the service.
A local hay dealer has started up a niche market hay service. It’s a clever idea for value-added hay sales. Her model doesn’t fit my needs but I’ve been watching acquaintances sign on to her program and crunching the numbers.
She sells a large square that weighs about 330 lbs, for about $100 plus a $30 delivery fee.
Delivery includes her loading it into the custom-sized small hole hay net you already bought from her, that she installed and attached to the stall wall and floor.
The idea is the horse then has free choice hay for about 2 weeks (about 23 lbs a day). Some horses finish it up in 10 days (that would be about 33 lbs a day).
The price varies a bit based on the type of forage and the actual weight of the large square. She is selling alfalfa/second cut timothy mixes and very nice fine timothy third cut, and other hay as well. She is importing from the commercial dry belt hay growers; this kind of hay is not grown locally.
She tests for sugar and nutrients, and started out supplying the IR/Cushings market. However the people I know who are buying her hay don’t have IR horses, though they do have easy keepers prone to obesity. They like the fact that the hay is tested, but aren’t particularly interested in getting the test results to peruse. They aren’t using the results to calculate mineral supplements, for instance. And they aren’t necessarily getting the same hay each delivery, as far as I know.
She also tests for glyphosphate and advertises glyphosphate free hay. This I think might be a bit of red herring. There is certainly Roundup Ready alfalfa out there, but my guess is that by harvest, it would test glyphospate free, if the pesticide had been used to clear weeds earlier in the season.
I understand that glyphosphate is used at times to dry down annual cereal crops before harvest, and I do find it a little unsettling that it’s used so close to harvest. But you wouldn’t do this on a field of perennial hay grass because you wouldn’t want to kill the grass, and there is no Roundup Ready timothy out there. There are broadleaf herbicides you might use on a grass pasture, but those are another category altogether.
Even with the small hole nets, the easy keeper horses that are on this system are getting a lot of hay because they stand in their stalls and worry away at the hay all day. It’s very different to grazing on a nice pasture, where the horses wander, and eat with no stress to their jaws and polls. On the other hand, maybe the fact that they hay is very low sugar is keeping them from getting laminitis when their intake is close to 30 lbs a day. However, an alfalfa mix would not be my choice for free feed hay for an easy keeper.
Some of these horse owners also still have small bales, and are feeding loose hay in addition to the large square.
My mare does very well on 15 or 16 lbs of good timothy in 4 or 5 feeds a day, which keeps her voluptuous but not quite obese. She is currently on pasture, and plumping up on the fall grass :). I like the fact that if I get a ton or ton and half at once, I am feeding the same batch of hay for four or five months and can transition to the next batch. If I had more storage I would certainly get 4 tons all at once every September.
So the free feed model isn’t one that would suit my horse.
But separate from that, when I crunch the numbers on the large squares, I get sticker shock.
One large square is about 1/6 of a ton, so that makes a ton $600. Then there is the delivery fee of $30 per large square, so $180 a ton. That makes a total price of $780 a ton, maybe a bit less if the bales come in at $90 rather than $100.
I am paying $460 for a ton of very nice second cut timothy, delivered and we help the seller stack. My monthly cost at 16 lbs a day on paper is $110 or $1324 a year (in reality its closer to $120 a month or $1440).
The boutique large square hay, assumed its delivered every two weeks year round, works out to $3380 ($130 x 26) a year, plus or minus a bit.
The $460 per ton delivered is an average price for three string timothy from the local hay dealers. i think it’s probably selling for $100 something per ton at source, which would be at least an 8 hour drive away, a lot further if you go over the mountains into Alberta.
I have no idea of course what the business costs for the boutique hay are, and what the profit margins are. I don’t know if the 330 lb large square is a standard size in the dairy industry or if she needs to contract for a special size bale with her growers. I don’t know the real costs of her local delivery, but I’d be surprised if you could take a truck loaded with hay and two people out for much less than $100 a trip, given gas and wages and time.
I’ve had hay tested in the past, and if I needed low sugar hay, I think I’d still buy per ton at a similar cost to what I’m paying now. There are other dealers offering tested hay and post the tests online. If I needed to feed free choice hay, I could shove a full small bale down from the loft into an appropriate size nibble net.
But clearly the full service model is meeting the needs of a number of horse owners, even though its more than twice as expensive.
