Hay Quality Question

[leeave96]

I’m a small farmer of square bales of hay, Timothy, Teff and mixed grass. Most hay is sold to horse folks. I don’t have all the answers or experience, so I want to reach out to you folks an ask a question regarding some mixed grass I’m going to cut.

I’ve got a field of Timothy mixed grass. Walking it today, there are some patches of foxtail and a few pieces of horse nettle.

At what point do you disqualify your hay for horse consumption due to the presence of foxtail and horse nettle? How much of it is to much?

There is some decent grass in is this field, along with some stemmy purple top coming up. It is otherwise weed free. I hate to just bush hog it down. Maybe cow hay? Goats? Can they tolerate that stuff?

What’s your limit on buying/feeding square bales of hay where there is potential for foxtail and a bit of horse nettle? If anyone has a pic they could post of a field “over-run” with foxtail or a bale of infested hay - I’d like to see it for reference.

Thanks!

PS - this post is on multiple forums for a broad audience - thx!

[stb]

Isn’t foxtail that weed that can work it’s way into the horse’s gums? I don’t like sticker weeds in my hay. I recently got some that had big stickers that were getting stuck in my horse’s tail. God knows what it was doing to his mouth. I won’t be buying any more of that stuff.

[OneTwoMany]

I wouldn’t knowingly buy hay that contained foxtail to feed to my horses. I cannot speak to cows, goats and sheep.

[shakeytails]

Quite honestly, it depends. We grow our own hay. Yeah, it has some foxtail and other weeds in it, depending on the year. The horses just eat around what they don’t like. For the few years we sold hay, we were honest about the hay having some weeds in it, and it was never a problem. We weren’t charging a premium price, just the going rate for mixed grass hay.

[candyappy]

Unless you are some big grower selling to high price buyers I wouldn’t expect my hay to be completely weed free. I noticed in one of our fields that we have some significant foxtail growing in patches at the moment.

It will be brush hogged down sometime this fall and will not grow again until this time next year so our 1st/ 2nd cuttings will not be affected. It seems to come at the end of Aug for us but we don’t do a 3rd cutting as we don’t need it.

If it is just some random foxtail here and there I would cut it. If the majority of your stand of grass is heavily infected I would think about spraying to kill it and definitely not baling it for sale. I wouldn’t feed that to my goats or cow either.

[leeave96]

Thanks for the replies. I’m going to sell this hay as “cow” hay.

[keysfins]

@leeave96

Thanks for the replies. I’m going to sell this hay as “cow” hay.

If applicable, you could market it as “organic”, with weeds as proof that you didn’t use weed killer sprays!

Just kidding.