How much hay do I need?

[4horses]

I’ve always supplemented my horses with small round bales. Usually a round bale lasts 1 week. Unfortunately the hay cutting this year wasn’t very good. I went to buy a round yesterday and the hay was 4 inches long with nothing longer than that. I switched it out for bales. Getting a bit worried about hay availability this year. Someone is selling rounds for $80 but they are larger and difficult for me to unload by myself. I’m paying $45 a round right now.

I have 3 horses. If I switch to bales, how many will I need to make it to May? I have 80 bales in my barn right now. 50 bales are 50-60 lbs. The rest are 35 lbs. I’m tempted to use an additional stall for hay… But the work involved in stacking hay! My barn has never been this full. I usually only run out of rounds for the last month before the new hay is cut.

[clanter]

going on the high end 60 pounds per day (20 pounds per horse per day) …so one of the 50/60 pound bales per day… Until May is 135 days… you have 50 so would need 85 to Get to May…the 30 bales of 35 pounds could be considered a reserve

[BrendaJane]

and if you have the room for more, add some, in case next year won’t be better.

[Scribbler]

I feed hay year round, and if you do the math, 20 lbs a day is 3.65 tons a year per horse. So figure out your bales per ton. 50 lb bales are 40 bales per ton.

You can also figure out how heavy your old rounbales were. IME people tend to accept wastage in round bales because they are cheaper and harder to move, whereas people tend to be more strategic about feeding small bales. So you may need less.

Thinking about bales per ton and cost per ton also helps calculate price per ton or price per pound which is really important when you need to decide which hay is the best deal.

[Simkie]

Horses eat between 1 - 3% in their body weight daily. If you have 3 horses at 1000 pounds each, that’s 30-90 #s a day. I buy for 2% consumption over the year, but if you’re buying only for the cold winter months, you probably want to lay in enough for 3%. Just do the math on how long you’ll need to feed hay until there’s more to buy or the grass comes in.

[candyappy]

Figure # 20 pounds a day per horse to feed well past your intended cut off date by a month or more. Also add additional bales so that you can feed more than #20 pounds a day easily if you need to.

I always have way more than I plan on feeding because you can have a colder winter and sometimes Spring just doesn’t happen like it should.

[Mango20]

I have two smallish horses (15.3 and 14.3 hands) and a small pony, and I figure on feeding 1.5 (approx 50lb) bales a day for Dec-March, and one bale per day for November, April and May (won’t need that much in May but that gives me a good cushion for numbers). So far my actual numbers for December have been about 1.25 bales per day, but it’s been warmish and they’re still finding other things to eat in the pasture.

[LCDR]

When you say you supplement your horses with hay, do you mean that natural growing forage is available as the main part of their diet?

[fourfillies]

I use the 20 pounds a day Dec-May estimator. I have good pasture and usually end up donating a good bit to the local rescue each year but haven’t ever gotten nervous about running out. With some pasture to pick at they seldom come close to 20lbs a day unless it’s very cold or we have persistent snow cover (happens but not the norm except for, thankfully, a month or two each winter).

[walktrot]

My horse’s normal body weight is around 1150 lbs. He isn’t an easy keeper or a hard keeper. He is the type who maintains his weight by eating in one day what he needs to hold his weight. He needs free choice hay. He hasn’t porked up in 20 years. He did lose a lot of weight when he wasn’t getting enough hay so I moved to another barn. It took a month or so for the new owners to understand what he needed. Hay is shipped in from Canada and is beautiful. He is 27 but his teeth are in reasonable condition. They pull out the finer fluffy bales so he doesn’t have to pick through the somewhat stemmy pieces. He gets about 25 lbs daily plus Blue Seal Sentinel LS and supplements from HorseTech.com. He is very happy. He doesn’t look or act his age.

[StormyDay]

It very much depends on your horses and your pasture. Around here, we still have grass that’s nutritious even in the winter. So I feed about half their daily forage, and they graze the rest. For me, I go through one 65 pound bale a day with 5 horses and a mini.

But when the grass is bad, or I have a hard keeper, I might feed up to 30 pounds per horse per day.

[luvmyhackney]

Depends on what your horses eat. I have 2 horses and 1 pony. I am going through 2 bales a day since my grass is next to nothing now. My bales are between 50-65 lbs with not much waste.

[sascha]

@4horses

I went to buy a round yesterday and the hay was 4 inches long with nothing longer than that.

You might want to go and look at that hay again. It may have been chopped prior to baling and not just cut at a really short height. At 4" it still qualifies as “long stem” fibre so if that’s a concern, it shouldn’t be. If you’re planning on feeding it indoors, you’ll have just about zero waste. Outside, well, depending on how tightly baled, it will either be fine or some will blow away on windy days.

[lenapesadie]

I agree.

If I could find round bales that had been cut that young, I’d buy them in a heartbeat. All other things being equal of course.

[4horses]

The problem with 4 inch long coastal is that it doesn’t have any stem to it. Is very fine pieces and what I consider hay waste. The horses don’t normally eat those smaller bits. With a normal roll they eat all the long stems and leave the short small pieces. I end up with a pile of waste hay that I dump in the compost bin. I use a hay feeder so anything left over needs to be manually raked up. Very difficult if you have a bunch of waste. Rolls like that tend to fall apart and you end up with a huge mess. I know from experience unfortunately. You can’t even burn it very well because it smothers the fire.

[clanter]

the 20 pound rule of thumb really does not work with our guys whose metabolism just does not require that level of hay to maintain or even gain weight.

I am using less than Half of one 130 pound bale of TEFF to feed two Morgans, one pony, three miniatures. six goats per day (use about one ton per month)…the goats are eating as much hay as the two horses, the three miniatures consume what one horse eats (and that is the horse that would eat all day long if allowed, the mare just nibbles at her hay)…and if there is anything left over the neighbors goats (11) are allowed to pick over what hay was left in the pasture …so there is not any waste hay…zero.

[walktrot]

My horse likes to nibble. He likes all of that fine stuff whether it is on the floor in the stall/runout or growing outside somewhere. He likes weeds with flat leaves and grasses that also are flat and wide. He has two modes of consumption when he is outside and I let him free graze. The weed whacker takes care of the fence lines, and the salad bar lover works on areas that the lawn tractor didn’t cover.

The hay from Canada is a grass mix with no timothy. Timothy mix is what you get around here (Maine). The stuff he won’t eat Is flatter and wider but doesn’t approach the steminess of first cut timothy. I got a fair amount of grief from the new barn owners and their staff that he was wasting hay. His teeth are good enough to chew the grasses which is pretty good for age 27. He can crunch his Rounders without any problems. He has a diastema but does not quid. As long as he can eat hay off the ground that’s what I want him to do. They find bales that meet his needs without much effort: they are greener and you can see the finer stuff. They pull them out in the hay loft and put them aside. There isn’t any reason at this point to feed him timothy pellets or chopped hay. Once barn staff understood what he needed the problem disappeared. He was malnourished when we moved to this barn.

The previous owner new exactly what he needed, which is free choice forage. He gained back well over 150 lbs. He lost a bit in the spring after the new owners took over but has gained it back. I think I’ve made progress with some of the flake-counters. Next is the scoopers who don’t know about weighing grain and converting it to volume. New BO does not have experience running a boarding facility but she is smart and learning fast. She asks questions and listens to answers. Can you imagine that? She didn’t change much so we get a very high level of service at what has become a bargain-basement price.

The funniest part of the process is the new mare who loves what my horse won’t eat. She vacuums it up. He swaps turnout areas with her and she cleans it all up. Now she swaps with a few others so hay wastage has declined.

One experiment did prove successful. Hay is tossed in the front corner of the stalls. The bedding is in the back corner. He was pooping and peeing, polluting the hay and bedding. I asked them to toss the hay on the wall between the door to aisleway and the door to the runout. Worked like a charm. He likes to fluff it out. He makes a pile along the entire length of the wall. If someone gives him the rough stuff he works around it. He still poops and pees in the same areas but his hay is clean. He is very happy. He was outside for 19-1/2 years until we had to move. He hates stalls, but he has an oversize runout so it works like a paddock with a run-in shed.