Ooh, how nice would this be as a corral panel setup? A square of corral panels with covered hay storage in the middle and nets that you can fill from the inside, like this: https://haychix.com/products/panel-feeder. You could just stand in the middle of the square and shove hay into the nets, no lugging hay around.
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What a great idea! Bonus if the cover part is big enough for you to stand under but something simpler, cheaper would work too for hay storage. A couple of mats and some dead chest freezers might work and be very cheap to try. Ugly as sin, but the panels already would be.
I like those net frames. I wonder if I could rig something similar to hold bags. I worry about my oldie so prefer those bags with one big hole. I bet those frames would save me time loading the hay bags I hang in the barn! And would be waaaayyyy cheaper than ordering another Porta Grazer or two!
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Good idea about the panels. I also have lots of trees, so could probably use them as well. Time to get creative. I can’t afford to keep wasting hay.
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I clip my hay nets inside a big stock tank - this is what I use:
It’s big enough to put a whole bale in if that’s what you like to do. I have to restrict diet so I weigh my hay and put nets out in the morning and again at lunch. But you could make it much less labor intensive if that’s what you’d like.
I drilled holes in the ends of mine and put in U bolts to clip the nets to, but you could also just put a loop of twine in and clip to the twine.
I am also not handy and this was really easy to put together. Basically no wasted hay with this set up.
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Put out more piles than horses, and placed far enough apart that the bully will quickly tire of moving from pile to pile, and just settle in to eat.
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Wait? That happens eventually? How many decades does it take? My bully seems to never give up.
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so true!
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Currently I’m throwing out piles, but want to invest in a set up similar to yours.
Seems easy enough to cover with a tarp if needed and they are moveable to change around locations, etc.
So since I’m stuck at home with COVID, I’ve been online shopping! 
I bought a bunch of full bale hay bags and today is the first day out in pasture. I put out one bale per horse in the (which is twice what they should eat in a day, but I imagine I’ll be filling bags every other day or so…). They are not too thrilled with the new arrangement, they’d prefer their hay delivered in an easier to eat fashion… after each horse checking each bag to find the best one, they seem to have settled into eating this way. I did not put the bags in anything, just out on the ground as they are advertised. We’ll see…
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Re: shoes and bags
I feed a 500# compressed bale on a table-height platform under a run-in. The bale is bound with heavy wire. I was away from home last week, and my neighbor found that the horses had eaten much of the bale, pushed it off the table, and now had one of the ~3’ diameter circular wires caught under his front shoe. FOrtunately he was amazing about it. She and my other neighbor (who came over to help)were able to get the wire out from under the shoe.
So yes, I would NEVER use net bags on the ground with shod horses.
And I am redesigning my platform so this does not happen again…
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I really like these haynets it holds a ton and you just open it at the top and drop flakes in. It’s a softer netting so feels nicer. This one is hung so low because I have goats and the pony isn’t shod.
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Where did you get that? I want it!
It could be a Freedom Feeder net. They are great and last well.
It’s not the Freedom Feeder I got it on Amazon this one is the large size and only $34. I actually sold a wooden goat hay feeder for $150 and bought this instead and it actually wastes less hay. I get maybe a pitchfork of hay on the ground every 3-4 days and I only pick out under it once every week or two.
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I have gotten lots of good ideas from all the responses on this thread. I ended up putting eye bolts up high in the corners of my pasture shelters, then clipping Hay Chix half bale nets to the eye bolts. This way the nets are high enough that I don’t worry about shoes getting caught. Also the shelter keeps the hay dry so no concern about rain ruining the hay. I put out two half bale nets at a time instead of the one full bale net I was throwing out on the ground previously.
Why this never occurred to me before I have no idea;)
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All the bale netting sites do not recommend using them for shod horses. Way too much chance of getting snagged on shoes, nails, studded shoes. Most horses I know would be in the next County with the net on their foot!
Glad you found a good solution to your hay feeding issues. Watching them waste hay is like burning dollar bills to me! STOP that! Ha ha
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This has garnered a lot of great responses. I appreciate everyone chiming in and offering their solutions!
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I have one of those big white ones too, mine came from Horze, it’s great, I’ve had it for many years now. Holds a TON of hay & so easy to use!
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I feel like mine would figure out how to manage that even without shoes.
I love that hay setup. Is it in a dry lot? Or in a pasture? I would love to have something like this but think it would be a muddy mess around it. Maybe just installing an area of mud control would work…
In the muddy season, I feel like I lose hay in the mud no matter what I do. So I feed around my barn which is a drylot; but I’d much prefer they went at least into the sacrifice lot so I don’t have so much cleanup of manure, etc. by the barn.
Originally we had debated putting it into the sacrifice area, but it was big enough (and that area small enough) that we were afraid someone might have collided with a fence if they got into a squabble over spots. So we put it into one of the paddocks. We made sure to put down a good base of rock and then gravel extending about 10’ out from the feeder in all directions (and that base is under the feeder too of course). That way they are standing slightly higher than the surrounding ground to eat. The snow will sit on it, but there isn’t mud as the rain drains away.
I don’t have any pics that show that really well, but you kind of get the idea from this one (the logs we use for ventilation purposes if we do use a big bale):
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