The pictures are so small I can’t really see what the" burr " looks like. Is it an actual ( what we call) cockleburr which are big and hard? I would think you would see the plant and leaves from the burr plant as well and I don’t see it.
It looks more like what we would identify with as a foxtail, but here they actually aren’t a foxtail as they are soft and completely edible and in my area they crop up in some fields in late summer and if hay is cut then, they are in it and pose no issues to any livestock who consume it.
You can tell the person your concerns and any seller who cares will make it right. It all depends on what kind of person the seller is. An opened round bale doesn’t travel well…
I think it is wise to choose professional hay suppliers or feed stores, my suppliers’ only business is hay production. Smaller producers can be very hit or miss. I never felt like they purposefully sold bad hay, most just don’t know any better. To many people any field that can be cut down and run through the baler is hay. If it has trash you can see from the outside it is cow hay. If it’s baled weeds it is goat hay. You will pay more, but if you factor in renting a trailer, your time, gas and hay wastage from less than premier bales, you could have paid twice the amount and still come out cheaper.
My other point is that drought DOES occur. In 2008 I literally watched my 38 acres of pasture turn to dust, there was no hay. I mean none, for anyone. It was one the guys who had tried to sell me “cow hay” a couple of years back that saved my butt. He had a connection that was bringing in okay cow hay out of the midwest. I cut that with some $400.00 large bale alfalfa and made it through. We wasted a lot of the cow hay, but I made it without weight loss or colic. I watched many people have colics, sell beloved horses, barns with soaring board prices and free horses were a dime a dozen. It was a lesson in never burning your bridges. I still have a list of hay suppliers that will get me by in pinch. I am lucky, this year I built a designated hay barn, I get first cutting in bulk from the field and store it. It hurts pay for 63 ton delivered at one time but I sleep very well knowing it’s in that barn. I also know that I can feed my horses until August 2021 ( I guess I need another horse, :yes: LOL)
If you do not have the storage to buy a year’s supply (most people do not) then keeping a good list of hay sellers can be well worth the time. Even the ones who have okay hay are still better than no hay at all. Just wait until February, there will be people everywhere wondering where to get hay and all of the suppliers will be out or low. If I had told all of these hay guys what I really thought, my list would be mighty short and my horses hungry. I will say if I do get a bad bale, I cut it open roll it out on a bare spot and let them pick through and eat what they like, the rest works great to hold seed down when my pasture is looking rough or eroded. Well fed horses will pick out the good stuff and trash the rest, or at least mine do.
“To have a happy horse home you need three people…The Hay Farmer, The Farrier and the The Vet. Treat all three as treasured friends, remember all three at Christmas and pay the first two cash.”
I would say that viewing the inside of bales before purchasing is pretty normal. Most farmers have offered to show me before I have asked.
The key for hay is to find a good supplier and than become a repeat customer. Unfortunately you won’t be high on their priority list if you just buy a few bales here and there. You may need to actually pay upfront a deposit or in full for the bales you want for the foreseeable future (and trust that your hay guy won’t sell them out from under you) and ask if he will store them until you need them. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Two hay guys I use (alfalfa and 2nd cutting grass round bales) bring time the hay straight from the pasture. If I want hay, I better be ready to pay and store it as soon as it’s cut.
My other guy I pay upfront for the hay I’ll need from October to April and he allows me to come
pick up 10 round bales at a time as I need it. This allows me to buy from him because I don’t have enough room to store hay for 30 outside horses that need forage 7-8 months out of the year and 15 inside horses that are on hay year round.
If you click the photo it should enlarge but I’ll try to enlarge a photo and attach it in the post. This is what they look like. They are usually attached to a stick or stalk looking thing. It doesn’t look like any foxtail I’ve seen.
Thanks for the insight everyone. I’ve purchased square bales from the same seller since I got back into horses a couple years ago (I only buy 30 or so at a time because of storage), as I was supplementing my horses hay consumption with alfalfa. That hay is fantastic but it’s also at premium pricing, usually $2-3/bale higher than what the average is in my area. But the seller is honest and the hay is lovely so it’s worth it. However, I wanted some orchard grass rounds for the winter and to supplement their alfalfa/Timothy with, and the hay looked lovely from the photos but I clearly made a few rookie mistakes in buying these rounds!
Lesson learned for the future. Thankfully I don’t free feed rounds- I pull off what I need, so I can pick through and try to pull out the burrs, but it’s super time consuming. It took me 30 minutes to fill two hay nets yesterday and I still missed some bad spots. I’m giving the seller the benefit of the doubt and assuming he wasn’t aware that the bale was bad.
To those recommending selling the hay for goat or cow hay, is that really ethical? Wouldn’t it present the same risk of injuring the mouth or causing intestinal distress?
My suggestion was to offer at a low price with full disclosure. Around here, when cattle operations feed rounds, they usually unroll the round bales across the field, so the hay is lying loose on the ground. Done that way, it would be easier to nose around for a burr-free bite, vs asking the horse to bite into the bale to pull the hay out chunk by chunk. But regardless, as long as I’ve disclosed the problem, I see nothing unethical about selling it.
I can see it better now and that is a cockelburr and I wouldn’t want to feed it either. Maybe now that he knows it is in there he can spray to kill them. It may be hard to see if the hay was tall. He may not have known.
Hopefully it will just be in a small part and not throughout the bale.
How did you unload them? How do you expect the seller to take them back? If you sell them to someone else how do you expect them to pick them up?
I think finding a buyer that wants them will not be that hard, but finding one that wants them and has the ability to bring something to load them to take them home will be next to impossible.
I was confused by that too-- OP originally brought a trailer to be loaded so I assumed they had the means to unload. (But I guess you can just wrap a tow strap around them and pull them off?) Regardless, for the two unopened bales, that’s what, $160 or so? Not worth an hour’s drive for either the farmer or OP. I’d probably just work through them and hope for not too much waste.
OP, I’d take a chain saw and slice off like a foot of the outer layers, and see what it looks like. Might find better hay as you get deeper in the bale. I agree with not feeding those burrs, they’re nasty. I was thinking you had thistle burrs which are softer and easier for the horse to nose out of the way.
Still worth a call to the farmer-- you could ask for a compromise, such as 50% refund. That’s be a totally reasonable request.
I pick up 2 rounds at a time in my pick up. These range from 600-700 pounds. They are surprisingly easy for 2 people to roll. No tow strap necessary. I have reloaded one onto a horse trailer with a shallow ramp that took 2 adults and one pre-teen to push it up the ramp.
Yeah, clearly a “round” means different things in different parts of the country. Around here they’re all 1500-1600lb, so it requires a 50hp tractor to pick up. (But if the OP’s bales are that small and easy to load at the farmer’s end, they’d be easy to load at the OP’s end, no?) But moot point anyway I suppose.
Probably not. If you have a tractor it’s easy to pick up the bale and put it in a pickup truck and then send someone on their way. When O.P. gets home, all she has to do is push it out of the pickup and roll it to wherever she’s storing it but if you don’t have a tractor, there’s no getting it back in the pickup once it’s off.
As a cow person (well married to someone who’s been a cow person their whole life) they are like garbage cans. They can eat a whole lot of mold and weird stuff. At the same time there’s some random stuff they shouldn’t eat.
Last year we were using round bales for the horses and got some nasty moldy stuff that we ended up feeding to the bulls. Finally switched to small squares this year for the horses.
Do you have personal experience rolling or pushing a 1500-1600# bale? I can attest that they do not roll or push even with 2-3 strong people unless gravity is greatly in your favor.
I bale small squares and I always offer a sample bale, gratis. (Not a dealer, just among friends; I usually have a few more bales than I can store.) My horses eat my hay, fat and happy, but horses, like people, have different tastes. And everyone’s idea of horse hay varies, too. As well as quality and supply from year to year. If I were a buyer of big or small bales, I would ask to see an open bale. One ‘hay dealer’ baled roadside grass; bales were rife with cans, bottles and just plain crap. Loading and storing hay is a job and it’s not worth getting a bad batch.
