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Buying and Storing Winter Hay

No extension service publishes a tons-per-head figure for a winter’s hay. What they publish is a calculation, and the waste allowance moves it more than the animal does.

A barn of animals

No extension service publishes a tons-per-head figure for a winter’s hay. Every one of them hands you a calculation instead: percent of body weight, times days fed, times head, plus an allowance for waste. That is not evasion. The two published worked examples land 36 percent apart for roughly the same animal. Oregon State gets 2.2 tons for an 1,100-pound beef cow over 182 days, while Cornell gets 3 tons for a 1,000-pound animal over 200 days. The animal barely changed. The days fed and the waste assumption did.

Intake, and where the numbers part company

Dry matter intake as a share of body weight, from Oregon State: goats 2 to 6 percent, sheep 2 to 5, horses 1.5 to 3, beef cattle 1 to 3. Arkansas and Ohio State both put sheep and goats at 2 to 4 percent, capping goats two full points lower. On a 150-pound doe that is the gap between 3 and 9 pounds a day, and nothing reconciles it.

Per-head figures hold steadier. Penn State’s NRC 2007 table gives a 154-pound meat goat doe 2.82 pounds of dry matter a day at maintenance, 3.70 in late gestation with twins, and 4.25 in early lactation with twins. A confined idle adult horse eats 15 to 20 pounds of good mixed hay a day with no grain, per Missouri G2806. Late gestation rather than cold weather is what moves those figures.

One class has no figure at all. If rabbits are in the plan, no land-grant extension service, no USDA agency and no provincial ministry publishes a hay consumption number for them. What surfaces instead is veterinary hospital material and 4-H project books.

Waste is the bigger lever

The University of Minnesota weighed what horses actually wasted from round bales, feeder by feeder. No feeder at all: 57 percent. A hay sleigh: 33. Ring, cone and tombstone feeders: 19 each. The best designs tested came in between 5 and 13. Penn State’s small-square numbers run the same direction, 1 to 5 percent in a basket, slat or bunk feeder against 13 percent on the ground, with feeder payback inside a year. A 2020 Penn State survey found 56 percent of equids fed on the ground with no feeder at all.

Oregon State says add 10 to 50 percent to the calculated requirement for waste. Cornell raises the base from 2.5 to 3.0 pounds of forage dry matter per 100 pounds of live weight instead, a 20 percent uplift. One caveat the sources do not hide: every feeder-waste measurement found is from horse or beef cattle trials, and nobody has measured it by feeder type for goats or sheep. Reading that ladder across to a goat pen is extrapolation, not a cited fact.

Sold by the bale, fed by the pound

Jason Banta at Texas A&M laid out what a round bale weighs at constant density: 4×4 at 563 pounds, 4×5 at 880, 4×6 at 1,267, 5×5 at 1,100, 5×6 at 1,584. Density alone moves a single 5×5 bale between 935 and 1,210 pounds. Eldon Cole at Missouri Extension puts it plainly. Large round bales are “not all 1,000 pounds. Most weigh less than that.”

Banta also did the cost arithmetic, and it is the most useful number in the subject. At a flat $50 a bale, a 563-pound bale costs $177.56 a ton; an 1,100-pound bale at the same $50 costs $90.91. Same price tag, nearly double the hay. Weigh a few sample bales before agreeing to anything. Small squares run 40 to 80 pounds per Minnesota Extension, which lumps large squares in with rounds at 800 to 1,200 pounds, and nothing else publishes a distinct large-square range.

On quality, Maryland’s fact sheet FS644 says it twice: “color can be deceiving,” and “color is not a good indicator of digestibility.” Leafiness and stem texture are what the eye should read instead, since Maryland puts 60 percent of the digestible nutrients in the leaves. Kentucky’s forage team is blunter: “A hay test is the only way to truly evaluate quality.” It runs $15 to $50.

What the stackyard costs

Mississippi State and Oklahoma State publish nearly identical dry matter loss tables, and they split at the bad end. For round bales exposed on the ground for 12 to 18 months, Mississippi State says 20 to 35 percent or more and Oklahoma State says 15 to 50. SDSU’s compiled range for uncovered on the ground is 5 to 61 percent, Iowa State says 30 or 40 after only six months, Maryland 5 to 40 in six. One practice, five published ranges.

They agree at the good end, which is the part worth acting on. Under an open roof, 2 to 5 percent up to nine months and 3 to 10 percent at 12 to 18 months. Enclosed barn, under 2 percent. Minnesota adds service life to that: a shed and a tarp on a pallet both lose 4 to 7 percent, but the shed lasts 20 years and the tarp 5.

The mechanism is wicking, and Oklahoma State quantifies it. Ground contact can cost up to 12 inches off the bottom of a bale. Geometry decides how much that hurts: Ohio State puts 41 percent of a 4-foot bale’s dry matter in the outer 6 inches against 31 percent for a 6-footer, so small bales lose proportionally more. Sarah Bauder at SDSU went after the same question with a moisture meter instead of a scale. In an open shed, about 98 percent of samples read 20 percent moisture or less. Outside in tightly packed rows, more than 66 percent exceeded 22 percent.

Where Kansas State disagrees with Kansas State

Nearly everybody recommends running bale rows north to south so both sides get equal sun. Oklahoma State, SDSU, Maryland, Illinois and K-State’s own text say it. Then K-State’s Table 1 reports what its trial measured: east-west rows lost 9.8 percent in alfalfa and 11.0 in brome, while north-south rows lost 10.1 and 14.1. North-south lost more in both forages, and stacked bales lost least of the three arrangements. The recommendation and the data sit in one publication pointing opposite ways.

Spacing within a row is openly unsettled, and SDSU says so out loud: “there is no research consensus on the ideal distance between bales.” Oklahoma State and Illinois want flat ends butted firmly together, SDSU wants 12 to 18 inches between faces so a wet face can dry, K-State at least 18 inches. Maryland’s measurement favors the gap, with spaced isolated bales holding only about 15 percent of bale volume above 22 percent moisture against 66 percent for end-to-end. Between rows, everybody lands on 3 feet.

The fire window

Baling moisture is where a stack fire starts, and that threshold is not settled either. For small squares, Minnesota says 17 percent, NDSU and Penn State and Ohio State 20, Missouri 22, Kentucky 25. For large bales, Minnesota says 15 and Missouri and NDSU 18. Penn State’s action scale is the one to tape inside the barn door: no action at 125°F, twice-daily checks and stacked bales pulled apart at 150°F, checks every couple of hours at 160°F, the fire service called and all air movement stopped at 175°F, and a fire expected above 200°F. Ohio State calls 110°F in the first five days the normal post-baling sweat.

The ignition figure is where the sources stop measuring the same thing. SDSU says spontaneous combustion can occur at an interior temperature of 170°F, while NDSU says 130°F is high enough for flammable gas to ignite. Missouri gives the ignition point as 448 to 527°F and treats 175°F as where microbes die and chemical heating takes over. Four quantities, published as though they answered one question. Measure instead of guessing. Penn State’s probe is a 10-foot length of 3/4-inch iron pipe, drilled near one end and that end hammered to an edge, with a thermometer lowered inside on a wire and left 10 to 15 minutes. Nobody counts the fires either: seven extension publications discuss them at length and not one gives an annual figure.

Worth putting the two loss figures side by side. The worst outdoor storage practice in the literature costs between 20 and 61 percent of a bale, depending on which extension service you read. Feeding that same bale on bare ground cost 57 percent in the Minnesota trial, and that one is a measured number rather than a range.

Sources

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