04/27/2025
Forage and access to forage is paramount to horses’ physical & mental health.
Today's post isn't really about the nutrition side of feeding horses but more the management of a very important component of the equine diet...Hay.
We should know by now that forage is the single most important component in the equine diet and also probably the most problematic. Hay has been the steepest part of my 20 year learning curve in horse keeping.
Everything about hay is problematic. Finding it. Choosing it. Buying it. Moving it. Storing it. Feeding it. There just isn't anything easy when it comes to hay for horses.
Now that I am in the twilight of my horse keeping days since once these three have crossed the bridge there's going to be a huge auction of property, equipment, tools and my tightie whities before I pull out of the driveway with tires blazing, I believe that I have my hay mostly figured out.
When I was working with businesses to improve their management technology one of the most difficult challenges I faced was placing a value on recovering "soft costs". Soft costs are benefits that can't be directly nor easily assigned a value but they exist and must be considered in the decision making process.
Soft costs exist when keeping horses and many times these costs are overlooked by owners. Commercial operators should pay close attention here as I share the lessons that I learned about feeding full time hay.
Pictured below are my three mares with their heads buried in their very expensive hay feeder. I chose not to get the slow feed system and yes, they waste about 20% but I really don't care because this hay feeder is about my freedom!
The feeder is part of a complete overhaul I did in my hay program four years ago when I switched from small square bales to large square bales. I bought a larger tractor and converted a detached two car garage for hay storage.
Prior to my conversion a four ton delivery of hay required a minimum of four people and about 40 minutes to unload and stack the bales. Now my hay guy shows up with 12 big square bales, dumps them in front of my barn and takes off. Using the tractor I can now easily move and stack four tons of hay in 15 minutes all by myself. My hay bill has been cut by 50% because big bales are cheaper than small bales.
I am also not breaking my 67 year old back nor am I begging for help from friends and neighbors whenever a load of hay arrives. You all know the drill. You schedule they hay delivery and hope that the hay guy makes it because you managed to find three people to come around to help you unload it. With my current set up when one side of my barn is empty I text my hay guy and within a week I get a text that he just dumped a load and ran.
These are soft costs. My life is so much easier. The bonus is that my hay savings paid for the hard costs of conversion and tractor!
Now to feeding the hay. Once a week, on average, I spear a bale, drive it to the feeder, slide it off the spear, cut the strings and park the tractor. On a slow day this process is 20 minutes. Imagine that, only 20 minutes per week invested in screwing around with hay.
When I wake up to a cold, clammy March morning there's no urgent need to get out there to feed the ponies. They have hay and I have a second cup of coffee.
If I feel like meeting friends for beer and burgers there's no looking at the time because if I don't get home until 10 PM for their evening ration balancer the horses don't care.
However, feeding ad lib hay was a lesson that I learned 15 years ago when I ran a boarding facility with 12 horses.
I ran the usual "2 and 2" hay feeding program; two flakes of hay per horse twice a day. This involved loading 2 bales of hay on the wagon each morning and spreading out 15 piles of hay across three pastures for 12 horses.
At the 6 PM feed the horses had long been queueing up at the gate, pacing, rocking, biting and pushing to be the first ones into the barn for chow. Sometimes it was downright dangerous to handle them and it was never a low drama event.
About a year into the boarding barn I was offered a full time job with some serious income so I jumped at it but managing the horses was an even bigger issue because time was more limited so I went in search of a solution which I found in "Hay Huts".
Investing in three Hay Huts I would load ten small bales in each hut which lasted four horses about a week since they were turned in for half the day and had hay in their stalls.
Now I had much more time because I didn't need 40 minutes a day to spread hay. Neither did I have to drop whatever I was in the middle of to get back to the farm for evening feed.
Some other benefits from ad lib hay were that there was no panic at the gate. The horses had full bellies and often I would have to call them up from the huts at feeding time.
There was also a huge reduction in minor scrapes and injuries because nobody had to fight for hay.
My hay bill went up but my feed bill came way down because all the horses were holding weight on full time hay which meant that of the twelve horses all but two were on ration balancer only.
I realize that this set up may not work for everyone because hay cost and availability varies from place to place but I can say with confidence that if it makes sense, offer full time hay to your horses it's worth the investment.
