Hay is an expensive resource, but when you don’t have as much grass as you need or your horses can’t have grass, it’s a necessary one.
Ask five different people for their advice on what and how to feed, and you’ll probably get ten different answers. I don’t pretend to have all the answers but over the years, we’ve found some things that have worked for us and with the help of my clever husband, we’ve come up with a range of tools to make things work even more efficiently.
My top tips for minimising hay wastage:
Have the right tools and equipment
Investing in a sufficient number of decent quality haynets is money well spent. Haynets slow horses down, make feeding easier and more convenient and make portion control possible in the long run. I buy them in small batches every now and again and now have a decent stock of them. I’ve got https://www.greedysteed.com.au/ nets that I’ve had since my son was a baby and he’s nearly 20 now – now that’s my kind of investment!
Having somewhere, even a sea container, to buy and store hay in bulk will pay for itself in the long term. If that place can also accommodate separating round bales of hay into hay nets, the cost per kilo of hay in that format is far lower than the cost of hay in square bales.
Where possible, feed hay by body weight
If it was a case of ‘more is always better’ that would be fine, but for many horses, more is not just ‘not better’, it’s a lot worse.
Excess bodyweight is bad for any horse, so if you’re spending money on more hay than a horse needs, and it’s making them unwell, then you’re paying more money to get them well again, you kind of have to question the logic. And I say this with the humility of someone who has done that exact thing in the past, so there’s no judgement here.
When you’re feeding just enough, horses will eat to satisfy their hunger, not as a way to pass the time. Calculating the amount of hay required for a group of horses is obviously not as easy as for one or two, but here are some thoughts on the maths of unlimited hay – https://hometrackhorses.com.au/the-maths-of-unlimited-hay/
Where possible, have food in more than one place
When horses have something better to do than eat, even if it’s just walking from one lot of food to another, they eat less. Is it more work for you? Yes it is, but you’re going to paying in resources of one kind or another if horses are eating more than they need.
You are either going to spend more time than you currently are, by making up hay bags and spreading them out, or by breaking up a big round bale into smaller parts. Or you’re going to spend more money on hay that the horses don’t need or vets bills to mitigate the effects of that extra hay.
The usual process is to hang hay nets from structures like shelters or fences. But if you haven’t got those, it’s not difficult to improvise. We created these feeding poles with stuff we already had lying around plus some concrete. For instructions on how to make them, I did a Facebook post with step by step images. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1aR4Wcot3V/
Where possible, keep hay dry
I hear that there are horses who will eat hay after it’s been rained on day in day out, but I have personally never owned or cared for a horse like that, so we’ve come up with two tools to keep hay as dry as possible in the two types of circumstances that we have.
A blue barrel attached to a tree for a single hay net and a stand-alone covered wooden box big enough to take two full square bales in their own nets, side by side.
Single Hay Net Barrel (The Hay Baby)
We have three of these around our day track and I only use them when it’s wet.
On days when rain is forecast, the three small bags of low sugar hay that I put out for them each morning go in there to keep them dry. They also get two small bags of higher sugar hay during the day which don’t go into the blue boxes because they will eat those, even if the hay bags were floating down a river of rainwater.
Getting the height right for horses of varying sizes can be tricky, but as mentioned, these are used very occassionally.
Big Covered Hay Box
We have one of these that I use when it’s pouring with rain or if the horses need to be confined to a smaller area for a day or night in bad weather. It was designed to fit two full bales side by side, but I seldom feed that much in one go now. I fill up one of those same bags with loose hay and clip it into the box.
There is almost zero wastage but the horses definitely eat more than they need. Based on the location of their manure, even when they can move away from the food, like if all the gates to the track are open, they barely move more than 5 metres away from the hay box until the hay runs out.
Where possible, clean as you go
No matter how fantastic your setup is, hay will fall on the ground. When that hay accumulates, I find that the chances of my horses eating any of it, decreases dramatically, particularly if there is rain involved. When I pick spilled hay up each day, I find that we waste less hay than if I don’t.
What are your tips?
If you’ve got clever ideas to reduce hay wasteage I’m always interested to hear them. Head over to the Facebook page and share your thoughts on the post for this article.