How Things Change

It is hard to believe that ten days ago we were waiting for the snow to melt from our third snow/ice event in a two week period. We went from not really having winter, to three weeks of winter, to spring. 

Last week it rained every. single. day. for I think seven days in a row.  Sometimes it rained most of the day, some days we only had a couple of random showers, but it rained Every Day. However it was warm and the grass, trees and flowers responded to the warm rain with a smile. It finally stopped raining early Saturday morning and it has been sunny and warm every day since. Yesterday and today we made it to 79F/27C. I wore a sleeveless shirt with my jeans. No more Michelin Man look. Jason wore shorts, a t-shirt and a sun hat. It has been glorious.

Jason spent the last couple of days on the tractor re-seeding various areas in the pastures. He also got the lawn mower ready for use as the grass in the lawn areas will need to be cut in another couple of days. That makes it harder to believe that ten days ago we were waiting for round three of snow and ice to melt.  I've been putting callouses on my hands with the shedding blade, tidying up manes and tails, and thoroughly enjoying grooming horses in the sunshine.

Happy Spring!

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Johnny and Africa

Lighty and Mick

pretty sunrise with the moon still in the sky

Rocky and River being playful

Clayton and Rubrico having fun

I love this shot where they both going for the other one's leg

Walon and Oskar

Sam and Nemo

Sunday Stills

pretty sunrise

Timbit is at it again, letting himself into the pasture with the new horse. Timbit, Nemo (new resident) and Sebastian all following Timbit's lead and running around the paddock. Of course Timbit left after he had Nemo and Sebastian all worked up.

Lighty pulling on Africa's tail and saying "play with me!"

Merlin

Bruno

Trigger, Baby and Ritchie

the pet cows; Apple in the front

A better view of Apple's face; she has the perfect mac symbol on her forehead and we call her our iCow.

Gibson and Gus

A group run; Romeo, Lotus, George, Cocomo, Donneur and Asterik . . . 

. . . followed by Gus and Faune

Calimba and Maisie having a wet grooming session

Cinnamon, Cuffie, Dolly and Calimba

Lotus and Lofty

Feeding Old Hay and Other Hay Questions

(post written by Jason) A couple of our blog comments on my last post asked questions about the management of feeding hay, with particular interest in feeding stockpiled hay. I will attempt to answer some of these questions in this post. 

The first question is what type of hay do you feed ?

We live at the bottom end of the transition zone....the area where northern C3 grasses give way to southern/tropical C4 grasses. Most hay in this part of the world that's cut before the end of May will feature a mixture of C4 cool season grasses. In a good year we can get two cuttings put up before the end of May and all of this that didn't get wet, or didn't get wet too often, makes excellent horse hay. As the summer progresses a lack of moisture and high soil temperatures cause the C3 grasses to go dormant and the C4 grasses take their place. The best local C4 grass hay is a combination of crabgrass, bermudagrass, dallisgrass and zoysia grass. Most of our summer and fall cut hay contains some mixture of the above grasses. This stuff tends to be a little higher in fibre and a little lower in energy and protein than earlier cut C4 grasses but it can work nicely as horse hay. 

In fact the only thing that really doesn't work for hay on this farm is the bane of the south.....Johnsongrass hay. It's extremely stemmy and almost impossible to get dry when it's cut for hay. We use some for mama cows in short hay years. While it's safe enough to feed to horses it's nutritive value is low and the quality is almost always sub par. I have never seen horses voluntarily consume any portion of hay containing Johnsongrass. 

The next question deals with feeding rounds vs squares vs big squares. 

My answer to this is that most of the horses here live on pasture so we feed, make and buy a lot of round bales. They are all stored in one of our two hay barns until we feed them. Round bales would be a very unwieldy option for horses that live in stalls. Most of these horses get fed square bales. What sort of hay one chooses to feed is mostly based on what works for the set up they have. Good hay is good hay regardless of how it's baled. Bad hay won't be made any better or any more palatable if it's baled in small square bales vs big round bales. In terms of injuries we have boarded a lot of horses for a very long time. During that time we've fed copious quantities of both round bales and square bales. Over time there we've seen no difference in the number of injuries....eye or otherwise.....that could be attributed to round vs square bales of hay, or indeed that we could say with certainty were caused by hay at all. In particular we seem to go years without seeing any eye injuries and then for whatever reason we may see several in the course of a few months, regardless of whether we're feeding hay or not during those months. 

My last question deals with feeding stockpiled hay. 

The reason people stockpile hay is to mitigate drought, late springs, early falls, or long, severe winters. The general guideline in this part of the world is that you want to end the winter season with enough hay in the barn to see you half way through the next winter. 

It goes without saying that the quality of stored hay isn't going to improve over time. If it went in under sub-optimal conditions it will deteriorate, often quite quickly.  Perhaps the question of the day is how long one can feed reasonably feed hay that was put up correctly, and what should be done to mitigate quality issues in stockpiled hay that's intended to be fed more than a year after it's made?

When I was a boy one of our beef barns had a mow of loose cut red clover hay that my grandfather put up forty years beforehand. It was heavily compressed by the bales we'd stored on it every year since it was put up. One year we finally decided to clean it out. After we dug down into it we were very surprised at how good the hay smelled. The idea was that we were going to spread it on the fields with one of our manure spreaders but (of course) the manure spreader broke one load into moving the hay pile. So we piled it in a gigantic heap in one corner of the cow yard and figured we'd get back to spreading it when we got the manure spreader fixed. We were extremely surprised to come back the next morning to find grandpa's cows had left their fresh green pasture and had eaten every single leaf and stem of the old red clover hay!

As my story suggests, the biggest quality issue in stockpiled hay is palatability and the biggest factor affecting palatability is hay that has a musty odour and taste. Stockpiled hay MUST be baled dry! Hay is often baled at 15% moisture or more. This is great in terms of saving leaves (the most nutritious part of the plant) and it works well for hay that's going to be fed up within a few months of being made. It doesn't work at all well when hay is intended to be stockpiled. In order to reduce the likelihood of the hay turning musty we bale any hay we intend to stockpile at 10% moisture or less. 

Protein levels, energy level and mineral levels decline very slowly in stockpiled hay. Vitamin levels decline more quickly. It's always a good idea to up the level of mineral and vitamin supplementation when feeding stockpiled hay. In spite of my story it's also a good idea to feed up any hay that's more than a year old at the beginning of it's second year (ie. 12-14 months after it was baled) and definitely to try not to keep hay past the end of it's 24th month in storage. 

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Goerge and Romeo both finishing up a good roll with Lofty watching (Gus in the background)

Timbit and Griselle

Rip and Grand

Levendi and Thomas

Cocomo and Lofty

Lotus and Asterik

Lighty, Africa and Taco on the run and having fun

Africa and Lighty

Gibson and Silver

Murphy and Dutch (Africa in the background)

Hay Planning

(post written by Jason) This is the time of year when farmers really start to look closely at their hay supply relative to when they think that livestock....horses or cows.....will get most of their forage consumption from pasture. The older generation did this by eyeballing the situation; my grandad was genuinely good at guessing a couple months ahead of time when he could stop feeding hay and let the pastures take over. I still eyeball the situation too, particularly in terms of how much green grass is available relative to how much hay I have left in the barn. But while most farmers of my generation still eyeball things in truth most of us are more inclined to test our theories with hard numbers. The first thing to gauge is how much forage a horse is going to consume. 

We measure forage consumption in terms of how many pounds of 100% dry matter (0% moisture) forage a horse will consume. No forage in the world is actually 100% dry matter, so this is a theoretical number but also one with very practical applications. 

The rule of thumb is that horses eat roughly 2% of their body weight in forage dry matter each day. Of course this number is an average, some will eat more and some less than average. Thus every 1200 lb horse on one's farm will eat roughly 25 lbs of forage dry matter per day. Most hay tests roughly 85% dry matter, so every 1200 lb horse will consume 25/.85 = 30 lbs of hay per day, plus a little more that will get wasted. If a large bale weighs on average 700 lbs, each bale will provide roughly 20 horse days worth of forage (ie will feed one horse for 20 days or 20 horses for one day or some combination thereof). Thus this time of year if one has 100 large bales of hay in the barn one has roughly 2000 horse days worth of forage on hand. This is enough to feed 20 horses for a hundred days or 50 horses for 40 days, etc. 

Extrapolating these numbers out a little farther yields some interesting results. On this farm we use the numbers to gauge the productivity of our pastures AND to size our hay needs and hay storage facilities for the coming year. You can do the same if you follow the calculations below. 

Over the course of a year a 1200 lb horse will eat 365 x 25 = 9125 lbs forage dry matter. If the horse is stalled with no access to pasture he'll go through roughly 11,000 lbs hay. This equals 16 seven hundred pound large bales or 275 small square bales. 

The rule of thumb is that to avoid a crisis you should end the hay feeding season with a half season of extra hay left in the barns. We should be in good shape here at Paradigm Farms thanks to a lot of years when we were able to do this. Last year was not one of those years and this one isn't going to be either. Thanks to a very late spring and a very dry early summer period last year we fed a lot more hay for a lot longer than we normally would. Hay supplies were also tight so we used used up much of our hay stockpile. This spring we will be looking to replenish our stockpile AND put enough hay away to get us through next winter. 

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Faune, Donneur and Romeo

Leo, Baby and Hemi

Slinky and Lightning

Maisie and Lily

MyLight and Silky

Oskar and Johnny

Bruno, Remmy, Walden and Hesse

Thomas and Apollo

Sunday Stills

Dolly napping; MyLight, Cuffie, Traveller, Lily and Calimba in the background

a closer look at Cuffie and Traveller

Silky and Cinnamon

Chance

Lotus and Silver

Ritchie, Homer, Trigger and Apollo

Flyer, Gibson, Faune and Asterik

Johnny, Africa, Alex and B-Rad

Walon and Rubrico