Machinery Chatter

Cut Hay Waste With Bale Feeders

Russ Quinn
By  Russ Quinn , DTN Staff Reporter
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Giving cattle free access to hay bales wastes hay and money. Bale feeders can pay for themselves many times over with the amount of hay they save. (DTN/The Progressive Farmer photo by Joe Link)

Those farmers who work with hay know all about the time and effort needed to put up quality hay. Whether you feed it to your livestock or sell it, it does take some work and dedication to get the hay put up just right.

If you do feed hay to cattle, the last thing you want to do is waste the hay during the winter feeding season. I know this is true on my family's farm. I kind of wish our beef cows would eat every bit of hay given to them like I had to with all the vegetables on my plate when I was a kid.

While this is probably not a reality, what is possible is to limit hay waste with the different type of feeders. There are many hay feeder designs; if you have ever attended a farm show, you will see many of them on display.

I have often wondered which design, if any, actually saves more hay than others. I spent all summer in the hot sun helping my dad put this hay up (which is especially tough for us red-haired/fair-skinned folks); I don't want the cows to waste it while they eat it.

For some people, just having a feeder is a step toward conserving hay, according to an article published by the University of Missouri (UM) Extension titled "Preparing for Hay Feeding Season." Research shows allowing cattle unrestricted access to hay bales results in about 20% hay waste compared to using some sort of feeder, wrote Justin Sexten, UM state Extension specialist for beef nutrition.

I can't think of too many cattlemen who would feed a round bale of hay without some sort of hay feeder. There are a couple acreages that I drive by periodically with horses and they just put a bale in the pen and let the horses eat off it.

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It takes all my willpower to not stop and tell them they are wasting a lot of hay without a feeder.

The other option that doesn't involve feeders is to unroll hay so livestock can eat it this way. Hay waste is minimized by unrolling what cattle will consume in one day. However, Sexten wrote that hay unrolling still resulted in 10% to 15% greater waste compared to using ring feeders.

"Offering two days of hay without using feeders will increase waste while reducing labor and equipment expenses," Sexten wrote.

Another article detailing hay waste is "Hay Feeder Design Can Reduce Hay Waste and Cost" and was written by Robert Wells of The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in Oklahoma. Wells wrote that researchers at Oklahoma State University (OSU) studied four common hay feeder designs: modified cone, open-bottom steel ring, polyethylene pipe and sheeted-bottom steel ring.

What did the OSU researchers find?

"Hay waste was the lowest for the cone feeder, while the poly feeder and ring had the highest percentage of waste (5.3% versus 21% and 20.5%, respectively," Wells wrote. "The sheet ring feeder had intermediate wastage at 13%."

Wells also figured how much waste this would be in terms of actual dollars lost. Using some assumptions a producer with 30 cows will feed 180 bales of hay that weigh 1,200 pounds each during a six-month period. With hay valued at $70 per bale, the modified cone ring feeder will waste $667.80 worth of hay while the sheet, ring and poly feeder will waste $1,638; $2,583 and $2,646 worth of hay annually.

"In this example, the decrease in wasted hay will more than pay for the cost of the hay feeders," Wells wrote.

The Noble Foundation has an online calculator to help producers estimate the value of the wasted hay in their particular operation. This tool is available at www.noble.org/tools/hay-ring.

We feed bales to our cows using the open-bottom steel ring as well as the sheeted-bottom steel ring. We also grind hay and feed out of portable hay feeders, which we have altered over the years to waste less hay.

We never owned a modified cone ring feeder because it was considerably more expensive then the open-bottom and sheeted-bottom bale rings. After reading this research, maybe I would be more willing to spend the extra money for a cone feeder since it seems to reduce hay waste.

The University of Missouri article can be found at http://agebb.missouri.edu/…. The Noble Foundation article can be found at http://www.noble.org/….

(CZ)

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Russ Quinn