Because of our climate here in the Northern Rockies, we have to feed hay to our horses from November until June … and given the number of horses we have (about 30), that means we buy a lot of hay — 125 tons this year. Like everyone else with large animals, our hay costs have skyrocketed … from $95 a ton a couple of years ago to $140 a ton last year to … ouch! … $210 a ton this year. Fuel and fertilizer costs are the main culprits.
Our next-door neighbor grows the hay we buy, and bales it in small square bales weighing about 75 pounds each. Until we built our own hay barn last year, we had to store our hay purchase in our neighbor’s barn and make weekly trips to pick up hay. This meant stacking two or three tons at a time by hand on a flat-bed trailer and driving the load back over to the ranch. Then we’d unload it and stack it in the various horse barns. Needless to say, that was a very time-consuming and labor-intensive task every week, and although it made for great muscles, it was a chore we could do without.
Building the hay barn last year meant we could store the entire purchase right here at the ranch. These past two days our neighbor has been bringing over this year’s hay crop, and by this evening, all 125 tons — that’s about 3,300 bales — should be in the barn. And thank heavens, we don’t have to stack them by hand! He uses an automated hay wagon that scoops the bales right up out of the field, shuffles them onto the bed of the vehicle, and builds a 6-ton load that can be mechanically raised to a vertical position until it forms a 14′ high wall of hay bales … no human muscle applied. (Unless, of course, a wall collapses, as it did yesterday on us — and then human muscle is again pressed into service!)
I thought you might be interested to see how this works, so I shot a video of one of the wagon loads being stacked in the barn yesterday evening about 7 p.m. I edited down the video into a short clip of the highlights:
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