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$15.50 alfalfa 3 string 115# bales
$14.50 bermuda 3 string 115# bales. Nice hay, order over 30 bales delivered for free.
This was roughly a month ago in central AZ.

Well it won't be right away, but, the horse slaughter being reopened may help hay prices. I sure hope so! Supply and demand

Shorty wrote:Well it won't be right away, but, the horse slaughter being reopened may help hay prices. I sure hope so! Supply and demand

Reopening the slaughter market is the best thing to happen down here in a long time. As for hay, alfalfa won't grown down here and we can only get it in small 2 wire bales or as bagged bales. It runs around $20 a bale. We also don't have the huge square bales I've seen out west. We get our hay in large round bales, which are still going for $30-$45 a bale. Square bales are around $3.50 or so, depending on the farmer. I expect our hay prices will really shoot up when winter really gets here. Flat beds full of hay headed to Texas is going to deplete our stockpiles and push our own prices up. Luckily, we just had our first frost a couple of weeks ago and hay was still being cut up until then.

I can touch on this subject a little bit. This season the cost of hay has gone through the roof mostly due to the Texas wildfire season. A very large percentage of Texas grassland burned up leaving livestock no feed whatsoever. The only way they survived the tragedy was to buy up feed from many other states. This high demand for feed plus costs of transportation to Texas has driven the price through the roof. We can all just pray that Texas is blessed with good spring and summer rains and the grasslands can rejuvenate. Also in many years past we will see large fluctuations in hay price simply due to supply and demand. When alfalfa price is low farmers plant wheat and other crops paying more therefore there is a decrease in the availability of alfalfa and the price goes up. When the price goes up then again lots of farmers will plant alfalfa again and the price will go back down. These are the smaller differences we see year to year in hay prices. Usually just a few dollars a bail. Hopefully this year lots and lots of farmers plant grass and alfalfa and prices will start coming back down. Also another way hay price is affected here is the availibility of water to irrigate. Without good snow pack in the mountains the Rio Grande and Pecos will have less available water. And finally if the cost of diesel keeps going up the cost of farming will stay high and in turn the cost of harvested crops will remain high.

this is only the start of the hay crisis. with the passing of the "bio fuel law" large farms are switching hay crops to corn for all the obvious reasons. unless this is some how reversed hay futures are not looking good. all we needed was big oil having intrest in agriculture. good by to the last of the little guys

Just paid 14.00 a bail for 115lb bails of alfalfa out of Nevada from the grower and hauled it myself.

Just bought meadow grass for 17.75 a bail. Last year at this time it was 13.00. Dogs will be eating good soon!