Hay or Bought Feed: Picking Your Risk on a Small Cow Herd

You can pay for winter feed with a tractor or with a checkbook. Most men running a small cow herd do some of each, and the ones who stay in business long enough to retire usually did it on purpose. Here is how to think about the choice without kidding yourself.

Start with the bet you are making

If you bale your own hay, you are betting on weather. Rain at the wrong time, no rain at the wrong time, a breakdown the week the grass is ready, any one of them can leave you short or leave you with feed that looks fine and tests thin. If you buy hay, you are betting on the market, and on whether anyone has hay to sell when your neighbors all need it too.

Neither bet is wrong. The question is which one you can afford to lose. A man with a paid-for baler, good ground and a free weekend can absorb a poor hay year better than a man who borrowed against a baler he uses twice a year. A man with cash flow and a reliable supplier can absorb a price spike better than one who has to buy at the top with an overdraft.

The shop-and-machinery math nobody likes

Here is what trips up small outfits: the machine sits there whether you cut or not. Mower, rake, baler, tractor time, twine or net wrap, fuel, repairs. Add what that gear loses in value every year and divide it by the tons you actually put up. On a small herd that is not many tons. Plenty of men do that division for the first time and quit baling the next season.

The cheaper way to run the same math is to price a custom baler on your fields. You keep control of the ground and the cutting date and skip the machinery payment. Call two or three operators and get a per-bale or per-acre figure in writing before you decide.

The same rule applies on the buying side. A cheap price per ton gets expensive fast when the truck is coming a long way. Add freight, unloading and storage, then compare. The University of Nebraska beef program at beef.unl.edu has budgeting tools that make this straightforward, and our own piece on where the money really goes per cow walks through the line items.

Price the feed by what it does, not what it weighs

A round bale is a round bale until you pull a sample. Hay cut late, rained on, or stored on bare ground can look like good feed and perform like straw. Send a core sample to a lab. The test costs little compared with a winter of feeding the wrong stuff, and it tells you how much protein and energy you are really getting.

Then match feed to the cow. A dry cow in the middle of pregnancy can get by on ordinary hay. A cow in the last trimester or nursing a calf cannot, and when she slips in condition she rebreeds late or not at all. That costs you a calf, which costs a lot more than the supplement would have. Our hay math guide shows how to work out the tonnage for the herd you actually have.

Cut the waste before you cut the price

Hay thrown on the ground is hay trampled, soiled and left. A ring feeder or feeding only what the herd cleans up in a day or two takes a real bite out of the loss. Keeping bales off the ground and under cover or tarped holds their value. Not glamorous, but it is money in the bank, and it works the same on bought hay as on your own.

Build a cushion

• Carry hay over. A good year is the time to bank extra. A stack of carryover hay is the cheapest drought insurance you will ever own.
• Know your second source. Before the dry spell, find out who has hay, what they ask and how they deliver. The phone numbers you collect in a wet spring are worth a lot in a dry fall.
• Stock to the bad year. The herd that fits a good-year pasture will be on the feed truck in a poor one. Leave room.
• Shorten the feeding season. Every day you graze instead of feed is a day you skip the cost. Cutting the pasture into paddocks and resting them stretches the season. Details in our rotational grazing guide, and farm.fm's page on understanding bulls is a good reminder that the bull battery needs feed planning too.

Watch the market, but not too closely

You will not outguess the hay market. What you can do is keep an eye on the broad picture so a spike does not catch you cold. The USDA Economic Research Service keeps cattle and feed data at ers.usda.gov. Prices vary by region and change by the month, so check what hay is bringing in your own county rather than leaning on a national figure.

Need a nearby supplier, extension office or custom operator? The listings at agriculture.directory are a decent place to start the phone list.

The straight answer

If you own the iron, have the time and the ground is good, make hay and keep a stack in reserve. If you do not have all three, hire the baling or buy the hay and put your money into cows rather than machines. If you are in between, make what you can make reliably and buy the rest from a man you have already spoken with. Test everything, count every cost, keep a cushion. That is most of the job.

Prices and conditions change, so use this as a way to figure, not a price list, and confirm current numbers with your county agent or local market report. This site is independent and not affiliated with the American Angus Association or Certified Angus Beef.