I’ve had some good questions in my comment section lately, so I thought I’d take the time to answer them.
Joan: Your prose is beautiful. You could write a book about your cattle adventures! You’ve probably covered this before, but the partner cows belong to neighbors that share the pasture?
Thanks so much! I might be able to write in short spurts, but I’m not sure I could continue enough for a book! What we call “The Partnership” is leased by us and yes, another rancher runs his cattle in there as well.
Ellen: Hi Carol! I’m stumped. You wrote, “ Our horse hay supply is small bales. You can see the difference on the trailer.” I don’t get it. What difference can you see on the trailer? What is different? Not a big deal, of course, just something I couldn’t make sense of.
Ellen, sorry for the muddy description… maybe I won’t make a writer after all! 😉 Our horse hay is in small bales because we put it in the top of our barn for storage. There is no way to put our big bales in the barn, and keeping your hay nice and dry and not moldy is important in horse hay. We also use small bales in our calving shed, again because of storage space, plus they’re easy to drag out and feed just a flake or two. If you look at the photo of the trailer…
There is a layer of big bales on the bottom. Three fit along the edge lengthwise. The small bales are on top… obviously much smaller in size. I’ve roughly drawn on the picture to show you.
The difference is simply preference. Small bales are easy to handle. Big bales are easy for us with our tractors and feeders and hay stacks. We also think there is less waste with big bales. Some people prefer round bales as well, but we like our set-up.
Joan: So you do the horse hay in small bales because there aren’t as many horses?? The big bales (big round ones?) are for the cows because there’s lots more of them?
Joan, I hope this helped your questions as well. In winter, we feed the horses from the same big square bales as the cows, simply because that’s what we have. The little bales are just when we are riding and keeping the horses in the corral and their access to fresh feed is a just a small lot. Bigger bales make for less work in winter… feeding a bunch six large bales instead of many little ones is just simpler.
Remember, the guys have designed two feeders to help with that job. Bale Feeder Video. Bale Feeder Version 2.
Thanks for the questions!
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Thanks for the answers.
You’ll still make writer!! I also didn’t notice the difference in bales on the trailer. I just didn’t realize what I was looking at (and didn’t look at all closely) since it was just all hay to this city girl.