Hey Hay!

Invariably, hay trucks are always late, so it is best to plan ahead and not run out. It’s one of those essential things that you can’t do without; like toilet paper. Our pastures here is Dried Salmon County grow some good grass, but lack the nutrients in comparison to hay that is grown in eastern Oregon.

You can tell a lot about anyone with livestock, be it cows, horses, sheep, llamas, or goats, by the type of hay they keep in their hay barns. There are some who feed their animals the local stuff, and with the money they save on the hay they have to spend on nutritional supplements. There are also those who go for the good stuff right off. The local hay sells for $2 a bale and the good stuff goes for $14.50 per bale. I am not a big time operator, and I don’t have a lot of room to store hay, so I never get more than a ton at a time.

Fortunately, sometimes there is a good way to get hay for less money, and that is when someone in the community gets a bunch of people together and we buy and split an entire truck load. That was the scene last night. The truck was supposed to arrive at Noon, so I carried a phone with me all day waiting for the call, which came at 5pm. No one in our little group has the room to accommodate a tractor trailer, so we met over by the sorting yard on Ft. Clatsop Road. All having received the call at just about the same time that the truck was in Seaside, we got in our trucks and headed there. By the time I got there I was at the end of the line of eight trucks following a Hyster fork lift down the road. When we got to the sorting yard several trucks with flat bed trailers were already there and waiting.

The hay truck arrived, and the hay was beautiful. It was a green as green can be. It was dry. It was also a pleasure to see farm kids tossing bales of hay onto trucks from the Hyster without concerns that we older folks have about throwing our backs out.

All said and done the savings was $5 per pale over what we would have paid at Brims or Papa Jacks. My animals can now rest assured that they will have the good stuff for yet another month.