Feed storage

[Marsha Cassada]

I thought this was interesting.

http://www.thehorse.com/articles/29426/horse-feed-storage-and-preservation?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=nutrition&utm_campaign=09-05-2016

 

[LuvMyBabies]

Interesting article. We use the galvanized cans for feed storage. Seems to work well. We also don't buy too far ahead. I'm always afraid something may get into a bag that is not used right away. Our feed store is nearby and we just buy weekly so it's always fresh as possible. Hay we try to keep 100 bales at a time and plan for more when down to 25. I shake out each flake when fed and pick out any stemmy stuff I find. If I get any that doesn't look, feel or smell right I get rid of it. We got really lucky and found a really good hay guy. He guarantees the hay he sells us. He said if we find any that is not good he will replace it. So far we have never had any outside of an occasional stem which is no big deal, it's been really good hay we get from him. We went through alot of good and bad until we found him.

 

[Miniv]

Basic common sense in the article....

We also buy grain a week at a time and rubbermaid tubs are our best friends. What ever doesn't fit in the tubs, stays in the car until needed.

Our hay guy lives a few miles away and he stores it in a big covered open aired pole barn on pallets. We pick up a ton at a time and go through it

about every two weeks......Once winter hits, we'll be going through a ton a week because everyone on pasture will be getting hay too, plus we feed

extra to everybody! We put the ton on pallets and cover it with tie-down tarps.

Hint: If you find a grower who grows great hay and handles/stores it correctly, make friends with him! (Sort of like your vet....do the same! I also have

developed a friendly relationship with our local feed store manager.)

 

[Cayuse]

Miniv, I have one of those friendly feedstore arrangements, I have been using them for about thirty years and they let me pick through their loads of hay for what I know my guys will eat. They've been known to put what I like aside if a particularly tasty looking load comes in. They are the best!

I just wish I had more storage room. I only can keep about 120 bales, a little less than half what I use in a year.

The vet, the farrier and the feed store are the bills that get paid first! Then WE eat, lol.

 

[Debby - LB]

Very good information. I always cringe when people talk about storing hay in their barns so I'm glad they address that. Also the condensation on galvanized containers is a good heads up, I used to use those when I kept all mine outside. I've used Rubbermaid now for years. Something I always do is inspect the bags at the store when buying, most especially in the summer. Not only check the expiration but look at all the sealed edges and sometimes you'll notice dust or weevil tracks. One thing I would suggest is Not to empty your bags into the containers, I sit mine in containers then open them as needed. I've done this for years so the bag with all the tags is still there if there is any problem.

 

[Jean_B]

If you are lucky enough to find an old freezer, they also make excellent grain storage containers. Because I'm old and arthritic, chest freezers are too deep, but I have an old upright freezer. Just lay it on its back and it is easy to put sacks inside and get grain out. No moisture, no rodents.

 

[AngC]

... I always cringe when people talk about storing hay in their barns ...

I am cringe-worthy.

We have a ton or so out there in our barn. I never realized this was a potential issue; I'm aware/have read about silos self-combusting but never realized this was a concern with hay storage? (... it makes sense to me that grain storage in an enclosed silo with dust, etc., ...but hay in a barn?)

My husband left for a job in MT today, leaving me the opportunity to poke into some bales with a temperature probe. (He would absolutely freak if I announced we had to change hay storage; I already have our garage filled with so much crap there's no room to park our trucks.) I wasn't able to get a temperature that was more than a few degrees above ambient. The hay is on a concrete floor, set on pallets. There's no space between bales. Smells good; no mold. hmmmm....

I don't know if I'm going to lose sleep over this one. I would prefer that our barn doesn't burst into flames, but I'm dubious. And if it does, at least the barn's well away from the house and garage, and our goobers all have 24/7 free egress from their stalls/barn.

 

[Minimor]

Yes hay is a leading cause of barn fires. Hay doesn't have to be all that "wet" to heat to an extremely hot temperature and if it gets hot enough it will ignite. As long as the hay is absolutely dry it's not a problem having it in the barn--but...

 

[chandab]

Well, I'm cringe worthy too, AngC... I store my small squares in the barn too. I don't have any other covered storage. All the big rounds are stored well away from all buildings, so they aren't an issue.

 

[Jean_B]

I store my hay in one section of our barn. First, I make sure the hay is absolutely dry (open one or two bales to check). I put plastic over the concrete, then pallets on top of that. They are stacked sort-of loosely. And then I leave doors open on each end of the barn for at least 3 days so that the barn can "breathe". The absolutely worst experience I ever had was years ago when I had no indoor storage, so I put it on pallets and then put a tarp over it. I had to throw away all of the top bales because they were full of mold, despite the fact that they were dry when put up. No holes in the tarps, but that plastic does not breathe.

 

[paintponylvr]

And then there is NC and two weeks ago...

My rubbermaid and steel trashcans sweated - both the ones with Alfalfa Pellets and the ones with Nutrena Safe Choice Original (pellets, too). I've thrown out more feed in the last month than in the last 4 years (the good news is our sand is a little better amended now,

- have to look on the brite side somewhere). Our feed is stored in 3 separate "buildings" and the one that did the best was the one that had open pallet walls AND was the most shaded by the surrounding trees (Mare Paddock feed room). Then the Boy's feed room (also an open pallet wall set up), and last the completely enclosed feed room with wood walls (all I have to do is open the door, and the clothes I'm wearing are instantly soaked & there is actually a nice amount of air movement w/o fans). However, the feed that had the most loss was the Boy's area - where we feed the least feed, but I'd just completely filled the two trash barrels (300 lbs of feed)... Trust me, it was not happy days.

The ambient temps thru July and August ranged from low 90's to low 100's and 2 weeks ago - we had 2 days in a row when we were over 102*F (according to our weather station meter) and 125* with the humidity and then a day later that index went up to 127* (& think 2 days after that we bottomed out at 56* at night - right before we got 10.5" of rain in one night)!! That was the open, ambient air in the country NOT the feed rooms or a vehicle or around lots of pavement.

I did enjoy the article and some things were a bit new. The hay portion was good. And now I have severely bruised ribs and hurt all over again (just getting over a cold/flu bug w/ loads of coughing). I laughed until I cried! .... stack hay bales only 4-5 high...

REALLY?? I can stack hay 5 bales high in my STOCK TRAILER (lower roof than a "normal" horse trailer) and I know of NO hay producer dealing in large amounts of hay that stacks hay only 5 bales high. I'm pretty sure that we stacked hay about 12-15 bales high in Colorado in our hay barn (I could be wrong??). Maybe it was only 10-12. Here, in a much smaller, shorter area - I KNOW that I've stacked 8-10 bales high (and somewhere I have a picture or two...). That said - there are A LOT of hay storage facilities that go up in flames - literally - here. Did you know that the galvanized tin AND steel will melt in a hay barn fire (U kno - the tin/steel sheets used on the sides of a lot of barns and on the roofs,too, here)? The larger the hay barn, the larger the amount of stored hay - the bigger & hotter the fire.

You can't get insurance on a horse barn in NC if you store hay in it. Hay has to have a separate, dedicated building. At least that is the way the commercial barns (boarding, training, showing, vet) that I have been involved with since 2000 have been in our area of NC (Raleigh, Fayetteville, Lumberton, Greenville - not sure about Southern Pines/Aberdeen/Pinehurst or the western side of NC)... I have still seen horse barns with lofts above them with hay and I always wonder if that barn/home is actually insured.

ON another note -

We are now preparing for Hurricane Mathew and possibly Nicole. Last Wednesday night and Thursday early AM (9/28 - 29), a weather system dumped 9 - 11" of rain in just a couple of hours on the 3 counties I'm most tied to (we got approx 6" measured here). The damage caused by sudden flooding is still affecting individual people (LOTS of roads still closed - complete collapses in several areas), business's, schools and commerce/life as a whole. I'm not looking forward to the latter part of this week or this weekend at all. We had our own "private" dirt road (7/10 of a mile long from paved road to our home - maybe another 2/10 of a mile to the last home on the road?) wash out in several spots (the pond went over the road, but did not do any damage to that section that I've been able to tell) - and had major repairs to it to get in/out. Thankfully, all 11 households on our road pitched in for payment - but the road is not completely repaired nor is it stable and more rain (especially a deluge all at once) may cause damage the likes of which have never been seen (EVER) in this area. Some of our neighbors have been on our dirt road for more than 30 years - and it's never done this in that time frame according to them...

 

[MajorClementine]

Around here everyone stores hay in their barns. You hear about a hay barn burning down every now and again. We've stored 13 ton of hay in the loft of our barn for the last 25 years. Never had a problem. We also stack them as tight as possible. You can tell real easy when you've got a wet bale because it weighs soooo much more than all the other bales. We throw those ones down to be put in the breezeway of the barn. We get maybe 2-4 wet bales in 13 ton of hay. BUT we handle all of our hay bales 3 times. We load them one at a time out of the field onto a trailer, then we unload them one at a time onto the hay elevator and then someone at the other end stacks them one at a time.

We did get some alfalfa late this year that was an odd crop. Young replant, mostly tender leaf, dried 8 days but then seemed heavy and a little wet when baled. We've had it in the barn 3 weeks now but every day up until yesterday we pulled bales to check for heat and mold as a precaution.

If we stored hay out around here we'd lose a lot of hay to weather and deer/elk.

 

[AngC]

What surprised me about this article was the "moisture" factor. I always thought of fire risk as based on the "fire triangle" ...i.e. fuel, heat, oxygen. I didn't know about those nasty microbes. I read a little more and was unable to find a massive number of barn fires from self-combustion of hay. I did like this article: http://ext.wsu.edu/hay-combustion.html because it broke down the temperature ranges. In some other articles I read that the critical time is 6 weeks (or so) after baling.

After contemplating this topic more; my husband lucked out; I don't think I'm going to change our hay storage method. Our stalls are open 24/7. If we had a big huge flame-out, the closest restricting factor is a few electric wires on the girls' dry-lot. If they were panicked, I bet they'd bust right through that wire (and then still be contained within the exterior wood fencing.) We don't have any fire risks like heaters, fans, or any sort of electrical in the barn (except the lights, which are only turned on when I'm out there.) There's way more fire danger in our garage, what with all the fuel cans, stove pellets, etc. that we store there. And the contents of our garage are massively under-insured compared to our barn.

Our insurance company didn't ask about hay storage in the barn. We did switch insurance companies, because the one we had wouldn't insure my new (at the time) horse trailer.

 

[Cayuse]

I store my hay in the barn but we do not get it directly from the field, it's been around awhile by the time it gets to me. For the first time ever we are renting a tractor trailer box (container?) with our neighbors and getting it filled with hay. I am afraid we will be short this year because of the drought. The neighbors feed their goats the same hay (same supplier, second cut) as we do and they are worried too, so we are going to stash some away.

We figured we can get 240 bales stored. I hope we're right.

Has anyone store hay like this? My feed store does but they move there supply pretty quickly so it's never around long. I am thinking that it should be up on pallets or 2x4s for circuation?

 

[Ryan Johnson]

Ive also just purchased extra storage (a shipping container) so I can stock up for next winter. We have had a drought over the last two years which have seen hay prices skyrocket to $17 for a single bale of grass hay. I can get good quality northern hay but will have to wait until early next year. We have had so much rain this year , Im praying that our farmers will get a 2nd and 3rd cut and in turn , my wallet will get some relief too.

Im going to store them on pallets too

 

[BSharpRanch]

We have a few hay fires at the local dairies every summer. Spontaneous combustion of moist hay packed into the open air pole barns, combined with the summer heat. The fire department usually just monitors the fires because once they start, there is no putting them out. They have to burn themselves out. Of course we are talking thousands of tons of hay. We haven't had any combust, but we have had moisture get into a stack once up north. I came out to feed one morning and the hay was fogging the cold air! I kicked the stack apart and opened all the moist bales to cool then restacked the good ones. I used the bad hay for my garden. I grew a lot of potatoes in that hay!

 

[amysue]

Around here, lots of people make wet hay. The dairy farmers round bale theirs so, a little damp is okay, especially if wrapping them to make baleage. The guys who square bale hay for sale, usually make a lot of hay not suitable for horses as it was baled too wet. We have a bale probe and we handle every square bale when unloading wagons and stacking in the barn. I do not care to store squares outside under tarps, as no matter how new the tarp is, it always seems to get wet. When overloaded with straw, I do not mind stacking it outside, but tarps still are a pain. We fill the old dry cow barn with squares, we can get about 2200 bales on each alley and there are 5 alleys. We stack it right in the free stalls (dont want to take them out in case we want to board heifers again). We put pallets on the concrete floor. I put the second cut squares in the lofts over the horses and calves. We throw moist heavy ones to the side and feed them out to the cows right away. I have never had hay get hot in the barn, but once while pulling 2 wagons home my father in law caught a wagon on fire when the exhaust on the tractor sparked. My husband has the pump turned up on the 666, and while chugging up a long, steep hill, it sparked (my fil tends to travel at half the speed of smell) needless to say he arrived at home with a ball of flames on wheels, couldn't even see the wagon it was so engulfed. Fire dept had to stop and put all the brush fires out along the road before coming to the barn. The wagon bowed out from the heat, they had to pull the flaming hay out with a back hoe and foam it while extracting it from the wagon and it smoldered for days. My fil just put a fresh coat of paint on the wagon and we still use it. It holds a few more bales because it's wider lol. I put a sign in our barnyard that red "Barbecue Hay for sale" and but didnt think it was funny. We asked him why he did not stop on the way home and use the fire extinguisher. ..he said "everyone was waving at me, but I just thought they were being friendly".

 

[Cayuse]

I can jut picture your fil chugging along towing his flaming haywagon. I bet he will never live it down with the Fire Dept. if they are anything like our local FD (who hubby is a member of). They like to file those things away for future giggles.

 

[Miniv]

"everyone was waving at me, but I just thought they were being friendly".

Oh my...now that is definitely funny.... Sorry for the loss of the equipment and hay, though.

 

[Miniv]

This all sparked a memory (sorry for the pun) about when we used to have our "big pasture" cut and baled. We hired a guy in the neighborhood who owned the equipment. He would have it stacked really high and bring it down......push it onto the pallets we had set out.

Since there was so much hay, we'd have a layer of straw bales on the bottom and then a layer of straw on top to help wick the moisture. Larry would also sprinkle rock salt on top of the straw bales.....

I am SO glad we don't have to do that anymore!