Cow or horse hay quality? Just curious what it’s selling for in your area. Three years ago I was buying cow hay for steers for about $165/ton. I’m going to get more steers later this spring so I will buy hay again.
Think it really depends on a couple of things. First, is the hay only for short winters (depend on location) and do you/they have ample pasture for the rest of the year. Second, are the stockers for barn sales, personal use or outside sales. During Covid, I saw some really, really crappy cows being sold for up to $3-4/lb on the hoof - love them big city folk! Myself, I wouldn't have turned most of those crappy cows into grinders, let alone other cuts.
Always interesting to see the difference in prices, around here we get $3.50 a pound hanging weight, plus the butcher fees which work out to about $1 per pound between the kill fee and their per pound charge.
That's about what we pay our friends that raise a couple every year. We used to split a side with my in-laws. Now we split a quarter. But not because of price. We just enjoy a lot of chicken and pork as well as beef.
I don’t do it for income. I get a few steer calves every couple of years and feed them out with hay, then grain them for the last three months before going to the packers. We keep one for our freezer and have friends and neighbors wanting to buy the others. We sell them for enough that we recoup the feed bill for the steers, so our beef costs amount to the purchase of our calf plus the packer’s costs. And our beef tastes better than anything we can buy at the grocery store.
Around here, everyone plans to grow horse quality hay, and if it gets rained on, it becomes cow hay. The exception being hay grown for dairy: they want quality alfalfa.
