Horses, of course

So I have been thinking about the horse situation up here quite a lot recently. Maybe I have a heightened awareness because I am getting so many calls for hay, any hay. Maybe it's an understanding of the supply/demand situation, maybe it's just a worry about what this winter will bring-who knows. But it stays at the forefront of my mind-how bad will it get?

I don't know. I am apprehensive, that's for sure.

I am trying as hard as I can, to get prepared for whatever happens. I never know how many horses I will end up feeding over the winter anyway, boarders or rescue types. I am finding it hard to say no to people who desperately need clean dry hay, even as I am trying to build an inventory of my own. Thus, several tons that I would normally hang onto, went into pickups or on trailers to grateful folks instead. That's okay, I have more vans coming, but I worry just the same about all the horses out there whose owners can't find decent hay.

Now, having said that, there are quite a lot of round bales to be found. Some are better quality than others, but it's out there. This works great for those that are set up to feed them-but I am not. In hindsight I sure wish I had given some more thought to feeding rounds, but if I had to I could manage.

No snow on the ground, and none expected for a couple more weeks, and already I have turned down three horses for free. Vets and farriers have lists of people willing to give away, or sell for next to nothing, a wide variety of horses. There are some on CL looking for companion homes, a bunch for lease, and a lot on the market for sale. Not much adjustment in price here in Southcentral, but I am seeing ads for riding horses for under $1000 fairly regular now-a first in my memory.

Hay production was very poor this year, at least for dry horse hay. Yeilds were down due to a very cool spring, and then it has pretty much just been rainy for about three months. Some farmers never even got a first cut on some feilds, some were fortunate and took their hay early (in June) and are hoping for one last dry spell before the snow flies. A lot of what would otherwise be horse hay, ended up round baled into haylage or turned into silage. The Delta area, long a savior to these parts with a great amount of hay harvested (typically!), did not fare so well either. I've been hearing the same gloomy news from across the state although some folks did manage to do pretty well. It's not just the weather, it's that there aren't enough acres in hay to meet the needs of the livestock here.

This has lead to a couple of feed stores being out of imported hay. Less local hay means more demand for imported, whatever the source. The largest hay broker in the PNW has had supply issues also-the hay is available in the Columbia basin, but the cost is up as much as $80 to $100 a ton since this spring. They too, had a cool spring and yeilds were down-and a bunch of them moved to more profitable crops such as wheat and soybeans-meaning less hay is being produced this fall down there too. Add in the outrageous freight charges to bring up hay, and that explains the prices you see posted-a small sliced bale of timothy going for $21, one of the main hay suppliers in Anchorage is at $668 a ton now, and so on. It's only going to get worse, and horse owners just have to accept that the cost of feeding them is going to keep increasing.