A lesson on baling hay

Now for a lesson on baling hay.

Did you know that haystacks can combust if there is too much moisture in them?

John Boelts, the 1st Vice President of the Arizona Farm Bureau shared one facts with us on baling hay in this week’s Home Grown.

“When the humidity comes up you can’t bale,” he said. “You wan’t the moisture to be just right between 9% and 13% or 14%, if you start getting higher than that you’re going to have fire problems so sometimes people will see bales burning and that isn’t necessarily where someone went and lit them, it might have been too much moisture and then spontaneously combusted after they were baled in the stack,” Boelts explained.

People who bale hay use a moisture probe to gauge the moisture levels in each bale of hay.

Some more interesting facts on hay we learned from Boelts is that most of the hay we bale here locally is sold for animal feed.

Baling is just an efficient way to get the hay from the field to the animals that are going to consume it.

If you notice, bales of hay can come in different colors. Some are yellow and some are green. The yellow stacks of hay are wheat straw and the green is alfalfa hay.

Dairy Cows eat the alfalfa hay.

With alfalfa, buyers look to see if there are a lot of small leaves in the hay because that’s what cows like!

Hay is normally sold by the ton. It’s roughly 150 to 200 dollars a ton.

The price of hay is due to supply and demand. With a decreasing demand for liquid milk, the price of hay can increase.

In the Yuma area, hay is planted in the fall, around September and in January is when first cuttings start. There are typically nine cuttings of hay in a year.

13 On Your Side would like to specially thank Daily Farms for letting us film their balers and hay fields.