Thursday, October 18, 2012

Hay or sheep?

As most of you know, we have had drought conditions in most of Southern and South Easter Ontario this summer. Pastures were dried up and crispy. As a result, many people had to start feeding hay when animals would normally have been out on pasture. Horses,cattle, sheep-they all had to eat something.
Even though there has been rain this fall and the pastures have recovered quite well, most people did not get a second crop of hay. We did not either, but were lucky to get a good first crop in before it rained and also did various neighbours' hay fields as well. As a result, we had hay to spare.

One solution to the hay shortage was for farmers to sell off a lot of their breeding stock. This has brought prices down. Not much yet, but they will probably fall further as time goes by and they run out of hay. Round hay bales are now selling for $50 to as high as $95 a bale for the really big, second cut round ones. Per lb it is about 12 cents. In this area, our usual price is $20 for a 4 x 5 soft core round bale of mixed hay, but not this year!
What do you think is the best plan of action? There are several options:
  1. We could sell most of our hay and cut down on our herd of Katahdin sheep;
  2. We could sell our surplus hay.
  3. We could buy more sheep at a cheaper price as we would have enough hay to feed about 20-30 more ewes. Prices of ewes should be higher next year, as there may be a shortage of them.
  4. We could sell some of the surplus hay and keep back enough to feed about 10 extra ewes.