I've always weighed my grain and tried to with my hay to get a feel for how much to feed. Once you are familiar with your hay and the flake weights you don't have to weigh every time but it is always good to make sure you are feeding the proper amount. Horses need from 1.5-2.0% of their weight in forage.
The shipment of bales I purchased are around 30 lbs each. Yikes. That is small. Luckily when the horses still had pasture to graze there wasn't as much of an issue that I wasn't feeding them "enough". But as I was needing to lean on feeding hay as their main forage I wanted to get the hay weighed. So I made a hay tote with tarp, wood and rope.
I already have the scale which works nicely with a bucket but it's harder to get the small hook around the two twine ropes of a bale. The hay tote worked one time, then the ropes broke off. Ugh. Instead of going through and trying to make it work I just figured a few bucks and I could get a hay bale carrier.
The one I purchased is from Tough One and very easy to throw the flakes of hay into it, grab the straps, weigh and then carry the flakes to the various locations I leave hay for the horses.
I make sure to locate hay in several places so boss mare won't run Chance off the hay. They still seem to eat well next to each other off the initial pinning of ears and deciding who should eat where. So this wasn't really a good DIY project and I'm sure I could have created another version that actually worked but...I've got enough projects right now!
2 comments:
I admire that you are always so willing to be an inventive problem solver Christie!
I've thought about buying one of those bale bags (to avoid the mess inside the trailer tack room). If you have time one day, I know that I'd be interested on a little review of the one you bought, how you like it, what it cost & whether you think it's worth it, any problems with the zipper?
Great post idea! I will do that in the future after I've played with it for a bit.
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