![]() Lots of companies make hay racks, but I was unable to find one that was designed to be moved around pastures with the animals. Seeing all of the goats and Maggie sleeping in their nests was very cut, but hay is expensive, and that was going to waste a lot of it.įrom the couple of days I spent carrying hay out to the goats I could tell doing that every morning was going to get really old really quickly, so I started thinking about making a portable hay rack. After that time, the goats had knocked over the doghouse, spread the hay all over the ground, and they and Maggie had made little nests in the hay in which to sleep. That strategy worked for somewhere between three and five minutes. Since we’re new at all this we started by placing a hay bale on top of a dog house thinking that LGD Maggie Mae could get some shelter and the hay would stay up off the ground. So basically we had to start feeding some hay. The temps here have been in the teens this week – no higher than 28☏ on any day – and have been in the single digits at night. ![]() I thought we were going to be able to make it until January before we had to feed any hay, but we’ve had such a cold snap here lately that the grass is fading fast. So this year we will have to feed hay to supplement the browsing and grazing of the goats. In the future we hope to be able to graze our ruminants year round without supplemental hay except in the worst years but we have to get our pastures into much better shape before that can happen. Winter feeding of hay is the number one operating expense in most livestock operations, so we want to minimize the amount of hay we have to feed and utilize the hay we feed as efficiently as possible through good management and decision making. I’m not supposed to do anything real strenuous yet and since all the things I had planned for this winter were “heavy duty” moving or building I decided to make providing for our goats a little easier on us and a lot less wasteful of hay. ![]() Well, I’m still on “light duty” from my appendectomy. Fancy, Ebony, and Ivory are thrilled with their new hayrack. ![]()
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