Is it possible to make a profit off land doing nothing but farming hay and selling the bales you make? In other words, not using your land for anything but hay production?
Very roughly speaking, you can expect ~2 tons of hay per acre. Again speaking very roughly, hay has a rather wide price range depending on quality, but $100 - $150 per ton would be in the ballpark. So if you had 100 acres in hay, that would bring in ~ $20,000 - $30,000. This does not include any of your costs. Bear in mind that depending where you are in the country, you can get 3 cuttings per season from the same fields.
You can certainly make a profit. Can you make a living? Touch and go. Considering the widespread drought throughout the country the last couple of years, more go than touch. Course, if you had hay for sale, you could get really good prices for it during the same periods of drought.
I assume you are asking about hay made from grass.
A better fodder crop for hay is alfalfa (lucerne) because it has greater nutritional value. Plus it grows quickly in the right conditions so can be harvested multiple times.
Even better than that is to make silage.
The problem with alfalfa is that it’s pretty picky about its conditions, and if it isn’t reaaly dry it molds FAST and is therefore pretty well unsellable.
You can make a profit growing hay, but it’s a ton of work and worry. You are really at the mercy of the elements, especially if you are growing for the horse market. On the other hand, if you grow really good alfalfa/timothy mix, have good storage and shipping available, and don’t mind dealing with supremely picky buyers… you can get $15+ per bale if you sell in the southern states where that hay doesn’t grow well.
I have a cousin that does this. Alfalfa on irrigated land in the Inter-mountain West.
The price of baled hay has gone up quite a bit in the last few years so it has become a pretty good business. The Eastern US is particularly short on hay. And now with the California drought, the prices are even better.
E.g., last year a trucker coming back from Seattle to Tennesee made some phone calls, got hold of my cousin and stopped by his farm. Filled the semi completely up with baled hay for resale in the East. Both parties made money.
But you have to be in the business for the long haul. Prices fluctuate and the amount of water available varies from year to year. You have to be able to survive a couple bad years in a row now and then. My family has been farming there since the 1930s.
My wife’s grandfather grew hay for some time after dairy farming in Central Texas ceased to be profitable sometime in the 1960s.
I get the impression that it paid the bills, but not much else, since the tales I hear imply that they had very little spare cash.
I used to work for a tractor dealership where we sold a lot of farm equipment for seeding, cultivating, and harvesting hay in bales and roles. Yes, it can be done. In fact it is rather common crop in areas with hilly farmland, since you can’t use automated combines on that kind of land.
In rural areas, where many families might have small home farms for their own use, they may only have a few head of cattle (for slaughtering or milk, and the odd 4-H project). These animals need to be fed during the winter just like the cattle in larger operations. A hay farmer may not make enough off a family or two, but if you’ve got several hundred families buying hay, it adds up. Keep in mind, too, hay is perishable. It’s dried and has a long shelf (or loft) life, but any you may have left over might as well be thrown out or used to line the stable floors. It will need to be replaced for the next season.
Interesting, didn’t know that.
But by golly it’s nice to be reminded of timothy. It is a beautiful grass which simply isn’t seen here these days. I had some growing wild but it was overwhelmed by the rampant ryegrass.
Good point although we used to sometimes feed out year old hay. Dad would sweeten it with powdered molasses and put it in a hay feeder which the cattle loved.
In SE Texas we see a lot of land with those huge rolls of hay. I love when it’s freshly rolled and dotting the fields. The ones that sit outside in the weather for a year or more that are ragged and sagging are the ones they couldn’t sell I guess. I don’t think I’ve seen a squared bale in decades!
I just wondered if hay was just grown to let the field rest or something.
So if you did have 100 acres, how would you know what to grow? Is hay the cheapest, or easiest route?
What does an old farming couple do with their land when they’re too old to actively farm it anymore? Hire someone? Lease it out? Let it sit?
I’m a suburb girl and know nothing about farming.
Also, a good hayfield can be harvested for several years without reseeding. it’s fairly common to get 3 years’ crops from an alfalfa field, and 4-5 years from a grass hayfield. Most other crops are annuals, so you have the expense & work of buying new seed and planting it every year.
Or maybe arrange a deal with a neighboring farmer to farm the land, and split the proceeds in some way that they agree on.
I rented a guest house on a 50-acre mini-ranch. The landlord (who lived in a larger house on the same property) was an old-like codger. Across the street, there lived an alfalfa farmer with 400 acres. He also grew barley and/or oats on my landlord’s property. He must have been doing all right with his 400 acres of alfalfa, because he had himself built a rather nice house, with a pool that was made to look like a little lake and various other nice amenities. This was in the San Luis Obispo County, in the central California coast area.
Please bear in mind that I’m posting from New Zealand and am a city boy myself these days so my experience is not American. Having said that, farming is farming anywhere and my brother still owns our family farm.
Small square (actually oblong) bales are seldom seen. They do however have a place because one person can handle them and they are very useful for small holders who only need 100 bales. Pea-straw is harvested and sold in small bales through garden centres because of its rich mulch and nitrogen properties. Plus it suppresses weeds.
As t-bonham said, grass just grows and grows. You don’t need to work the land up each year and replant. My father used to rotate our hayfields and tried to avoid cropping a paddock two years in a row.
Fix nitrogen.
“Perennial and forage legumes such as alfalfa, sweetclover, true clovers, and vetches may fix 250-500 lbs of nitrogen per acre”
A hay crop may be used to help restore health to the ground, this may help the main crops. So you may make a profit from hay, without selling the hay.
How do you know what to do ? I suppose one would read books, subscribe to magazines…get the news from the government and other organizations, compare ones fields with neighbours…
That’s true, but with a caveat. If you want to get the best prices for your hay, it has to have a good nutrient content and very few weeds. Big time buyers will test it. So, you will have to add nitrogen to the soil after each cutting if you want to get the best prices. You may also have to do some broadleaf weed control spraying for the first cutting.
I’ve been toying with the idea of converting about 30 acres into a small hay operation with a coastal bermuda hybrid. It’s quite discouraging though when I look at the cost of equipment. To produce hay in a large scale, commercial operation, you’re looking at about $120K-$150K for the equipment unless you buy very used stuff.
It’s a very risky business, but most farming and ranching options are these days.
100 acres in most parts of the US for most crops is too small to do anything with. There are a few exceptions, e.g., tobacco. Due to old laws, it can only be grown on certain plots, and these were usually small back when. So families grow it on sometimes tiny lots.
You could graze a few beef steers on it, but you’d have to supplement with hay. Then you have to have it fenced, which isn’t cheap. Better to just lease it to neighbors.
The farmers in my family routinely leased neighbor’s land. E.g., my aforementioned cousin leases a neighboring farm. A young couple decided to go into farming. Part timers. Never a good idea. The guy got shipped off by the Army for a tour overseas. She works in town. So they lease it out.
For older people, in addition to leasing the land, there are other options. E.g., one pair of grandparents sold their farm to a neighbor but with the right to live in their house for the rest of their lives. My grandmother managed to live there for over 20 years. It’s still considered “family” property in some sense. E.g., they go there each summer to harvest the apricots along the drive. (The other pair just sold theirs, got a small acreage for a good sized garden.)
Back when they still had dairy cows, there was a switch from baled to other forms. E.g., one uncle built a huge hay barn by himself for chopped hay. Rolled and chopped hay is good for on-farm use, but baled is better for transport, especially in small quantities. My cousin used to load up a truck and go into town to sell off the street to people with horses and such. Now they come to him.
Rich people with horses are good customers. Ever seen a Jaguar with a bale of hay sticking out of it?
OTOH, my g-grandfather’s ranch has been ruined thanks to hay buyers. The cattle company puts way too many cattle on it during the winter, feeding them hay all winter. Mud in the winter, dust in the summer.
Most farming has become much less risky lately, because government or co-op programs have been developed to ameliorate some of the risks.
You can now sell your harvest, for a guaranteed price, before you ever plant it. And you can buy insurance to guarantee a minimum yield, as well as catastrophic government insurance against natural disasters. And there are various government incentive programs, to encourage farmers to plant needed crops (corn, mostly) and to take good care of the land.
Unfortunately, most of these programs aren’t targeted at hay crops. Part of the reason that hay is in short supply – farmers are planting corn or soybeans instead. Hay farmers do best by selling their whole crop to a local livestock producer. Horse breeders are good – they will pay high prices, though they are quite picky about the quality of the crop, size of the bales, when delivered, etc. But they;ll keep buying for years if they are satisfied.
Also technology has made farming more efficient – computerized equipment checks your records and for each acre of land, applies only the amount & type of frerilizer needed by that acre. (Though this increases the cost of the equipment needed.)
Or you could get contractors in to do it. You’ll pay more in production costs of course but won’t have to tie up so much capital in equipment. Most farmers here don’t own their own bailer for example.
Gayville South Dakota is known as the hay capital of the world. It’s hay is especially prized by people who raise horses for show and racing in the south. http://www.gayvillehall.com/
Personally my Dad made $10,000 last year letting a guy cut hay on his farm.