© Gary Hubbell, Ranch Real Estate Broker, 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ORGANIC GRASS HAY
This is another market that is begging for more production. Horse owners, as you know, can be extremely finicky, and they want top-quality grass or grass/alfalfa hay for their prize horses.
Grass hay is a little different than alfalfa because grass doesn’t usually yield more than two cuttings. Some growers in California or Arizona can get as many as a dozen cuttings a year of alfalfa. Once grass has pushed its way up from the ground in the spring, grown a stalk, fertilized the seed heads, and matured, it’s usually pretty well spent. In western Colorado mountain hayfields, it’s common to get one good cutting of grass hay, and sometimes you’ll be lucky enough to get a second cutting.
Many smaller fields are irrigated by ditches, gated pipe, or other forms of flood irrigation. Consequently, it is more difficult to spread fertilizer via a gush of water out of a ditch. Fields are usually fertilized by spreading pellets of ammonium nitrate, which obviously isn’t an organic fertilizer. Other methods, such as cattle  manure, horse manure, or fish emulsion can be used, but it’s labor-intensive and not as easy as spreading commercial fertilizers. If you don’t fertilize, however, yields will be dramatically smaller. Let’s say you have a 40-acre field of grass hay. In consecutive seasons where conditions are basically the same—weather, water, sunshine, etc.—an organic field with no fertilizer might yield 1-1.5 tons of hay per acre. After fertilizing the next year, you might cut 3-4 tons per acre. That’s a substantial difference.
Buyers who insist on organic hay often don’t realize what they’re asking of the farmer who grows it. They don’t realize that they’re asking the farmer to accept a yield of less than 50% of a commercially fertilized field, while the costs of running a swather and baler up and down the field, burning expensive diesel fuel, are the same. Are organic hay buyers willing to pay 50% more for the product? It’s up to the farmer to explain the difference and market his hay that way.
 Horse owners in particular have a habit of making themselves extremely difficult consumers. I’ve talked to many ranchers who have shipped an entire semi-load of small square bales of hay to a distant buyer, only to have the buyer turn up her nose at a couple of bad bales and reject the entire load. As a hay grower myself, I don’t play this game. I send out a contract in advance of delivery, stating that the buyer will accept the load and I demand payment for both the hay and the hauling in advance. If the buyer wants to be picky, she can come to my haystack in Crawford, Colorado, and inspect the hay. Most growers haven’t developed their marketing strategies to actually get paid what organic hay is worth. Many ranchers are growing organic hay without really realizing it, and they sure haven’t gone to the trouble of bringing an inspector out to certify their fields organic. This is a market that should be developed because there is a growing demand for it.
Click here to keep reading—Organic Vegetable and Produce Farms
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