All About Alfalfa

If you own animals, you have to feed them. There are basically three categories of feed available for your livestock animal: mineral, grain, and forage.

-Mineral is a non-organic portion of feed. Animals need their vitamins too! This is usually supplemented as a mineral block or mixed into a pellet when the rest of the feed ration is lacking in nutrition.

-The grain portion of your feed ration is going to typically be corn, soybean meal, or oats. This is a high energy portion that is minimally processed to become easily digestible

-Forage is your hay and pasture portion. It is made up of grass, clover, brassicas, and alfalfa. This is the portion that makes up the bulk of your feed ration.

Lignin is a structural component of plants. In larger amounts, lignin becomes what we know as wood. In alfalfa, lignin is good because it allows the plant to stand upright, off the ground allowing it to be cut and baled.

The quality of hay has an inverse relationship with lignin content and yield. The more lignin, the greater the yield, but the hay has lower nutritional quality. Therefore, hay has to be managed well in order to optimize yield and lignin content to make a high quality feed.

In alfalfa, there are 3-4 hay cuttings per year. The first cutting generally has a higher lignin content than subsequent cuttings. This is because the first cutting of alfalfa is based off a particular biological maturity stage while subsequent cuttings are based on calendar days after first cutting. This system ensures that the alfalfa stand stays healthy for several years and that the yield in the later cuttings does not drop significantly.

How you store your hay will greatly affect its longevity and quality. Here are a few tips:

-Store it indoors. Hay left outside is exposed to the elements, specifically rain, which can cause loss of nutrition and mold growth.

-Leave room for it to breathe. Hay will give off and absorb moisture from the air. It typically settles at around 16% moisture. Leaving space around and under the bales allows this process to happen without affecting hay quality.

-Leave headroom for air circulation. If you are storing hay for an extended period of time, make sure there is headroom above it, no less than two feet. Proper airflow above your hay will move moisture out and keep it from condensing and falling back onto the hay, like rain.

Some of our hay gets treated with hay preservative. We use a preservative called Hay Guard which comes in food grade containers and is perfect for all kinds of hay for all kinds of animals. It helps to maintain feed quality and allows us to bale sooner so there are more leaves on the hay that you purchase.