As a farmer, I would caution the making of small bales to make money. It is my opinion, but with a huge recession looming and their “great reset“ on the horizon, the days of people owning hobby horses are shrinking. Animal Husbandry, especially equine in general as a way of life, is way down at least in MY area. And my area is/was PRIME equine country. I notice considerably fewer horse people. Its an expensive hobby and people will be shorter on money for the foreseeable future. The middle class numbers are shrinking fast. More people in lower class earnings means less horses.
I dont know how much land you hay, and its none of my business, but bigger bales may be a better pursuit as theres still a need for beef, until the fake beef takes over…you know….the “impossible burger”??? Lol Im definitely looking at soybeans and wheat as alternatives now.
The times are definitely changing.
I thought the same thing would happen when the Great Recession hit in 2008, and indeed the market made a big change. As I said, that was the year we switched from wholesaling our hay to retail, and we'll never look back. The hay market did take a dip at first, but we were able to hang on because we were, and are, debt-free. I will admit that hay was cheap back then, and we were building a new customer base, so we weren't much more than breaking even. But then came 2012, an extremely dry year. Hay was short, very short, and by then demand was recovering. We doubled our price, and at that we were lower than most, and could have sold three barnsful that year at that price. The next year we dropped our price back a little, but it has still stayed high enough that we can make money.
Meanwhile, folks have taken to calling the area "Equine Alley," because of all the facilities around. They even tried to get the state to make it official in tourism publications a few years back, but nothing ever happened on that level. And the demand for small squares at the retail level remains strong. There isn't much beef around here - quite a few dairy farms, but they make their own hay. In fact, those dairy farmers also make horse hay, and compete with us in that market, so selling to them probably isn't an option.
We put up an average of 2500 small square bales of 1st a year, and it's a rare year when we don't sell out. We live on a Federal highway, and all we had to do was put up a sign by the side of the road, near the barn, across the street from the vegetable stand. People call, then come with pickups and/or trailers, load up their hay (we help), pay for it, then come back when they need more. Most of the hay feeds horses, but we've had people buy it for cows, sheep, goats, even donkeys and alpacas once. And there was one time when a vegetable customer bought a single bale to feed her rabbits that winter.
Besides, if we were to switch to big bales, what would we do with that John Deere 336 baler we bought with our Trumpcash in 2020?
