How a Moisture Meter Saved Our Winter Hay Supply

I, Bernie Harberts, did not use generative AI to write or illustrate this article. Spell check and grammar check, yes. AI, no.

Winter is coming. If you own horses or mules, you either a) feel smug because you have a barn full of dry hay or b) are freaked out because you’re down to ten dinky square bales of hay. Last week, my wife Julia and I were in camp b. We were down to ten bales of hay for three mules and two horses. We didn’t freak. We’ve been here so many times it’s familiar territory.

Finding Dry Hay

Julia and I live in western North Carolina. That means lots of sunny weather, rain and lush grass. It also means it’s really hard to find dry hay, especially second cutting. First cutting around here is usually the first week of May. Second cutting runs from August to November. The problem with second cutting hay is drying it out.

For years, Julia and I have struggled putting dry hay in the barn. Until this year, we relied on guesswork to figure out how dry our hay should be. That meant jamming your hands into a bale of hay and seeing if it felt moist or not. While that folksy approach works okay some of the time, it’s totally subjective and wide open to wishful thinking. It’s too easy to stand there with your fingers in a bale of hay and think, “this is dry enough,” and buy 50 bales of the stuff.

Which is exactly what we did this year. We bought hay from our regular hay guy, hoped it would be dry enough, loaded it into our barn and, two days later, cut a bale open and it was molding. We loaded all that hay back onto our trailer and returned it. We’ve got a great hay guy. He gave us a credit toward a drier load. Too bad he didn’t have any dry hay he could sell us.

That’s when we did what we should have done years ago. We bought a moisture meter.

Meet Mr Moisture Meter

We bought an AgraTronix moisture meter online for $225, cruised Craigslist for hay, and visited three local farmers to check out their hay. Our moisture meter opened a whole new hidden world of hay moisture content that had been hidden from us for years. Hay in our neck of the woods should be between 12 and 18 percent. One farmer we visited had beautiful fescue timothy mix bales for sale. They were heavy, lush, and in the good old stick-your-finger-into-the-bale-to-see-if-it’s-dry day we would have bought it. We stuck our moisture meter into it and it read 23 percent moisture. We passed on that hay.

We finally tracked down Gary Miller of Vale, North Carolina who had just the hay we needed. It was a beautiful fescue/crabgrass mix. You may hate crabgrass in your lawn but horses love it in their hay. We poked our meter into the hay and it ranged from 12 to 17 percent. We ended up buying 400 bales from Gary and hauled it home to our farm, stacked it into our barn, and went from freaking out at having no hay for the winter to feeling like we’d be okay.

Here are some photos from our hay hunt I thought you’d enjoy.

Now He Owes Me One

Julia and I have been so impressed with our moisture meter that we gave one to a friend of ours who runs a large boarding stable. For years, he’d had hit and miss luck getting dry hay. Some years the bales looked crispy dry on the outside and, when he cut the first one open, it was just as dry and crispy as the outside. Other times, the freshly opened bale released a cloud of mold. Ugh.

This will help him.

Good thing he’s a good friend. When I’m in his neighborhood buying hay and forget my moisture meter, I’ll know who to call.

More about life up Shoe Box Canyon: Around the Homestead.

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