Besides finding the right goat, obtaining hay can be a challenge especially if you are new to dealing with hay. In the beginning, I thought all hays were created equal.
Wrong! I even thought hay was sold abdundantly in our area since people own a lot of horses, cattles, etc.. Wrong again.
In regards to this statement, these people grow their
own hay to feed their animals and store the rest for the winter months. Which this is a great investment, saving them money.
I would look into doing this if I had the land, equipment, and more animals.
When looking for hays the most common I have seen are alfafa, timothy, and orchard…though there are many other types. Here is my brief break down on hay.
I’m still learning about hay. If you know about hay and want to add a comment below please do! I would like to learn more and also it might help others reading this.

Each type of hay has a minimum of two cuttings per year, some of the hays have more. I have listed them below. It seems like there is no one way to cut hay. While doing
a search on hay, it seems like every farmer has their own technique, resulting in different growth of that hay. I did run into comments here and there in regards to
getting the hay tested especially if their animal are sensitive to certain types. It makes me suspect that even though someone says they are selling one type of hay
they may be selling in fact a hay that has another mixture in it. However, I do believe that people try to be up front as they can be in selling hay. I have never seen hay
cut so I don’t know if one field might be cut sooner than the other or is different from the other field and some how some blows into one field or the other. I don’t know,
I’m just speculating.

Legume hay (like alfafa) contains more protein and calcium than grass hay.
Alfafa can have up to four cuttings per year.
This type of hay is good for pregnant and lactating goats since their bodies use up a lot of
nutrients and energy.

Grass hay (like timothy, orchard) contains less protein and calcium than legume hay.
Timothy hay has two cuttings per year. Orchard grass on the other hand has three cuttings per year.
Timothy is lower in calories, protein, cand calcium than the Orchard grass.

The type of hay you want depends on the types of animals and how you keep them. As I’m typing this, we have nigerian dwarf goats: a buck, wether, and two does. Pretty
much every day we let our goats out to graze around our yard. Our back yard is butted up with a large forest, offering plenty of different plants for them to choose from.
We feed our goats a little bit of grain pellets at night, sometimes during the day (if we need to round them up it’s the easiest way to get them back into their pens).
I would like to point out that if you feed too much grain, it can cause urinary calculi (stones) in the males. Since I’m bringing up urinary calculi, I would like to also add
that we put a splash of apple cider vinegar into their water. Supposedly, the apple cider vinegar is a great deterrent for the forming of urniary calculi but there isn’t
much research. It is said apple cider vinegar even aids in offering the animal vitamins, keeping water fresh, digestion, etc.

Since I gave a brief overview of how we raise our goats, a little bit of a background on legume and grass hays, I can get on with what hay we use and how to get it.
With owning two male goats and feeding them grain, we purchase grass hay. Usually we end up with a timothy hay. I have heard that legume hay can cause the male goats to have
urinary calculi becaue of the higher calcium and protein. However, I have also heard people say they feed alfafa hay with no problems. While doing research on hay, it can
also depend on if the goat is cooped up in the pen all day or is allowed to forage.

Before we brought home our buck (BB8 and soon to follow our wether, Yoshi) I looked for hay being sold. I searched through facebook trading posts and craigslist with no luck.
I posted my own ad that I needed to buy hay. Surprise, suprise. No response. We picked up BB8 and his previous owners were kind enough to allow us to buy a bale of
hay off of them. They got an abduance of hay from someone that they knew. I kept up the search. I finally found a farm store (an hour away) which sold bales of hay. They
didn’t have too many bales left but we bought enough to have a small supply. Then winter rolled around and guess what? We ran out of hay. Tractor Supply Co. came to our
rescue. Haha. Actually, by speaking with their staff members that’s how we found that they had compacted timothy hay. Buying the compacted hay saved us from being hayless.

The compacted hay almost lasted the whole winter and early spring. We ended up purchasing a second one until we were able to find a hay dealer. We bought our does at the
end of February, their owners gave us hay so we could incorrupt it into what we have until the girls got used to what we had. Finally, I came upon the facebook group:
Virginia Hay for Sale and Trade. I wished I had found this sooner, it would have saved me from a lot of searching and stressing. I posted that I was in search of hay
in our area. I quickly received a response from someone that said he does trips to our area and could bring hay. Perfect. We got a couple of bales to see if the goats
liked it.  They did. We ordered more but this time we went towards where the man lived. We stacked 5 bales of hay into our van. It was almost like playing tetris, trying
to get the bales to fit. Thank goodness I only asked for 5 bales since they fit snugged in between the front seats and the third row seat (middle seats were taken out).  Poor kids

had to climb over the third row seat to get out by using the tailgate door.  See Abe below behind the hay.

Hopefully you found this helpful.  If you have anything to add or stories to share please comment below!  I would love to read them.  Thanks.  🙂