Fescue hay for goats

[GoatsRus]

Is there any problems with feeding goats Fescue? We are having a rain shortage and hay is at a premium price, if you can find it. No one wants to part with what they have for fear that there will not be another cutting this year. We found some large rolls, but they are fescue. Do goats have the placenta problem like horses if they eat fescue while pregnant?

[Oregon Julie]

Our local pellet mill sells low endophyte fescue hay and makes hundreds of tons of pellets per year using the same. My understanding from them and what I have read is that the low endophyte fescue is safe to feed all classes of livestock, pregnant or not. We have fed it for a number of years now with no ill effects that we are aware of so I think if it is truly low endophyte you would be fine.

http://www.caf.wvu.edu/~forage/fescu...htye/story.htm
http://www.sweetlix.com/user_files/F...eToxicosis.pdf

[ozark_jewels]

We have fed fescue pastures and fescue hay to our goats and cows for several years. Never any problems. It is not my favorite hay, simply because it is hard to find any that was baled at the right time(people tend to leave it till too late), but no problems.

[GoatsRus]

Thanks. I don't know if this is endophyte fescue or not. The only reason I ask is that when I worked for a breeding farm (horses) they would make sure the pregnant mares did not eat fescue as it made the bag too hard for the baby to break out of.

[Jim S.]

17 years of feeding endophyte infected fescue and orchardgrass hay, no troubles.

I agree with Emily, resellers like to leave it too late, because late hay makes more QUANTITY at the expense of QUALITY. When you are selling by the bale or ton, though, it's the former you are after.

We have ours cut on shares, and the guy I have now does it just about right. Not quite early boot stage, so we get a bit more quantity, but not late seed-set stage, either.

My FIL tried endophyte-free in one field once. Hard to get it to persist, though they claim they have solved that with the new, low-endophyte seed. Found out fescue has a symbiotic relationship with the endophyte, which leads to hardiness. Found it out AFTER thousands of acres were planted to endophyte-free. There was a class-action suit, and I think they gave him some free low-endophyte seed to plant. Of course, the planting costs were his.

But across the county, there are millions of acres of infected fescue. Horses are the only ones I know of with a birthing problem, though it causes cattle to be hotter and run for a pond if they can in summertime. The increased body temp was blamed in university research for lower calf weight gains in cow-calf operations, which is how the whole endophyte-free thing broke out of the smaller horse feed market and was peddled to cattlemen in the early '90s. Still the vast majority of cattyle eat endophyte fescue.

Late hay cutting, 2005...high quantity, but you can see the yellow seed heads.

[moonspinner]

I have heard of some goats being sensitive to fescue resulting in some acidosis/foaming at the mouth. Don't know how prevalent this is.

[Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians]

Fescue is fine, it's the drought, freeze, stress words used that should send up the red flags. It's the stress the hay goes through that causes the problems in this hay and also hay grazer/sudan/red cane hay. Endophyts....It binds copper in the animal making deficency problems worse, which is seen in sacks kids can not get out of plus a myriad of other things. But heat/drought and freeze bring out the pruissic acid in the hays that will kill livestock. Some of this is regional of course, like clover hay here, it's way to humid to ever not have mold.

But you are right, the best hay for your goats is what horse folks purchase. Feed dealers are very very careful with what they sell to horse folks, not so much with our goats. Vicki

[GoatsRus]

Thanks all. They are just cutting the fields this week and will be baleing it. I'm afraid that we might not get a second cut this year because it's dry and the price is about $10 more a roll than last year - for right now anyway. All I could find that anyone was willing to part with was the fescue rolls. It may be all right and we'll get a second cut, but right now everyone is hoarding their hay here in TN.
As one guy said, "either they eat it this winter or they'll be eating a snow ball".

[Jim S.]

Hey GoatsRus, 5x5 rounds are $50 each in the field here in Lincoln County. That's double spring of last year, and just $15 shy of the high in late December last year. Buy while you can at only $10 more than last year. The drought monitor folks forecast continuing drought with only moderate chance of improvement. People here who are overstocked are feeding hay now, driving the prices. Everyone is antsy about fall hay. If you can store more than you need, buy as much as you can and resell it in late December at near $100 a roll. Counties along the south-central TN line with Alabama are in extreme drought, and it inches northward every week. Moore County is the upper limit of extreme now.

If you have the pasture, along about late August there ought to be some real goat bargains showing up.

Vicki, the best hay period is what the horse set buys. It is also so high-priced that the economics of a production farming business preclude its use. The one exception is if you are farming at the higher end of the breeder set. Us regular folks can't pencil it out, though.

I know people running to Ky. at $3 a gallon to haul back alfalfa/grass mix squares at $7 each. I cannot get those numbers to work outside the show ring. If I had a $31,500 Boer buck like auctioned in Texas recently, I could make those numbers work. They start to work on my place at about $1,500 a goat, but I don't have any $1,500 goats. They don't work in a production meat system, and I seriously doubt they'd work in production milk, either.

Standard disclaimer: If you have goats as a hobby, disregard the above, because costs are not as crucial to a hobbyist.

[GoatsRus]

Thanks Jim. We're getting ours from a guy up the road from us here in Warren county. He has 4x5 rounds for $40 (and that's delivered). We're also getting more than we think we'll need. The guy assured us they wouldn't "squat" as they will be rolled tightly. We're also getting squares at $4 each from someone else. We were originally told it would be $3 in the field, but that has changed, as we expected. The squares are alfalfa/grass mix and I know the guy from the horse farm I worked at, so he's going to be good enough to hold back 50 bales for us. Since he raises Walking horses and cattle, I know the hay is good. We've bought from him for the last 4 years, but this year, he won't part with his round bales until we start seeing some rain.

[Jim S.]

Small world, GoatsRus. I got a niece next county over, near Woodbury. Map says ya'll are in severe drought up there.

http://drought.unl.edu/dm/DM_state.htm?TN,S

I don't blame the guy on his rounds, and $4 would be a decent square price down here for sure, this year. I'd be glad I could get it. Down here, most of the available hay was spoken for before it was cut this year, so a guy just looking on the spot market will pay a premium. I wish I had a barnful of rounds to hold til winter, cuz this extreme drought runs from Moore County to the north all the way past Montgomery, AL, to the south. Quite the hay market. Forecast calls for ongoing drought for much of TN and top 2/3 of AL for the next 3 months.

[moonspinner]

Do I ever feel fortunate up here in the NE. We went through a horrendous winter and it's been a largely rainy two years, but never drought. I pay $3.50 per organic alfalfa 45# bale delivered. And during the summer I pay $20/round 500# bale alfalfa delivered.

[Jim S.]

moonspinner, look at this historical drought chart:

http://drought.unl.edu/whatis/palmer/pdi1895.gif

Historically, 5%-10% of our time here has been in drought. Same with much of the NE.

The drought moved east from Texas to us. Hope it doesn't ride up the coast your way next year. Typically, small grass rounds here are $15, large are $25, squares are $1.50-$2 in the field. Not the past 2-3 years, though.

On organic: Everybody talks organic. I'd want to see the certification, since to even use the term, you must now by federal law meet certain exacting criteria.

See: http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/organcert.html#steps

and

http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/NOP/standards.html