I found some really nicely priced hay...

[SheepGirl]

I found a guy an hour away from me selling large square bales of alfalfa (1120 lbs each) for $175/ton.

With hay that price and the fact I can get corn for $6 or $8/bushel, it makes me want to start a confinement flock! I already have the fencing and the T-posts so my only real capital cost would be a shelter and a gate and the actual sheep lol. Plus then of course feed. I could get some Finns or Romanovs or Dorsets or Suffolks and have lots of babies to grow and sell

Looks like I need to write me up another business plan lol

 

[BrownSheep]

I am oing to warn you that the ton bales have SOOOOOO MUCH WASTE.

It's cuckoo crazy how ineffient those things are....but if you do start your secondary herd please send me some Finns and romanovs!!!!

 

[secuono]

If I was forced to use round bales, I would peel off hay as needed and never just give them a whole bale and hope for the best.

 

[SheepGirl]

I am oing to warn you that the ton bales have SOOOOOO MUCH WASTE.

It's cuckoo crazy how ineffient those things are....but if you do start your secondary herd please send me some Finns and romanovs!!!!

Yeah that was what I was worried about! I was reading though that large square bales have flakes like the small squares do. So I was thinking I could feed it like that...I would probably have to build a new feeder though. But my only issue would be moving them around! I can easily roll a round bale off my truck and push it onto a pallet, but you can't roll a half ton square bale :/ Do you feed them? If you have them do you use a tractor to move them? I don't see me getting any sort of tractor in the near future... maybe if I take the bales a part I can move them flake by flake where I want

And of course! If I had a flock of 20 ewes I would be drowning in babies. I could air mail you a pair

If I was forced to use round bales, I would peel off hay as needed and never just give them a whole bale and hope for the best.

That's what I do. I peel hay off, put it in a trash bag, weigh out 6 lbs (though the past couple of days I was giving my ewes half that so I could have enough hay to last them to Thursday when I could go get more) two times a day, and put it in their hay feeder. I can buy a 400 lb round bale for $25 vs buying a 35 or 40 lb small square bale for $5. It is cheaper to buy the round bale so that's what I do. Especially since I go to college part time (taking 8 credit hours) and work full time (30-40 hrs/wk), most of my paycheck goes to paying for school, car insurance, gas, and rent. I don't have much more money to be spending on my sheep! So I feed them as cheaply as I can.

 

[promiseacres]

Finding hay at that cost consistently would be the challenge....peeling big bales is def doable either round or sqare (done it both)

 

[BrownSheep]

We've fed the ton bales before. We don't have a tractor either so moving them was a problem. We had the guy load it in our truck. When we got home we hooked a tow rope around it and connected it to another car. We pulled the truck forward and the other car reversed. It slid it off next to the fence line.

Our problem with feeding them waste fact the flakes wereso large. They do flake but they break up when you go to move it. The pitchfork just broke the flake into what would have been an armful of hay. Toooook so much longer to feed than the small bales did.

But where you're feed round bales now it may be comparable.