What’s your haylage worth?
- amy55735
- Jun 11
- 1 min read
Pricing hay to accurately reflect forage quality is an ongoing challenge, especially because there are no hard and fast standards to justify a going rate. Even more challenging is pricing haylage.
Haylage is usually a homegrown forage source for dairies, being chopped and stored on-farm. It’s less common to find haylage for sale, especially considering its high moisture that leads to even higher trucking costs. But in some cases, haylage can be brought in from outside sources, and when it is, it is critical to determine a fair price. Lauren Krentz, a dairy and young stock specialist with Vita Plus, explains how to do this in a recent Forage Foundations article.
Price discovery for haylage — and baleage — depends on several factors, which can be objective and subjective. For instance, Krentz notes 1 pound of haylage or baleage should objectively be valued the same as 1 pound of dry hay on a dry matter (DM) basis. However, there may be some different viewpoints as to how various feeds physically interact in a total mixed ration (TMR), which is a subjective point to consider.
June 10 2025 08:00 AM
By Amber Friedrichsen, Managing Editor
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