If you have been struggling with excess mud and muck in your pastures when you put out hay for your cattle, you might be wondering if there are better solutions. After all, who wants to drop the hay into the mud and then encourage the animals to eat it? The good news is that there are solutions that will help you eliminate the mud problems and still retain your hay-feeding routines. Here are a couple of the things that you should think about.
Create Hay Pads In Your Pastures
Hay pads are a convenient solution for minimizing mud issues with hay feeding. If you want to continue feeding your cattle hay, take some time to evaluate the size of your pastures and determine how many feeding stations you want to create. Then, you can build hay pads to control the mud.
Hay pads are structures crafted from textile fabric, stone, and crushed limestone. Chose areas that are fairly level and that drain well so that you don't have water accumulation issues. Excavate a round area larger than the hay bale and about six or eight inches deep. Deeper is okay if you want to create thicker layers of stone. Cover the excavated area in textile fabric before creating a layer of stone for proper drainage. Then, top that layer with crushed limestone.
Pack the limestone down, even if you drive a tractor over it a few times. Make sure that you create a compacted, level surface that's even with the ground. Some rain storms will also help level it out and pack it down. Then, you can place hay bales on the pads for your animals to eat.
Install Fence-Integrated Feeding Structures
When you want to place feeding stations in areas away from the pasture traffic, install feeding areas in the fence line. Replace sections of your fence with recessed feeding structures so that you can drop hay in the feed space and your cattle can come to the fence line to graze.
You can help control mud even further by adding hay pads within those fence line feeding spaces. That way, you get the benefit of both feeding improvements to reduce the mud development throughout your pasture and in your feeding areas.
Consider these solutions when you want to reduce the amount of hay feed that ends up in mucky, muddy spaces in your pasture. Incorporate fence structures and hay pads to keep your livestock happier with cleaner, fresher hay.
Contact a local service provider to learn about hay-feeding systems.
