The Benefits of a Covered Hay FeederĪ covered hay feeder protects your investment (hay) from the natural elements, thereby limiting the amount of waste left over. One solution to this predicament is purchasing a covered hay feeder. This entire situation results in a less than desirable clean up situation for the farmer! In addition, as the animals finish the limited amount of good hay unspoiled by the elements, the bottom hay is left to rot in the mud and becomes moldy. Without it, cattle farmers wouldn’t have cattle to raise! However, with the varying weather across the United States, hay can be wasted due to rain, snow, heavy winds, ice and more. It’s no secret that hay is a crucial part of every farmer’s operation. Also used flashing for the sides of the roof to hold the shingles down and protect the wood.Are Covered Hay Feeders a Wise Investment?.Roofing material, we used the roll of shingles, and it worked great.It’s been over a year now since he built it. Here is the supply list from what Husband can remember. I am not the builder on our homestead so I apologize for not telling you the size of each piece of wood, rounding the numbers for each wall and not giving you a step-by-step guide. Now if we just had a tractor to help move the round bale to its final resting spot… One day! It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but it makes a huge difference to our monthly hay expenses.
It’s a sturdy little hut, and now our round bales last us a whole week and a half with our three horses. I plan on eventually painting the posts black and staining the cedar slats. Not bad considering our hay bill was cut by over half when we switched to rounders. The rounder sits on a plastic pallet so that it is not sitting on the dirt and is elevated a little bit more. We can still easily move it to a new spot though by hooking it up the our UTV and dragging it. Initially, we wanted to put it on a little trailer, but because of our budget, we didn’t. There is a gate on the tallest side that we keep chained shut unless we need it open to put a new rounder in. He cut down cedar fence slats to fit the sides and left small openings in between each slat, allowing the rounder to breath and the horses to eat hay through the slats if they want to. Husband put a slight pitch on the roof and used plywood, standard roofing shingles & trim to weatherproof the structure. It’s important to make sure the wall is short enough for the horses to be able to eat the hay down to the ground but also tall enough to prevent them from climbing into the house and getting caught and/or ruining hay. The window for the horses to put their heads through is about 3 ft tall on the high side. Our structure is 7 ft tall on the tall side, 6 ft 9 in on the short side, and 5 ft wide on all sides. Our hay farmer’s rounders are about 5 ft tall and 6 ft wide. The general consensus was that a little hut to house your rounder is the best solution, so off we set to build the hay hut. I put out a plea on social media and got many responses. We had to come up with another solution and fast. It was great… 😑 That rounder lasted less than a week for our three horses. That lasted about a day… They had a party in the hay, pulling down whole layers at a time and pooping and peeing all in it. Then we wrapped it in plastic construction fencing to keep the horses from trampling it. We have a run-in shelter, so we tried putting the rounder under that. Luckily, we found we could store an extra bale in our 7.6 x 7.6 storage shed that we had been using for stacked square bales. For horses, it’s best if you keep your rounder safely covered from the elements to prevent your hay from molding and your horses consuming moldy hay. They’re humungous and heavy making them hard to move, hard to store and hard to cover unless you’re already equipped to do so. Round bales are a whole ‘nother ball game. Well, if you read the DIY Square Bale Slow Feeder article, you know that our paddock was set up for square bales, not round.
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