As an undergraduate at Cornell during the mid-1960s, I took a course titled “Marketing of Agricultural Products.” The textbook for the course bore the same name, co-authored by Max Brunk and Lawrence Darrah. When I took the course, Darrah was the instructing professor, and I paid $4.50 for a used copy of his book.

In that course, I learned that the Chicago Board of Trade (CBoT) was a commodity exchange established in 1848. CBoT originally traded only agricultural commodities, such as corn, wheat and soybeans, plus cattle and pork for slaughter. Now it offers options and futures contracts on a wide range of commodities, including gold, silver, U.S. Treasury bonds and energy. In 2007, CBoT merged with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

That city was chosen as the exchange location because of its railroad infrastructure, its proximity to America’s agricultural heartlands and its key position as a transit point for livestock. Quoting one CBoT representative, his organization “focuses more on agricultural commodities and interest rate products. A commodity futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell a particular commodity at a future date. The price and amount of the commodity are fixed at the time of the agreement. Most contracts contemplate that the agreement will be fulfilled by actual delivery of the commodity.”

Nowhere in any of my CBoT research have I found mention of “hay” as a tradable commodity – nothing comparable to standard U.S. #2 corn. From some online sleuthing, I learned that there isn’t a traditional futures market for hay in the same way there is for many ag commodities, like corn or soybeans. Hay prices are generally determined by local and regional supply and demand, influenced by factors like weather, production and transportation costs. The hay market is primarily a regional phenomenon. Hay is usually traded through private sales, auctions and feed dealers.

Price discovery for hay relies on factors like local supply, quality and transportation expenses. While there’s no hay futures market, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) provides regular reports on hay prices by species, bale type and quality, offering some insight into regional price trends.

Without a futures market, predicting future hay prices can be challenging. Factors like weather patterns, which can drastically affect production, add to the uncertainty.

Practically speaking, if hay has its own “future,” it’s something like “don’t run out of it before grass time.” With that goal in mind, here are some management pointers. As we enter August (especially across the northern tier of states), temperatures start to drop more at night – despite occasional incursions of Canadian wildfire smoke, thus slowing production of warm-season crops. This grouping includes soybean, corn, sorghum, sudangrass, their hybrids and millets. With these crops fading, cool-season crops can thrive under fewer growing degree days. Stands of straight cool-season grasses – fed nitrogen (N), sulfur (S) and adequate rainfall – can give good yields in early October.

Cool-season crops don’t dry rapidly in late summer and early autumn. Thus, wide-swath same-day haylage (with proper inoculant) makes high quality forage. For folks planting in early August, oats as a forage promises the best potential and is most practical. Planted at three bushels/acre of grain-type oats, we can expect to harvest two to four tons dry matter/acre by the end of September.

Classic forage experiments conducted at the Cornell Valatie Research Farm showed no response for higher seeding rates. But if planting is delayed, yields fall significantly. Normally cool nights in September conserve sugars, producing forage with high fiber digestibility. With sufficient N and S, and/or manure, oats harvested as forage can easily test 18% protein.

But a word of caution is in order: oats are not a foolproof crop. Planting in early August, especially in more southern regions, brings the risk of aphids introducing barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV), often fatal to oat plants. However, cool nights with heavy dew usually retards aphids, thus reducing potential loss.

According to Elson Shields, Ph.D. (entomology, Cornell, retired in 2022), “Since BYDV is circulative, a neonic[otinoid] will kill many aphids before they can transmit the virus. Thus, most of your problems will be in the disease area, like rust.”

Other Cornell researchers reported that the rust populations have developed the ability to overcome certain oat disease resistance genes, thus enabling them to infect older, previously resistant varieties. There have been reports from growers of susceptible oat varieties covered in rust spores, resembling orange highway cones. Presently on the market are two rust-resistant oat varieties, Steuben and Hayden. Developed at Cornell by Dr. Mark Sorrells, these varieties apparently have solved the rust issue – at least for now. For folks using non-rust-resistant oat varieties, there remains the option of applying properly timed fungicide to control rust.

Planting late summer oats without fungicide is not advised. There have been cases where untreated oats were planted at the end of July, and within a month they succumbed to rust. Note: Neither Shields nor Sorrells recommend indiscriminate use of neonics since these pesticides are toxic to honeybees.

Let’s leave these summer annuals for a brief look at winter forages – be they rye, triticale, wheat, barley or speltz. These cold-footed crops serve well as a disposal site for manure during late autumn and winter. Most small grain experts believe that triticale can metabolize up to 70 lbs. of N during the November-March period. Semi-solid manure averages about 1% actual N. So an acre of triticale can be expected to process and store nutrients from about 7,000 lbs. of manure during that period.

With winter rye – due to its greater proneness to lodging – we’d better limit manure application to 5,000 lbs./acre. These late summer-planted winter forages will start waking up as next year’s early spring snows finish melting.