Crop Comments: Hay Situation Tightens in the Northeast

The Dec. 10, 2025 issue of Country Folks listed 11 advertisements for hay crops, one of which was for organic hay. This is relevant, because one year ago our paper posted approximately 30 hay crop ads, roughly 10 of which were for organic forages. I believe that these numbers provide a report card on the Northeast’s growing season, which just finished.

Very few locales in our region received what farmers considered adequate precipitation. My wife and I watch the Utica TV weather report almost every evening. Their meteorologist taught us our average monthly rainfall is about three inches. In June 2025 we received 2.1 inches of rainfall; July, 1.4 inches; and August, 1.6 inches.

May had been much wetter than average, so making high quality first-cutting forages was difficult. For most of our region’s crop growers, first cutting got ransacked quality-wise; second and third cuttings suffered seriously quantity-wise. This weather misbehavior has been quite taxing on livestock growers, particularly organic “grass-fed” cattle people – those who manage their cattle without feeding concentrates. For them it’s important to consider culling low-producing cows who are eating more than their fair share of inadequate quantities of harvested forages. Those animals may be sold to “regular” organic farmers, who have the option of feeding grains.

Livestock nutritionists stress the need for cattle people to test their forages so they can precisely feed the best forages to the milking animals. Computerized least-cost dairy rations tend to draw in commodity grains, which can compare quite favorably against increasingly expensive, hard-to-find forages. (Also, it’s cheaper to haul in concentrates – often just plain old soybean meal and shell corn – than bulkier forages, assuming that you can find the latter.)

Another option for addressing inadequate forage resources is the use of monensin sodium. This compound is classed as an ionophore and has been approved by the FDA for lactating dairy cattle for over 20 years. Monensin sodium (most commonly marketed as Rumensin ) is a feed additive that improves feed efficiency, boosts weight gain and prevents, or controls, coccidiosis by altering rumen bacteria to favor propionate production over acetate. This reduces energy loss in the form of volatile methane. This additive is used in feedlots, for growing cattle and dairy cows (for milk efficiency).

Monensin is used extensively in the beef and dairy industries.

If we look at this issue somewhat technically, we see that monensin improves ruminant feed efficiency by favoring gram-positive bacteria and protozoa in the rumen. This allows for an increased efficiency of the remaining beneficial bacteria via increases in propionic acid and decreases in acetic acid and lactic acid production. Expressing this concept a little more simply, we know that most sugars in cattle diets contain six carbons. With normal rumen fermentation, glucose (the most common six-carbon sugar) reacts biochemically to yield one propionic acid (with three carbons), one acetic acid (with two carbons) and one methane (with one carbon).

Influenced by monensin in the diet, rumen microbes realign fermentation to yield two propionic acids, accounting for all six of the original carbons; therefore, no more acetic acid, and, importantly, no more methane. Methane has no nutritional value and is a serious greenhouse threat. Introducing monensin to a dairy cow diet improves feed conversion efficiency, increasing milk production (usually by about 5%) or lowering feed intake slightly (or a little bit of both).

With the commercialization of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) over 30 years ago, certain well-studied dairy farmers determined that feeding monensin to lactating dairy cows improved milk production as well as rBGH, doing so less expensively, without injections required by the synthetic hormone.

This clever end run by enterprising dairy farmers did not endear them to folks aggressively marketing rBGH.

Fortunately for such farmers, monensin’s residue was not detectible in milk.

Once soils thaw enough to get sampled, doing so would be wise. Soils on corn ground that test less than 3.5% organic matter should be taken out of corn and planted next spring to a hot climate summer annual (like sorghum, sudangrass, their hybrids or millets).

Unlike corn, and for that matter, soybeans, these grain-bearing grasses benefit from fibrous root systems. This means that they tend to maintain, rather than deplete, soil organic matter (SOM).

With each loss of 1% SOM, the soil’s ability to store moisture is reduced by 16,000 gallons (or approximately 1.5 quarts/square foot of soil surface). University of Texas research has proven that when moisture is very limiting (like what happened in much of the Northeast during 2025) a limited amount of water supports twice as much sorghum forage dry matter growth as it does corn forage dry matter growth. Another plus for sorghums, sudangrasses and their hybrids is that brown midrib versions of these cultivars can, or a dry matter basis, support as much milk as good corn silage.

One Central New York grass-fed organic dairy farmer (whom I advise) is now selling two-year-old hay, because this year’s hay (beyond what his own herd doesn’t need) is already spoken for. Dairymen who need to buy hay this winter – and are able to find it – should agree to buy hay from those sellers during years when organic hay supplies aren’t quite so tight. With even a slight chance than a dairyman might be hay-deficient in 2026, she or he should make a commitment to buy some hay from that grower even if next year turns out to be a bumper year forage-wise. The peace of mind for both parties should justify the cost.

Molasses top-dressed on marginally palatable forages will help ensure intake as well as help compensate some for lower energy values in such roughages. If the hay seller doesn’t provide recent forage test results with their hay sale, the buyer should take a hay sample and test it immediately. There’s a good chance that a lot of hay that’s still available may be nutritionally lacking, particularly on minerals.

by Paris Reidhead