Prices are low because the dairies will just buy the hay from someone else around here. Our neighbors. Local neighbors, or neighboring states.

There are two reasons we think we can go up on our prices a little this year. One is because we have worked for years to build a good relationship with the dairy we sell to now. He owns two dairies that are 5,000 cows each, plus he also owns a feedlot. We sell him good hay with few weeds at a reasonable price (at a small discount so that he will buy every bale of it) and haul it to him ourself, and he pays promptly. It's a relationship built on trust. We hope he will understand that with fuel prices these days, we will HAVE to charge more.

The other reason is that Colorado had a freeze in late spring/early summer. Bad for them. Good for us. That freeze meant that their alfalfa hay was killed. See, alfalfa is planted once every 5-8 years. It comes back every year. It goes dormant in the fall, comes back in the spring. It came back in the spring and bam, unexpected freeze killed it all! No hay coming from that area, they had to plow and replant. Now, we don't grow alfalfa anymore. It takes a good deal of water, and we don't have it anymore. At least, not enough water to make it profitable to grow it. Alfalfa has a much higher nutrient count than plain ol' Haygrazer (what we have). Cows produce more milk on alfalfa. So it's more desirable and they will pay more to have it shipped in than buying local haygrazer. Oh, but there IS NO alfalfa coming in this year! So they will HAVE to settle for our haygrazer.

So it all comes down to supply and demand. Supply is lower this year, demand for any kind of hay is higher. But they are hopefully going to realize that they will have to pay more. Simple economics (glad I paid some attention to that class in college! LOL!).

JJ, you may find some info on my family website interesting. Mind you, it's out of date. I REALLY need to update this part of my site. But you may find some of the info and especially the pictures interesting. Some of the machinery we have to use, for one. Maybe I can find some time to update it in the next week or so. But here it is:
http://www.jandjessary.com/farm
Last time I updated it, I only had two children. LOL! There are four of them now, they greatly outnumber me. LOL! Our farm operation has changed since I did those pages. Most of the info is about alfalfa. But cutting and baling haygrazer is much the same.