3 - Marketing Harvested Forages

Abstract

Hay has traditionally been priced and sold on the basis of visual criteria alone. Classification systems based entirely on appearance of the hay have provided a rapid and helpful means of evaluating forage quality; they have been used in lieu of more direct chemical analyses that have a high cost in both time and resources. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) hay grades provided for 11 hay groupings and four quality grades within each group. Grade criteria emphasize primarily leafiness, greenness, and content of foreign matter such as weeds, but are also based on moisture content, odor, and dustiness. Even though sampling and testing lots of harvested forages hold the key to intelligent buying/selling and management decisions, only a small fraction of the U.S. hay crop is evaluated for nutritive properties. The laboratory method usually considered to be superior for estimating the digestibility (primarily energy) of hay and other forage samples is the use of in vitro dry matter digestibility (IVDDM). This IVDDM procedure, however, is not recommended for routine, commercial hay-quality testing, because it is difficult to standardize and is expensive to run.