7 Haylage Vs Dry Hay For Goats Truths Old Farmers Swear By

You stand in the field, looking at a forecast that promises three beautiful sunny days followed by a week of rain. It’s the classic hobby farmer’s dilemma: do you rush to make dry hay, praying it cures in time, or do you take the less weather-dependent route of haylage? This choice isn’t just about what you’ll feed your goats this winter; it’s a decision that impacts your labor, your storage, your wallet, and your animals’ health. Understanding the real-world differences between these two forages is one of the most critical lessons for keeping a healthy, productive herd.

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Understanding Forage: Haylage vs. Dry Hay Basics

Dry hay is what most people picture when they think of winter feed. It’s grass or legumes like alfalfa and clover, cut and left to dry in the field until its moisture content drops to around 15%. The goal is simple: remove enough water so mold and bacteria can’t grow.

Haylage, sometimes called baleage, is a different beast altogether. It’s the same forage, but it’s baled much wetter, typically between 40-60% moisture. Instead of being dehydrated, it’s wrapped in layers of airtight plastic. This oxygen-free environment allows beneficial bacteria to ferment the forage, pickling it and preserving it through a process called ensiling.

The fundamental difference is the preservation method. Dry hay relies on dehydration. Haylage relies on anaerobic fermentation. This single distinction is the root of every pro and con that follows, from nutrient content to storage risk.

Haylage’s Edge in Preserving Feed Nutrients

Making dry hay always involves a compromise. As the forage dries in the sun, the most nutritious parts—the delicate leaves—become brittle. When the baler comes through, many of those leaves shatter and are lost on the field, taking a huge chunk of the protein and energy with them.

Haylage short-circuits this problem. Because it’s baled with higher moisture, the leaves remain pliable and stay attached to the stem. Nearly all of that field-grown nutrition makes it into the bale. The fermentation process then locks in those nutrients, preserving a higher percentage of protein and digestible energy compared to dry hay made from the exact same field.

For your goats, this is a big deal. That extra nutritional punch can mean healthier kids, better milk production from your does, and less money spent on supplemental grain. It’s like feeding a vibrant salad instead of a dried herb.

Palatability: Why Goats Often Prefer Haylage

Goats are notoriously picky eaters. They’ll often pick through a feeder of dry hay, eating the leafy bits and leaving behind the coarser stems. This selective eating leads to a surprising amount of waste.

Haylage, on the other hand, is a goat delicacy. It has a distinctively sweet, slightly tangy smell from the fermentation process and a soft, moist texture that most goats find irresistible. Put a flake of good haylage in front of them, and they will clean it up, stems and all.

This high palatability means less waste and better overall consumption, ensuring your animals get the full nutritional benefit of the forage. While a goat raised solely on dry hay might turn its nose up at first, a slow introduction usually wins them over. When it comes to a clean feeder, haylage almost always comes out on top.

Health Concerns: Mold in Hay, Listeria in Haylage

Every feed choice comes with a risk, and it’s foolish to ignore them. For dry hay, the enemy is mold. If hay is baled with even a little too much moisture, mold can flourish deep inside the bale, producing mycotoxins that can cause respiratory issues, digestive upset, or even kill a goat. A musty smell or visible dust is a giant red flag.

Haylage has its own boogeyman: Listeria. This dangerous bacteria thrives in soil and can multiply in haylage that hasn’t fermented correctly, usually because oxygen got in. A pinhole in the plastic wrap is all it takes to spoil a section of the bale and create a breeding ground for listeria, which causes a neurological disease that is often fatal in goats.

The lesson here is that management is non-negotiable. You can’t be lazy with either forage. You must inspect every bale of dry hay for signs of mold before feeding. And you must be obsessively vigilant about checking haylage wrap for punctures, discarding any bale that smells rancid, feels slimy, or has visible white or blue mold.

Storage Demands: The Barn vs. Airtight Wrapping

Dry hay needs protection from the elements. A single rainstorm can ruin a stack of unprotected bales, leaching nutrients and inviting mold. This means you need dedicated, dry, and well-ventilated barn space, which is often a major constraint on a small farm.

Haylage offers a compelling alternative because its storage is built-in. The plastic wrap acts as a mini-silo for each bale, making it weatherproof. You can store haylage bales outside in a designated area, freeing up precious barn space for animals or equipment. This is a huge advantage for homesteads with limited infrastructure.

However, that plastic wrap is also a vulnerability. It can be easily punctured by equipment forks, sticks, or wildlife. Rodents can chew holes in it, and birds can peck through it. Every hole is a potential entry point for oxygen and spoilage, so your outdoor storage area must be well-maintained, and you need a roll of special bale tape on hand for immediate repairs.

Labor and Equipment: The True Cost of Each Forage

Making your own dry hay is a high-stakes gamble with the weather. You need a window of at least three, sometimes four, consecutive dry, sunny days to cut, ted, rake, and bale. This often leads to frantic, stressful periods where you’re racing a storm cloud, a pressure that’s tough to manage with an off-farm job.

Haylage dramatically widens that weather window. Since you’re baling it wet, you might only need one or two days of good weather from cutting to wrapping. This flexibility is a game-changer, reducing stress and making it far more feasible for a part-time farmer to put up their own forage.

The tradeoff comes in the form of machinery. Making haylage requires a bale wrapper in addition to the standard hay equipment. These machines aren’t cheap, and the plastic wrap itself is a significant recurring cost. While you might save on building a giant hay barn, you’ll be spending more on equipment and supplies upfront.

Daily Feeding: Spoilage Rates After Opening Bales

How you feed is just as important as how you store. A bale of dry hay is incredibly stable. Once you cut the strings, you can pull flakes off it for days or weeks, as long as you keep it dry. There’s very little urgency.

Haylage operates on a completely different timeline. The moment you open that bale and expose it to air, the preservation process stops, and a new process—aerobic spoilage—begins. The feed starts to heat up and break down.

How fast this happens depends on the temperature.

• In summer: You might only have 2-3 days before the bale gets hot and unpalatable.
• In winter: You can stretch that to 5-7 days, sometimes more in a deep freeze.

This means you absolutely must use up the bale faster than it can spoil. Feeding haylage requires a daily commitment to assess the bale and a herd large enough to keep up with consumption.

Herd Size Dictates the Practical Forage Choice

This brings us to the most crucial truth of all. The choice between haylage and dry hay isn’t about which is "better" in a vacuum. It’s about which is practical for the size of your herd.

If you have two to five goats, haylage is almost certainly a bad idea. You will never be able to feed a standard 4×4 or 4×5 round bale before it spoils. You’d be throwing away more than half of every bale, wasting money, time, and all those well-preserved nutrients. For a small herd, high-quality small square bales of dry hay are infinitely more practical and economical.

Haylage only becomes a viable option when your herd is large enough to consume a bale within that 3-to-5-day spoilage window. This typically means a herd of at least 15 to 20 full-grown goats, depending on bale size and weather. At that scale, the nutritional benefits and harvesting flexibility can finally outweigh the risk and management intensity of spoilage. It’s a simple calculation of mouths-to-feed versus time-to-spoil.

Ultimately, there is no single right answer. The old farmer’s wisdom isn’t about picking a winner, but about matching the forage to the farm. Dry hay offers stability and is forgiving for small herds, while haylage provides superior nutrition and harvesting flexibility for larger operations willing to manage the risks. Look at your herd, your barn, your equipment, and your climate, and choose the system that sets you, and your goats, up for success.