As temperatures continue to rise across Saskatchewan, so does the price of hay.
The average price of hay in the province generally sits between 3 and 5 cents per pound, but a dry summer has prices rising to between 5 and 8 cents per pound.
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“You’d be looking at about $140, $150 for good quality hay, which is quite a bit more than we would’ve seen in normal years,” Terry Kowalchuk, a provincial forage specialist, said.
The hardest impacted are farmers in southern Saskatchewan, where dry conditions exacerbated by extreme heat have caused a deficit for hay. It’s a different story in the north; farmers are seeing a surplus of hay crops.
The inconsistency has producers looking at alternate food sources to feed their cattle.
“Producers are creative,” Mike Fleury, the sales manager at Saskatoon Livestock, said.
“They’re using straw, barley straw, maybe even some grains with it, instead of having to source the hay.”
Many farmers are even using silage to avoid shipping hay.
“The cost of shipping hay is expensive and if you ship it beyond a certain range then it’s really not viable to buy it,” Kowalchuk said.
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Other farmers are relying on neighborly kindness, capitalizing on failed, unusable crops to feed their cattle.
“There’s always been a provisions to harvest hay from ditches for example,” Kowalchuk said.
“There’s wildlife areas that are being made available, and there’s Crown lease land where people may not be utilizing their leases where they can access additional hay if people were to sublease some of that land.”
Many farmers do store a years worth of feed in case of dire situations; for those who didn’t, it’s come down to getting creative, or risk losing their herds.
“If (finding alternate sources) fails, then of course they’ll start to sell off cattle.”
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But Fleury said selling off cattle would be a last resort for producers. He said summer sales have been relatively normal, but is expecting to see calves sell sooner this year.
“I think they’re making some decisions now on their calves, if they don’t have enough feed they’re more than likely going to market calves earlier,” Fleury said.
“You got the weight in the calves, you don’t want to see them backing up, and losing weight.”
Farmers aren’t panicking just yet, but are hoping for some fall precipitation followed by a mild and wet winter.
Meteorologists say it’s still too early to tell what kind of winter we’ll have in Saskatchewan, but early indications say things will be warmer and drier than normal.
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