Pasture Improvement

I come from Montana. Up there hay rings don't seem to be used much. I could be wrong but I really didn't ever see any. What I would see are hay bunks in a feedlot or the bale rolled out on the pasture.

PROBLEMS WITH HAYRINGS

First, a hayring gives you a ten foot radius circle of concentrated manure, pee and hay wastage. A very concentrated circle. This is relatively okay so long you move the ring each time you put in a new bale.. which brings me to the next problem. Most only seem to move the rings seasonally and sometimes never. Don't be lazy! Make that in place fertilization count! Cost is the third problem. They cost money to buy. Some times prohibitively so. If not heavily built, they will get busted up and bent and you'll have to eventually replace it. More money. Finally, they can be problematic for horned livestock. Which I have and have fairly long horns to boot.

PROBLEMS WITH ROLLING OUT BALES

While this spreads the manure over a much larger area, it really only works well with a herd size that can eat that much in a day. But even then, there tends to be excess hay wastage.

MODIFIED BALE ROLL OUT

So this is what we do. The bale is rolled out over the area we want to fertilize, this is generally progressive and after several bales can cover a large area, and a "break" wire (electrified) cuts the cattle off what we don't want them to waste. They will eat the hay from underneath the wire but in general we'll give a foot or two hay strip.

This method still has problems. If it snows heavy your unused hay gets covered up. If it's not too bad you can dig the edge out a little and the cows usually take it from there. Sometimes the cows get out and make a mess of the future hay. This irritates me the most.

CONCLUSIONS

Though all these methods have their problems, if managed well you can put carbon and manure down nicely in a manner that improves your pastures. The picture below is of the modified bale roll out. We have a hay ring with our beef herd as they like to break the fence a little too much. So we move the ring every time we feed them hay.