One of our forum moderators was trying to make a DIY hay basket for his mothers horses. I think he did a bang up job with it. Using materials he found around the farm; he not only saved on building materials, but also helped his mother save on feed costs.
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So I had been thinking about a way to make feeding the horses easier and faster. We were using these nets to hang half a bale in, but they took a long time to use (probably about 20 minutes for 3 bales of hay) and kept breaking, basically more trouble than they were worth imo.
So I decided I would make a hay feeder out of some stuff we had lying around and see how it would work.
I started with some old pieces of grill we were using as a garden trellis this summer, and I took some wood from my sister’s ruined yurt that I took down (see my redneck greenhouse thread for a pic of that).
I was trying to figure out how to attach the grill to the frame in a way that it wouldn’t be permanent, since we don’t need to feed hay in the summer I wanted to be able to use them for trellises again.
That’s when i saw these pieces of hardware from the yurt and it gave me an idea.
One side finished.
The sides and the back done.
And the bottom.
Got it put up on the post.
All done! Hopefully it works well enough as is and I don’t need to do any serious modifications to it.
and the results
It is working pretty good so far, but it does need a little reworking on the design.
I think for the next one I build I’m going to use cattle panels so i don’t need to break the hay up. The holes in the cattle panels are much bigger so the horses will be able to get a big bite out of a compact bail. As it stands now I have to break the hay up and drop it in the top so they can get to it.
It’s also been pulled out of square a bit from all the tugging they have been doing on it but it’s lasted pretty much all winter so I’d say it’s a success so far!
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So take a look around your farm and see what you can use to make a hay basket with.
