MUNCIE — When Tammy Courtney and her family take their horses to Brown County State Park to go trail-riding, they don’t worry about somebody stealing them. Instead, they worry about waking up and having more horses tied to their hitching rail.

“You can’t sell a horse and get anything out of it right now. I gave two of them away this year,” Courtney said. “So people come along and tie them to a fence and just leave them.”

equestrian affairs is the result of several elements coming together at the same time — the perfect storm, if you will.

It started with the huge increase in the price of hay as a result of last summer’s drought. Also, diesel fuel has topped $4 a gallon, which means bringing hay in from other states is more expensive than in the past.
And the final contributor — the one least talked about — is the closing of horse slaughterhouses, which means there is no place to sell the old and infirm horses. The result is that people are forced to keep and feed aged horses at today’s much higher costs, according to Courtney.

Hay ranged from $1 to $2.50 a bale in 2006. In 2007, the price jumped to $12 a bale in some areas briefly, before settling in at the current price of $5-$7 a bale.
Hay is more expensive this year because hay production in 2007 was down by about 65 percent compared to 2006, which was a record-breaking year, according to the Indiana office of National Agricultural Statistics in West Lafayette.

As if that weren’t enough, Greg Matli, deputy director of the Indiana office, said last fall that hay stocks left over from 2006 were the eighth lowest since record-keeping began in 1950.

“We didn’t have much to start the year with and then we had a bad year on top of it,” he added.

With 2007 being such a poor production year, hay stocks for 2008 will probably be lower than average, so ‘08 might be another bad year, at least starting out, he said.

According to Courtney, the price depends on how badly growers want to get rid of the hay, how desperate the buyer is for hay, how much is available and the quality of a given bale.

“For a while we couldn’t find it at all,” she said. “A lot of people are going out of state for hay and bringing it back by the semi-load to sell here.”

That’s where the price of diesel comes in. The greater the transportation cost, the more expensive the product is.

Tim Van Gordon sells a lot of hay every year from his farm near Millgrove. Currently he is selling it for $6-$7 a bale, depending on size of the bale and quality of the hay.

Lower prices can occasionally be found, he said, but the buyer must be aware.

“There’s people out there selling junk,” he said. “I’ve seen weeds baled and cornstalk baled. Animals can eat it but it’s low quality.”

Van Gordon expects the price of hay to remain about where it is now for the near future.

Closing slaughterhouses
Then there is the slaughter issue.
About 100,000 horses were slaughtered in the United States in 2007, according to Kathryn Caldwell, a founding member of the Indiana Horse Rescue League, but none will be slaughtered in 2008 because new laws forbid paying horse meat inspectors with U.S. tax dollars.

“That was the only way we could get it done,” because all of the horse slaughterhouses are foreign owned and paid no U.S. taxes, she said. All of the meat was being shipped to Europe and Asia.

The result is that some people unable to feed old horses or sell them to slaughterhouses are just turning them loose in state parks and on other public lands, according to Courtney.

“Some people have abandoned horses, just left them,” she said. “Shutting down the slaughterhouses is not the solution because old animals have to go somewhere. You are not allowed to bury a horse in your own yard. It is illegal. They end up in a rendering plant anyway.

“But we do need to control the way horses are treated up to the slaughterhouse,” she added.

Caldwell agreed that the price of horses has gone down but it has nothing to do with eliminating slaughter, because kill buyers are still buying horses and taking them to Canada and Mexico.

“The cost of horses going down has to do with the drought and has nothing to do with slaughter,” she said. “It’s due to the price of hay and the economy.”

Varied diet
Hay cannot be replaced in a horse’s diet, but it can be supplemented.
“The price of hay is so high it’s hard to feed your animals,” Van Gordon said. “If you are buying hay to feed horses you just ride in the summertime a little bit, I would think it’s difficult. But if you are raising race horses and you are making some money off of them then hopefully you can keep them.”

Jeff Stanley is one of those race horse breeders, and he and others have come up with one alternative to the high price of hay.

He maintains about 100 horses at his Genesis Stable in Blackford County. He buys hay by the ton and believes the price is not going to drop again.

“I think $200-a-ton hay is here to stay,” he said. “With $15 and $16 soybeans and $6 corn farmers are going to grow more grain and less hay. That will keep the price of hay up.”

But he is now supplementing hay with beet pulp, a byproduct of beets that horses like and that is good for them because it has a sugar extract left in it that helps their digestion, he said.

Stanley has fed beet pulp in the past, about 10 percent of the horse’s diet. He has increased that to about 50 percent.

“I raise most of my own hay,” he said. “But the drought last year forced us to buy about $25,000 that we lacked compared to the year before. The horses like the beet pulp, it’s good for them and it helps me.”

Source: The Star Press