Old hay-When does it lose its feeding value?

yep, old hay is old gold……

I'd say it's a bit like Oats. Good hay feeds better than it tests.

the problem with hay is it’s often old pasture that’s left growing until the hay weather comes and if that’s 4 months growing, so be it.
no amount of saving is going to make great feed out of that. But if it’s good hay made then it’s good to keep for years.

To expand on this, I suppose that’s where it gets a bit circular, because even when you think you’ve timed it right, you’re still really just reacting to whatever the season decided to do in the first place. So you end up with this idea that good hay is partly planned and partly accidental, which doesn’t sit entirely comfortably either way.

It’s not that the grass knows what it’s becoming, more that it sort of drifts into being cut at a moment that later gets described as “right,” even if it only looks that way in hindsight. And then once it’s baled, people talk about it as if it was always destined to be good or bad, when really it might just be a case of it having avoided being something else…

So in that sense, keeping hay for years isn’t so much preserving quality as holding onto a version of a decision that may or may not have made sense at the time, which somehow becomes more convincing the longer it sits there!