Hay bales in a field.

Hay quality in the Northwest fared well on the first cutting, but second and third cuttings took a hit.

It was largely dry in June when hay growers were taking their first cutting of alfalfa and grass hay, with only some isolated rainstorms. There wasn’t a lot of widespread rain damage, said Jon Driver, an industry analyst formerly with Northwest Farm Credit Services and Washington State University and founder of Hay Kings social media group.

So there wasn’t a lot of feeder hay. It was largely high-quality hay, he said during a hay outlook webinar hosted by Northwest Farm Credit.

“Normally that’s a great thing, unless you’re a cow-calf producer trying to find what would normally be available,” he said.

Second cutting was a different story.

“Unless you have a steamer, in the Northwest you rely on dew and you bail at night. But when it hits 118 degrees, there’s no dew at night,” he said.

Dew rehydrates the leaves and helps attach them to the stem, he said.

So the second cutting in the Columbia Basin and parts of Idaho was baled when there was no dew.

“The problem is without that dew and without a steamer machine, the leaves shatter and it makes a lower-quality product because the leaves literally fall out of the machine as it’s being baled,” he said.

“But despite that, prices kept going up,” he said.

High temperatures also wreaked havoc on yields in second-cutting Timothy grass. Timothy is a cool-weather grass and doesn’t like temperatures above 85 or 90 degrees, and temperatures were 20 to 30 degrees higher than that, he said.

Third cutting — or second cutting, depending on the area — got smoke damage in August, he said.

“There was some discoloration, lower yields,” he said.

But with tight supplies due to the drought, the challenges didn’t hurt prices, he said.

Alfalfa prices bottomed out about April. The conglomerate price for premium alfalfa in big bales for Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington was around $170 a ton, he said.

“Now we’re talking about $290 a ton,” he said.

That’s a meaningful price increase for exporters trying to sell product overseas, he said.

“As prices increase, we know demand tends to decrease — the question is how fast,” he said.

Higher-priced hay will stress dairies if the price of milk isn’t going up, he said.

Timothy hay prices in the region have seen an even steeper increase. That hay price in all packages was $100 a ton last spring due to a bumper crop in 2020, he said.

“Now we’re talking $350 a ton,” he said.

Even that price might interest livestock producers in Montana, where hay is scarce and $400 a ton is not outside reality in some places, he said.

The magnitude of production issues on non-irrigated grass hay is huge, with substantial increases in grass hay prices because the supply isn’t there, he said.