Hay & forage

Weighted by tonnage, SUM(price × tons) ÷ SUM(tons) — not an average of quotes. Lots run from about 30 to 475 tons, so treating a small load and a semi-load as equal votes would let a handful of little consignments set the price. Priced per ton only. USDA also quotes hay by the bale — 249 lots across 17 states in this window — which is a different unit and is not mixed in here. A 45-day window is used because hay is reported weekly or fortnightly and not by every state every week.

Read this across a row, never down a column. Nationally the grades do not rank cleanly against each other — fair/good hay can average more than good hay — because the mix of classes behind each grade differs. Quality only prices sensibly inside one class. Even then a lightly traded grade can sit out of order: the tonnage beside each figure is how much stood behind it, and the ladder is only worth reading where that number is large. Cells under 60 tons are shown as a dash rather than a price, since one consignment is not a market.

Alfalfa only, weighted by tonnage, months with under 200 tons reported left out. Alfalfa is used as the reference forage because it is the one class quoted in enough states to average nationally month after month.

States under 250 tons or fewer than four lots in the window are left out — Wyoming set a $330 average off three loads before that floor. This is not a like-for-like ranking: a state selling mostly supreme alfalfa will average above one selling mostly grass hay, so read it alongside the quality table rather than on its own.

Markets report on their own schedules, so this takes each market's most recent report within three weeks rather than one date — anchoring on a single day would total up whichever barns happened to publish that morning. Heavy receipts usually mean hay is moving off farms; light ones mean it is being held.

Source: USDA AMS hay market reports. Every price is our tonnage-weighted average of USDA-reported lots, marked Derived with the method stated beside it. Related: bred stock and cull cows for the decisions a feed bill drives, and sale barns for the cattle side. This site is not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the USDA.