Eddie: 2022 A Challenging Year For Many Hay Growers

While it wasn’t the worst on record, this was not the best year for Washington hay growers either.  Andrew Eddie, Vice President with the Washington State Hay Growers Association, said many growers were down on tonnage because the first cut was pushed back thanks to the cold, wet spring.  He added that resulted in several operations only recording three cuts this year.

“For Timothy wise for the [Columbia] Basin, I think tonnage was down a little bit quality was pretty good. But I know that the dryland crop out of the eastern portion of the state was rather large, so there's a lot of that product in the market that I think is moving a lot quicker because it's lower price. And we'll kind of see what happens. I know that right now exporters are pretty slow. And when I say pretty slow I mean really slow.”

Eddie added he’s hopeful those exporters will improve speeds soon.  And input costs were roughly double this year compared to 2020.

"In the sense of urea inputs, which grass is a large utilizer of you know nitrogen fertilization. So, alfalfa PNK was up, most everything was up, herbicide wise, insecticide there was probably about a 5 to 8% uptick probably across the board on everything like that," Eddie said.  "And projections going into this next year from kind of the sources that have and what I've heard they're probably looking to be about the same probably another 3 to 5% maybe. And then supply and availability of certain products is going to be kind of tight.”

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