Colour and leaf tell the first part of the story
Good hay keeps a green cast, from soft olive to clearly green depending on the grass or legume it was made from. Yellow, bleached or brown hay has usually been rained on, left too long in the field, or cut over-mature, and each of those costs feeding value. Run your hand into the bale and pull out a bunch: a good sample is leafy, with leaf blades clinging to fine stems, because most of the nutrition lives in the leaf. Stemmy hay with thick, woody stalks was cut late, fills a bale with bulk the animals pick through and waste, and a bale that feels suspiciously light for its size is often more stem than feed.
Smell and feel catch what your eyes miss
Lift that handful to your nose. Good hay smells sweet, green and clean, almost like the field it came from. A musty, sour or mouldy smell is a rejection on its own, and so is a caramelised, tobacco-like scent, which tells you the bale heated during storage and lost value in the process. Shake the sample: a puff of dust is a warning, and clouds of fine, grey dust point to mould spores, which matter most of all for horses, whose breathing suffers in a dusty barn long before the hay looks obviously wrong. Squeeze a wisp and twist it — soft, pliable stems suggest hay cut at the right stage; brittle, snapping stems suggest it was not.
Always open a bale before you commit
The outside of a stored bale is weather and sunlight; the truth is in the middle. Ask to cut or pull apart one bale from the batch you are actually buying, not the show bale by the gate, and work your hand into its centre. Bales can hide a mouldy core behind a clean face, or hold a band of weedy, stalky material from the field's headland. Check for things that should never be in hay at all: thistles and docks in quantity, baler twine from a previous crop, stones, and litter blown in from the roadside. A seller confident in the hay expects this inspection; reluctance to let you open a bale is information in itself.
Know the automatic rejections
Walk away from hay with white, blue or black mould patches, hay that feels damp or warm inside, and hay with a strong musty smell regardless of how green it looks. Be wary of hay baled from fields you know carried ragwort, a real danger to horses and cattle that stays toxic dried. Dusty hay is sometimes offered cheaply as cattle-only, and even then it is a false economy if it reaches the horse barn by mistake. Cheap poor hay is the most expensive hay you can buy — the waste, the vet bills and the thin animals all arrive later with the invoice already paid.
Match the hay to the animal in front of you
There is no single best hay, only the right hay for a job. Rich, leafy, early-cut hay suits youngstock, breeding animals and horses in hard work; a plainer, later-cut hay can be the wiser buy for good-doing ponies and dry cows who need bulk without surplus energy. Buy the quality your animals will actually use, judged bale by bale with your own hands and nose. In the merchant's yard, with the sample still in your hand, put a follow-up question to KinsLe's Kimmy; she answers using the KinsLe Answers library.