How Hay Cubes For Horses Are Made

If you’ve ever considered switching from baled hay to hay cubes for horses, you may be interested in the process used to produce these convenient packets of condensed nutrition. Like any superior horse feed, starting with the highest quality ingredients is essential to creating an excellent end product. Once the sun cured hay has been ground, mixed, and sent through a cubing machine, it is then cooled, stored in sheds, and shipped as needed.

Sun Cured and Chopped

Instead of baling, hay that has been properly field cured is chopped with a field chopper in preparation for the cubing process. Depending on which hay cube you prefer, either pure alfalfa or a mixture of alfalfa and oat hay are used. Sacate Pellet Mills only purchases hay that is locally grown and of top quality. Our hay is inspected both in the field where it is grown as well as immediately prior to it being processed into cubes.

Forming The Cubes

The chopped hay is collected on a concrete pad, then placed into a “meter box”, where it will be mixed with bentonite and water before it is sent through a cubing machine. The machine forces the chopped, mixed hay through a square shaped die with the help of the heat and pressure generated by the process itself. Hay cubes are still considered long stem forage appropriate for the long term maintenance of superior horse health.

Prepping The Cubes For Storage

The hay cubes for horses leave the dye at around 150 degrees and spend the next 18 minutes in what is called a “cooler”. Here they not only cool considerably but also drop from around 13.5 percent to 12.5 percent in moisture content, a number sufficient for long term storage.

Cubes Are Stored in Sheds While Awaiting Transport

Once cooled, the cubes can be loaded onto trucks and transferred into sheds while awaiting transport to various distributors throughout the region. Because of the strict standards used to produce hay cubes for horses, customers can be assured they are receiving a product of consistently high quality in an extremely convenient form available in a formulation appropriate for horses during every stage of their lives.