Chris Martin has been growing hay his whole life, but for the last 15 years he has taken it to a whole new level. He began as a dairy farmer near Alma, and hay had always been a part of his rotation, but in 2006, he made a connection in Pennsylvania and shipped 50 loads of hay. He started leaning more into growing and marketing hay and, in 2010, he essentially switched farms with his brother to get out of the dairy altogether.
Marhaven Agri was started in 2011, with Chris and his other brother Scott going big into hay, growing about 600 acres each year between their own and what they share-crop. They have two rakes, two balers and a bale stacker running throughout the summer and their 120- x 330-foot storage shed is filled with hay they have grown or bought, to process and sell. If they weren’t busy enough, they also have some beef cows and cash crops on the side.
On top of that, Chris also partnered to create the Chinook Hay Dryer, is a founding member of the Ontario Hay & Forage Co-operative (OHFC) and current Vice-President of its board, and helps run the Hay Press Company.
Marhaven Agri hosted the Ontario Forage Council (OFC)’s annual Forage Focus on December 6, 2024. This year, OFC joined forces with the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association (CFGA)’s conference, offering the day as a free post-conference tour.
The day involved a bus tour to Mark Horst’s hay storage near Gorrie, then to Marcrest Manufacturing near Listowel for a tour of the facilities that manufacture the Bale Baron and a lunch. (The tour ended at Marhaven Agri for an industry trade show, demonstration of the hay press, a presentation about the Ontario Hay and Forage Co-op (OHFC) and a panel discussion about hay exports with Chris Martin and his fellow co-op members, Fritz Trauttmansdorff (Dunlea Farms) and James Fisher (Fidale Farms), along with Mark Horst (Marcrest) and Jay Aitkins (Ag Credit Corporation).
It was clear that when it comes to hay, these guys mean business.
Opportunities for hay
These days, hay makes 12 billion U.S. dollars annually in global trade (according to the GAIN report) and there are at least two reasons for Ontario to be a major global exporter: the province has both reliable rains and access to ports on the Great Lakes.
Another reason, perhaps self-serving for Ontario farmers, is that hay is good for the land. Hay is great for the rest of the rotation, improving soil structure and infiltration, controlling weeds, reducing fertilizer requirements and improving yields in other crops in the rotation. Ontario’s Agronomy Guide for Field Crops (Pub 811) includes a nitrogen credit of 100 lbs/ac from alfalfa to a subsequent corn crop, along with a yield boost of 10-15 per cent.
Still, Ontario has been seeing a dramatic drop in hay acres in the last 50 years. According to census data, pasture acres are down by 78 per cent since 1976 and hay acres are down by 40 per cent in the province. This makes sense, because cattle numbers went down by 49 per cent in the same period.
Since the 1980s, and the creation of the Canadian Hay Certification Program for export, Ontario farmers have been wanting to export their hay, but shipping fees made it impractical for the long trip from Ontario, and the furthest Ontario hay travelled was down the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. and delivered by truck. Meanwhile, Alberta and the Western states of the U.S. had a relatively easy trip to Japan, which has been a major importer of hay since the 1980s.
Another factor in hay production, as most readers will recall, is that bringing in hay can be an awful lot of work. It wasn’t until the 1970s that farmers could buy large round balers and large square balers to drastically reduce the time and people required for harvest and handling.
But, as the trend was towards the large bales, a Huron County farmer, Mark Horst, realized that the horse market still needed small square bales for individual handling, so he designed an ingenious compromise that packaged small squares into large bundles for easy transport. He started tinkering with his idea and prototyping in 2003 and was into production by 2007. He named it the Bale Baron and within two years he was exporting them to Europe and Australia. Today, the Bale Baron has become a household name to hay producers around the world.
The global hay market began to open to Ontario in the last decade. With increased demand for milk around the world, large dairy farms sprung up in China and the Middle East, in areas that didn’t have the capacity (that is, water) to produce enough feed. At the same time, improvements to the Suez Canal in 2015 and Panama Canal in 2016 put the costs of long-haul ocean trips within reach for Ontario.
Hay producers organize
Ray Robertson had been working with the Ontario Forage Council since 2000 and had led several trade missions overseas looking for potential export markets. He was astounded at the market for hay and had been promoting it for a few years.
“Ray was really the godfather of hay exports from Ontario,” says Fritz Trauttmansdorff. In 2015, Ray brought together the Ontario Hay Marketing Forum to hear a presentation by David Normandin, from Norfoin Inc., a large-scale hay producer, buyer and exporter from Quebec. When Ontario growers saw what the Normandins could do with a hay dryer, they got interested in reaching the overseas market.
There would be quite a few hurdles that hay growers would have to overcome to export beyond the U.S., including quality, logistics and grower education. While Ontario has the rain and farmers with both the expertise and equipment to grow good quality hay, it is risky to leave hay to dry down to 12% in the field to make premium grade. To access overseas markets, Ontario would need to have access to a large amount of premium hay to fill large orders, hay dryers, hay presses to double compact bales for shipping in sea containers and the relationships in international markets. It was too big for any one person to handle.
“It was either we go big or go home,” says Fritz. A working group of the Marketing Forum took a hard look at what it would take. Someone would have to take a leap and make a huge investment to get Ontario hay overseas. So that’s why farmers went in together.
They decided to share the risk and the rewards by forming a co-operative in December 2015 with the 10 members of the working group. They accessed funding, hired George Alkalay, Northfield Ventures Ltd, to support with a business plan and contracted Patricia Ellingwood, of the Ontario Forage Council, for administrative services. A lifetime membership is $1,000 and gets you one vote and access to the overseas market at an equal price as the rest, no matter how large or small of a grower.
Fritz Trauttmansdorff has been the President of OHFC since its inception and is a powerhouse driving Ontario’s hay export market. Trauttmansdorff runs Dunlea Farms near Jerseyville. He came there from Austria in the 1980s, to a dairy farm on 250 acres. He recalls that they had to buy hay for the cattle the first year he was there. After that, he started growing hay and he was pretty good at it. He ended up selling the cows in 1986 and instead focusing on hay as part of his cash crop rotation.
Ontario hay dryers
An Ontario farmer wouldn’t think of not having access to a dryer for corn, and neither would a serious hay producer not be seriously considering a hay dryer.
“It takes the risks out of hay,” says Fritz, and it is necessary for producing high quality hay. There are several types of hay dryers around the world, Fritz himself had built a passive drying system in his barn. He adds that good hay growers also use a hay preservative, whether something like Nuhn Forage’s “The Juice” – a buffered organic acid product – or Silo-King’s enzyme and bacterial products, that reduces pH and prevents spoiling. While these products compliment a hay drying system, they are much more important for growers without a dryer.
Chris Martin worked with Edgar Reist to design a revolutionary hay dryer. The Chinook Hay Dryer takes three large square bales at a time (either 3’x4’ or 3’x3’) onto a spike table that inserts 150 spikes from both the top and bottom and pumps 90°C air into the bale. It can remove up to 10% moisture in 15 minutes. Running on a three-phase 250-kilowatt diesel generator that powers the heating elements and a 200-horsepower fan, the bales are dried evenly to their target temperature of 50°C and then moved to a cooling ramp. The unit can dry about 6-8 tons an hour.
After the prototype stage, Reist passed the manufacturing of the Chinook Hay Dryer to Orvie Knorr of Knorr Manufacturing near Priceville. They have now built about 60 dryers, with 30 in Ontario and the rest mainly in Michigan and Ohio.
Another made-in-Ontario hay dryer was built just 30 minutes down the road by Mark Horst and his team at Marcrest Manufacturing. It takes the opposite approach, slowly drying batches of 18 bales in a closed chamber with low heat and high airflow over several hours. Using a propane 140-horsepower engine driving a four-foot centrifugal fan which generates 40,000 cubic feet per minute (cfm), the only heat is captured from the engine itself. Hot off the press, Marcrest sold its first few dryers in 2024.
Hay Press Company
After hay has been dried, it needs to be double-compacted for the most efficient transportation, and hay presses aren’t cheap. Previously, the OHFC had used a hay press in Eastern Ontario for its shipments overseas, but they were going to need one in Southwestern Ontario.
Capitalization has been a long-standing issue for co-operatives, but Ontario found a solution when a few OHFC members and other investors, along with a loan from Farm Credit Canada, pulled together well over a million dollars to purchase a conversion- compaction hay press as a separate corporation. The Hay Press Company is contracted to process hay for the OHFC and its shareholder growers; it can also process bales for other growers.
The hay press was purchased in 2021 and installed at Marhaven Agri, where large square bales are split into 11 x 16 x 22- inch bales that weigh between 40 and 50 pounds, with the exact weight controlled by the press and adjusted for clients as required. These bales will max out the weight of a transport truck bound for the U.S., explains Jamie Fisher. Jamie is the President of the Hay Press Company and board member of the OHFC; he farmed his whole life near Burlington, using marginal land around fruit orchards for growing biomass crops and hay for the local horse market.
For the overseas export market, the bales are double compacted with 1,000,000 pounds of force to make that same small bale weigh 65lbs. The press can process up to 75 tonnes a day, which will fill three 40-foot shipping containers, and brings each just under the maximum weight for shipment of 26 tonnes. At peak season the OHFC was shipping five sea containers a week. The export operation is inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and a SGS hay analysis is provided for each shipment upon request from the buyer.
Marketing overseas
This operation hinges on the global market for hay, which has its share of challenges. Josh Callen is a hay market analyst from Idaho, who runs the Hoyt Report and keeps his finger on the pulse of the hay market in Western U.S.
He spoke at the CFGA conference about global trends in the hay market that rely on international currency, politics, global prices for beef and dairy, alternative feed proteins, and weather patterns. He showed that Chinese milk prices were strong in 2021 and 2022 but dropped below the cost of production in late 2023. To cut costs, Chinese farmers quickly changed their feed ration to include cheaper protein sources, like canola or soybeans, and to use straw for roughage, or some got out of dairy production altogether.
Japan remains one of the largest import markets for both the U.S. and Canada. Canada imports a significant amount of hay from the U.S., but the U.S. is also the top market for Canadian hay exports. There were 53,000 metric tonnes (MT) delivered from Canada to Florida alone last year and that market is growing year by year, says Callen. It might not care about the 25 per cent tariff that Trump is proposing, he adds.
With just under $253,000,000 in sales in 2023, Canada is the fourth largest exporter of hay in the world, behind the U.S., Australia and Spain, according to Callen. According to Stats Canada, Ontario is currently about 18 per cent of Canada’s export market, but that has grown by over $21,000,000 since 2019. The overseas markets are being served by the OHFC, but the rest of Ontario exports to the U.S. are done through brokers or private relationships.
The OHFC isn’t targeting the Asian markets because the co-op’s target market is premium hay for horses, camels and small ruminants, explains Jamie Fisher, and they don’t want to compete with cheap hay. With water use restrictions for hay growing in the Middle East, the demand is only growing stronger. As well, Ontario and Quebec have a shipping advantage compared with the hay coming from the Western seaboard in the U.S.
The OHFC went on its first trade mission to the Middle East in April 2017 to the Agri ME show organized by the Canadian Trade Commission. Their first shipment went to the Middle East within the year.
By ship, the trip to the UAE or Dubai takes about six weeks if all goes well. The cost of shipping varies widely and is paid by the buyer, but it is estimated that 90 per cent of that cost is in the ground transportation to and from shipping yards.
For some time, the OHFC had steady shipments, but when conflict in the Middle East heated up in January 2024, there were very few ships that could get through the Red Sea without being attacked. Insurers were hesitant to let ships through the Red Sea, and instead ships went around the horn of Africa. This trip should technically only take a week longer, but the waiting for safe seas around the Cape of Good Hope as well as priority drop-offs in India meant that OHFC hay stayed on the ship for four months, taking on moisture despite the desiccant strips and degrading the quality. And with Ontario hay being only a handful of sea containers on a ship carrying up to 12,000 of them, they just can’t command priority.
Next steps for Ontario hay
The OHFC is pivoting to make its next move and secure its position in the Middle East, so it hopes it can also ramp up premium hay production in Ontario. It provides mentorship and connections, and it continues to look for new members or growers to sell premium hay. The OHFC has also researched and developed new ways to get hay easily into rotations, like growing timothy grass as a quick winter cover crop between two years of soybeans.
“Hay is an excellent crop for vegetable growers to diversify,” says Fritz, who has seen great results using hay to build soil health between rotations of potatoes.
As for Chris Martin and a few other members, they are also willing to rent or share-crop local land for hay or to do custom work for farmers who don’t want to make the investment in the proper equipment. Chris works out the math: on good land, you can get three cuts and 4.5 metric tons (MT) per year and the OHFC is paying between $0.12 and $0.14 per pound, so that means $1300 per acre. Sharing 50 per cent of the gross, Marhaven will do all the field work, save for the landowner who would be responsible for spreading fertilizer after every cut.
Of course, the price will vary depending on the quality, which is based on local weather, and depending on the market, which is often based on other people’s weather.
As for crop insurance for hay, that is still a bit tricky. Hay and forage yields are often not understood in detail because most farmers aren’t weighing every load, and so this has made it difficult for Agricorp to insure. It is calculated instead by excess or insufficient rainfall, especially within harvest windows. As more growers take hay more seriously, perhaps Agricorp will provide insurance for both yields and quality.
The entire hay industry is built on relationships. There is no Chicago Board of Trade that is setting a price, it is about a relationship and trust between the buyer and seller. There is no easy test weight grade and, although there are U.S. grade standards, most often quality is determined by eye, that is, how green the hay is.
While there is strong demand for Ontario hay from the Eastern seaboard, the relationship between the OHFC and buyers in the Middle East is just beginning. For Fritz, he has found that the best bet is to build relationships farmer to farmer.
“Farmers are the same anywhere, an Arab farmer’s handshake is as good as ours here,” says Fritz. This is another advantage of operating as a farmer co-operative.
“It has been incredible to see Ontario’s hay industry evolve in the last decades,” says Patricia Ellingwood, who has been working with the Ontario Forage Council since 2012 and took the reins of the from Ray Roberston in 2023. When she started, hay sales were mainly to local farms, but now there is so much going down to the U.S. “Farmers are taking hay production really seriously,” she adds, “and they are pioneers, both competitive and co-operative at the same time.”
These are exciting times for Ontario’s hay export market, thanks to the dedication of those who have developed the technology and worked together to create a new frontier for hay. ◊