Enterprising Idaho hay growers are selling their crop to East Coast racetracks, Georgia dairies, Disney World elephant trainers and even Queen Elizabeth's stables.
Their clients are willing to pay the freight - and then some - for high-protein, low-fiber hay cut in the nick of time under sunny skies and irrigated, high-altitude conditions.But hay grower and marketer Andy Dobson of Mud Lake estimates that only one in five Idaho hay producers is growing the crop for its cash value.
"There is money in alfalfa," he said, "but you have to take care of it."
Hay, grown on 1.23 million Idaho acres in 1991 at an estimated value of more than $319 million, trailed only cattle and potatoes in overall value of production last year.
Still, it's the stepchild of Idaho crops, Dobson said.
Row-crop farmers whose major cash commodity is beans, potatoes or sugarbeets and who grow alfalfa primarily for rotation "always get the others taken care of before they take care of their hay," Dobson said.
And that's often a costly mistake, he maintains.
Harvesting time makes or breaks hay quality, said Robert Romanko, University of Idaho extension forage specialist at Parma.
Romanko estimates that delaying harvest by just three days during warm weather can slash quality from premium to good. While premium quality hay for dairies and racetracks is typically commanding $75 to $95 a ton, Romanko estimates prices for good hay at $55 to $75 and for fair hay that is fed to beef cattle at $40 to $55.
Statistician Doug Wong of the Idaho Agricultural Statistics Service puts the average price paid for Idaho hay in 1991 at $74.50.
With surplus carryover stocks keeping a steady downward pressure on prices, producers are hoping cattle forced off parched range earlier than usual will nibble some of the slack out of hay markets.
According to Romanko, drought in other states during the 1980s was the principal catalyst for development of new markets for Idaho hay.
"At a time when we had a surplus of hay, there was an acute shortage somewhere else, and that really helped," he said. "It created prices that were high enough so that people felt that they could absorb high freight costs to these markets and still make money."
Impressed by the quality of the Idaho hay they received, buyers are coming back for more at delivered prices of $150 and even higher, said Romanko.
Ron Torgerson, a Hamer-area hay marketer and grower, first sought eastern customers about six years ago "when we couldn't pay our bills with what we could get for hay around here."
Now he sells cubed hay, which can be packed more densely into railroad cars, to Georgia and Florida dairy producers. Their demand for a premium product dwarfs local supplies, and they will pay $100 plus freight.
This summer, marketing specialist Stewart Hyndman of the Idaho Department of Agriculture will begin compiling the results of a marketing survey of East Coast racetracks. That should help Idaho growers locate additional out-of-state markets.
But Dobson predicts many hay growers still won't "have the stomach for it."
"They don't know the buyers from Adam," Dobson explains. "It scares them to death to put $2,000 worth of hay on a truck and ship it down the road with no money in the palm of their hand."