State’s hay growers take a hit

YAKIMA – The heavy rains that hammered parts of Eastern Washington this month have left their mark on several crops, including hay and cherries.

The alfalfa hay that Pat Paulus baled in her Palisades field a week ago was dry and brown – a poor quality, she acknowledged. It had been rained on three or four times and had lost most of its nutritional value, she said.

“I’ll be lucky to get $60 a ton, and with the cost of fuel, we’ll be in the hole,” she said.

Last year, Paulus made $120 to $130 a ton on her first cutting.

Hay was Washington’s sixth-largest crop in value in 2004 at $376 million, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

As of last week, 90 percent of the first cutting had been cut, but probably 70 percent of it had been rained on more than once, dramatically reducing its value, said John Kugler, a Washington State University Extension forage crop specialist in Ephrata.

Growers generally get three to four cuttings a season, but the first cutting represents about a third of the total volume, said Bob Eckenberg, owner of Eckenberg Farms in Mattawa.

Chep Gauntt, a Kennewick grower and past president of the Washington State Hay Growers Association, estimated the losses for the first cutting at between $30 million and $40 million.

As of June 9, just 100,203 tons of first-cutting hay had been sold from the Columbia Basin compared with 221,921 tons at the same time last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Market News in Moses Lake. However, the average price per ton, on just 400 tons of what was sold, was $125 to $130, not far from last year’s $125 to $150, the report said.

Mark Anderson of Anderson Hay and Grain in Ellensburg, an alfalfa and grass hay exporter, said it was too soon to estimate losses, in part because the delay to the first cutting also could hurt later cuttings as well.

“You’ve got a lot of growers selling hay at substantially cheaper prices, but to try to put up a dollar impact, it’s still kind of early,” Anderson said Tuesday. “Obviously, there’s been a hit to profitability on first cutting just given what it’s worth. But all of the impact of the rain, it goes even further to what the yield will be later.”

Japan and Korea are big buyers of Washington alfalfa and grass hay to feed horses, beef cows and dairy herds.

Cherry growers also took a hit from the rain, which can split the fruit. Some growers in the mid-Columbia and lower Yakima valleys, who tend to grow the earlier-ripening varieties, lost more than 50 percent of their cherry crops, said David Severn, promotion director for the Northwest Cherry Growers.

“There are some who had enough rain damage they made it so they couldn’t pick their orchards,” Severn said. “But many still managed to salvage a crop out of their trees.”

At the same time, he said, the earlier-ripening varieties represent only about 5 percent to 10 percent of the state’s crop.

“I think the key for us is that a lot of our fruit was unaffected. A lot of it was still too small, so we’ll be producing a great crop in the Northwest.”

The group has estimated this year’s crop at 120,000 tons, up from the 117,000 tons produced last year.