Using a hay probe or corer is the best way to collect a sample for testing. | Courtesy Dr. Dennis Sigler

A: When having a hay analysis performed, your goal is to get data that represents all the hay of that type in your stack. Hay within a stack will have grown across the field, and growing conditions can vary depending on soil conditions, sunlight exposure, etc., and these factors can result in nutrition content variation bale to bale. The variation shouldn’t be too great, but some will exist. For this reason, you want to submit a sample for analysis that captures the variation that exists within the hay stack.

The data you receive from the lab is only as good as the sample you send them. Therefore, your representative sample needs to capture potential variation between bales and across the stack.

Obviously, the more bales you sample, the more representative your data will be. However, it’s not realistic to sample every bale in a stack unless you only have a very small number of bales. At that point, testing the hay might not make much sense because you might have fed most of it by the time you get lab results back