How should I handle milkweed & dogsbane in hay for h

Brett24 · May 25, 2022

I will soon be baling for feeding horses.

The field that I want to use has great grass, but also has milkweek and dogsbane (sometimes called false milkweed) in it, both of which are said to be poisonous to horse.

I really dread the thought of walking through the field and picking those out by hand.

I am wondering if anyone here has had experience with this sort of situation, and if so, what you did.

Did you pick the weeks out prior to cutting, after cutting, or not at all?

If not at all did you see any signs of poisoning in your horses?

This post was edited by Brett24 on 05/25/2022 at 04:31 pm.

old · May 25, 2022

I've been baling hay for my horses for decades now and yes I have milk weed but have never had any problem with it hurting a horse

rrlund · May 26, 2022

Is the source of this Facebook or something?
I've said it before, I don't know how horses have survived as a species give all the things that'll kill them.

Brett24 · May 26, 2022

Thank you for the response. It is what I was hoping to hear also.

My thought was that I might go as far as fluffing the bales when I feed them, so it makes it easier for them to pick out the good stuff.

Brett24 · May 26, 2022

Your reply made me laugh. Thanks for that.

No, not on Facebook. My mother-in-law is on Facebook literally all day long. I actively avoid it, for that, and many other reasons.

I was reading about plant toxicity (concerning horses) mostly on extension services websites. It seemed like everything that I looked up was toxic to horses.

I wondered if horses really are as delicate as reported. I also thought that if I happen to have horses that eat the unpalatable, toxic components of the hay, that seems to be just a demonstration of natural selection.

I did a little reading on a couple of horse-centered websites too. These tended toward what seemed like an irrational and extreme idea that even one leaf of one of these plants in a bale renders the entire bale unusable.

That is why I came here looking for more reasonable, experience-based opinions.

This post was edited by Brett24 on 05/26/2022 at 04:59 pm.

Texasmark · Jun 2, 2022

Tough to get hay without them in it when you have neighbors on the windward side that totally neglect their pastures.

On horses I think most owner's buy hay to eat themselves then turn their brood out into weed infested pastures.

Johnson Grass gets a bad rap but my daughter's horse never ate anything but it in hay and the pasture, with my maintaining a
couple of no-no rules to reduce/eliminate any worry about PA poisioning. JG is a superb, self sustaining, sweet and protein filled
cheap hay to raise and maintain. My cows would head for a JG bale first off it one was available.

Northvale PA · Jun 7, 2022

Dicamba will kill milkweed. Spray it on each plant. I have hand pulled milkweed patches too. The roots
spread big time so not a long term solution.

How should I handle milkweed & dogsbane in hay for h

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