Hay Basics: Know Your Hay. Feed With Confidence.
Hay may seem simple, but there’s a lot packed into every bale.
Hay Basics is a beautifully illustrated digital mini course designed to give beginner riders, horse owners, homeschoolers, 4-H members, and equine students a practical foundation in one of the most important parts of horse care: forage.
Rather than simply memorizing hay types and nutrition terms, students learn how to look at hay, understand what they’re seeing, and apply that knowledge to real-world horse care.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
How hay becomes hay
Follow forage from the field through cutting, curing, baling, storage, and feeding—and learn how each step can affect the finished product.
How to recognize common types of hay
Learn the characteristics of common grass hays, legumes, and mixed hays, including orchardgrass, timothy, brome, Bermuda, teff, alfalfa, clover, and grass-alfalfa mixes.
What makes “good” hay
Explore maturity, leaf-to-stem ratio, seed heads, harvest conditions, storage, cleanliness, and other clues that can help you evaluate a bale.
What you can — and can't — tell by looking
Color, smell, texture, and leafiness can tell us a lot about physical quality. They can't tell us exactly what's inside. Learn why forage analysis matters and what those numbers actually mean.
How to read a forage analysis
Get an approachable introduction to digestible energy, crude protein, ADF, NDF, WSC, ESC, starch, calcium, phosphorus, and other commonly reported values.
How much forage horses need
Learn a practical starting point for estimating forage needs, why individual horses differ, and why “four flakes a day” doesn't actually tell you how much hay a horse is eating.
Why feeding frequency matters
Go beyond pounds per day to consider how horses are designed to consume forage—and why how long the hay lasts matters, too.
LEARN IT. SEE IT. APPLY IT.
Hay Basics was created for visual learners and horse people who want to understand the why behind good management.
The course combines illustrated lesson pages with standalone educational infographics, visual identification activities, practical worksheets, and a companion video. Students don't just read about hay—they practice recognizing, interpreting, and applying what they've learned.
INCLUDED
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Complete illustrated Hay Basics lesson
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Hay Basics reference infographic
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Know Your Hay illustrated forage guide
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How to Read a Forage Analysis guide
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Two visual hay identification worksheets
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Forage analysis activity
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Practical identification and written application worksheets
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Go Deeper video: The Most Common Hay Mistake I See in Barns
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Printable reference materials
WHO IS IT FOR?
Hay Basics is designed to be accessible for beginner riders and horse owners while providing meaningful practical knowledge students can carry into the barn.
It's also a natural fit for homeschool equine studies, 4-H horse projects, riding lesson programs, youth equestrian groups, instructors, and other equine education settings.
Use it as a standalone mini course, incorporate it into a larger horse-science curriculum, assign sections between riding lessons, or print the illustrated guides to keep as references.
BUILD THE HORSE KNOWLEDGE THAT MATTERS
You don't need to be an equine nutritionist to understand the fundamentals of what your horse is eating.
By the end of Hay Basics, students will understand what makes one bale different from another, how to evaluate hay beyond its color, what a forage analysis can tell us, how to think about appropriate forage amounts, and why good forage management involves more than simply counting flakes.
Because there’s more to hay than flakes.
