Posted By Bill on February 27, 2011
We have an older horse. I used to do endurance on him. Mark will be 25 this May (2011). He’s toothless pretty much. He lives on a diet of soybean hull pellets, distillers grains, supplements and . . . chafe hay.
In the past we would purchase chafe hay, either as “pelleted” cubes or bagged. Looking at our costs, and also looking at the bag ingredients as they got eaten (mostly alfalfa) we decided we could do better for the big guy if we did it ourselves.
It can be a bit tedious, but we thought we would share what is working for us.
First, an overview:

Overview of Hay shredding set-up
We are going to take a bale of hay (actually we are nearly half done here) and feed it through this 2002 vintage leaf vac. Twice. Its late February here in Ohio, so it’s low 50′s (Fahrenheit) The snow is melting and things are WET. The setup is so that we can keep the shredded hay as dry as possible while we work on it.
Hay is about $2 a bale here this winter, so we are also using this as a feed supplement for our other 7 horses, our 5 goats, and even a little goes to the chickens. Doing this saves us about 5 gallons of our regular feed (nearly 25 pounds) daily. One full shredded bale will last us nearly a week as a feed supplement for all of those critters!
And before I forget. That bit of HVAC galvanized steel on the front is to re-direct the engine exhaust away from our heads. That bit of plywood of the chipper funnel is to reduce the amazing amount of noise that comes out of there!
Step 1
Get a leaf vac. No Joke. We got the one you see on craigslist for about $100. That was a rare deal, they seem to mostly be about $250-$375 as of this post tonight (I’ll say why I was looking later). Clean it and put in (or get) the smallest “Screen” you can in the grinding part.
The grinding “Screen”:

The one on the right is the original, the one on the left I “acquired” from a friend by trading my coarse one for a “fine” screen. Seems all he wanted was shredded leaves and did not care how fine the result was.
Step Two. Pick your hay:
We are using a grass hay. It’s what we feed to everything here. We’ve set things up so that we can slowly (key word!) feed the bale into the shredder. For future note, the heavier the bale, the less you can feed in before you fill a plastic tote like we use. In these pics (and hopefully videos) We are shredding about 1.5 to 2 full flakes of hay per tote.

Feeding a flake of hay for the first round.
This part is a tedious monotonous task, yet somewhat soothing. You need to feed the hay fast enough that you are not wasting fuel, yet not so fast that you are bogging down the shredder. Bonnie (here) tends to do it in large handfuls, I tend to try and peel off a “tube” of hay. It’s not really important which way you do it, so long as the output on the other end is consistent. They key is to listen to the shredder, and if it slows down, let it catch up. Really, try not to even let it slow down for the best consistency.
Step3. Dump the first shred.
OK, so if I could get another shredder (Remeber my craigslist comment earlier?), I’d own a second shredder, this would all be up on a table, and I’d be feeding a big 55 gallon plastic barrel, not a little tote.
I don’t have that. So, when you shred your 1.5 – 2 flakes of hay, you shut the shredder down and dump the hay like this:

Fist dump of the shredded hay.
The goal at this point is to not shred any more than your receptacle (in this case a tote) holds. Please note we have the shredder up on a pallet. Prior to his we were not only shutting the shredder down each time, we were disconnecting the bag. Pallet made the bag removal/reinstall go away. Big plus.
Here is the finished volume for what we shredded this round:

Finished First Shred Volume (about 1.5 flakes)
Step 4. Shred it again.
Yep, if you are shredding for a toothless animal, or as a feed supplement for smaller critters, once is not enough. We are looking for a 1″ to 1.5″ long grass piece when we do this. You will also get MUCH smaller pieces and seeds. Not a problem if you wet your feed, but it could be if you try and feed this dry.
So you close the bag, pick up the tote, restart the shredder, and feed it back in:

Feeding the first shred in, for a smaller shred.
Step 5. Dump the bag again.
It’s not rocket science. Keep it clean, keep it dry, keep feeding it in till you get the size you want. We were paying $10.99 for a 50lb bag of Standlee “Premium Alfalfa Cubes”, and ONLY feeding that (soaked) to our 25yo stallion. It would last two weeks. This entire bale of hay will feed and/or supplement feed for all of our critters (except the dogs) for two weeks, for $2 plus about an hour of shredding.

Dumping the shredded hay 2nd time
I forgot to take a photo of the finished volume, but it’s about half the volume from before.
Thanks for reading folks.
Bill J.
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