Hay is for Horses!!!

Once again, I was able to get away from the house projects and do a little work for someone else!  My brother and I were asked to build some sort of device that would hay for horses without making a mess all over.  Basically, horses were dragging very good hay out of the feeding trough and then trampling it into the ground where they would not touch it.  Day in and day out, this made a lot of hay go to waste at the horse ranch.

So our job was to come up with an idea as to how to change that!  After looking at numerous ideas on the internet (most out of steel), we decided on a specific plan.  We would devise a contraption that would hold a hay bale, and the horses would have to work to get it.  I was told that this was actually a good thing as it keeps horses from being lazy!

Ya see?  We knew what we were doing!  Kind of.

Well, after a couple of hours, we had ourselves a horse feeder!  The first one went a little slow as we were also making a blueprint for others to be built long after we were gone.  The ranch wanted to have several placed around the pen, and we needed to come up with the model first!

We were pleased with our project!

Stick the hay bale inside, and close the door!

A goofy-lookin' idea with a specific purpose!

Of course, it didn't matter how much we liked it.  What mattered was whether or not the horses would be able to figure it out.  Well, not even two minutes after we placed it in the pen, the horses came over and knew exactly what to do.  It was pretty satisfying!!!

We have success!

They are workin' for it!

We ended up building two that day.