A family hay business, Yass-based, Southern Tablelands grown.

Tablelands Hay is run by Paul out of Yass in the NSW Southern Tablelands. We grow lucerne, oaten and pasture hay across the Yass Valley, bale it ourselves, and deliver it to people who actually need to feed something.

What we do differently

Three things, mostly.

We cut at the right stage. Lucerne goes off as the flowers come out, protein peaks at early flower. Oaten and wheaten go off at soft dough, that's when the seed has most of its weight but the stem is still soft enough to be palatable. Cut too early, you've lost yield. Cut too late, the leaf is gone and you've got stalks. We watch the paddocks daily through cutting season because the window is sometimes a single day.

We shed it the same day. Every bale goes under cover before it sees a second night out. No bleached tops, no rain damage, no mould risk from a damp ground stack. When you open a bale of ours, it should be green inside and smell like a freshly mown paddock, even six months after it was cut.

We deliver properly. If we say Tuesday, we mean Tuesday. If you're feeding stock that depend on a regular schedule, you need a supplier who treats delivery as part of the product, not an afterthought. We run weekly into Canberra and Goulburn, fortnightly into Crookwell and Braidwood, and scheduled monthly runs down to the Monaro.

The country we farm

The Yass Valley sits at the headwaters of the Murrumbidgee, around five hundred metres above sea level. Heavy basalt soils in patches, granite country in others, cold winters and hot dry summers. It's good lucerne country, deep roots get through the dry, and the cold winters keep the lucerne dormant and the leaf tight when growth restarts in spring. It's also reliable oaten country, with enough rainfall through October and November to fill heads and not so much in December that we lose the cut to a wet windrow.

From Yass we cover the Southern Tablelands corridor, Goulburn east, Crookwell north, Canberra and Queanbeyan south, Braidwood and Bungendore further east, and down through the Monaro to Cooma and Jindabyne in the south.

How we got into hay

The short version: we ran cattle for years, ran out of hay one autumn, and figured if we were going to do this properly we'd grow our own. That turned into baling for the neighbours, which turned into a delivery run, which turned into the business you're reading about now. Most of our regular customers came in through word-of-mouth from someone else they trusted.

How to order

Call Paul on 0422 573 281. The phone's answered 24/7 for current stock and availability, and we answer through cutting season too, usually from the cab of a tractor, so don't be put off if it takes a couple of tries.