Grandpa's Best Timothy Hay Mini Bale, 10 Lbs (Packaging may vary),Brown

I read all of the reviews before I purchased, as I didn't want a huge shipment showing up and then forcing the bunny to eat the hay (it may not like) until it was gone. I started getting nervous as some of the poor reviews, but took a chance. I am so, so glad that I did. The condensed bale showed up, in a medium box, in a large plastic bag. No mess there to carry it through the house. It was very high quality, fresh, and fragrant. For those people like me who do read the reviews, here is my feedback with the other reviews in mind: 1. I think the people shocked at the condensed bale just do not understand hay or farming. Yes, this is 10 lbs of timothy hay super pressed into a tiny bale. Yes, it will be difficult to separate. You may need some sort of tool to loosen it up as you flake it out for your pet. This should be obvious it was not coming loose like the bags of hay that are loosely filled. Yes, you will need scissors to cut the bale open. Once again, this is 10 lbs of hay pressed into a tiny block!!! 2. My bunny LOVES it. Yes, there are random sizes of hay in the bale. This is normal. Again, you are buying a high quality, farm cut and processed, bale of hay. None of the hay is inedible. The bale I received is very fresh and bunny has NOT picked through it like other hays I have purchased (from petco, local farm store, walmart). Even the large pieces are eaten up quickly because they are NOT hard and stale. 3. It is okay for hay to loose color. Organic products (ie: plants) can loose color when it gains access to air and such. Just because it is not bright green in part of it does not make it bad. Mold and moisture is when hay is bad. I think this is an awesome, quality product that I will continue to purchase. I absolutely love that its pressed into a tiny bale. I can put it in a storage container with a lid to keep the mess down (vs that time i bought a 20 lb bale from the local farm store and it was huge and made an even bigger mess). Also, it is cost effective and as it lasts longer, I am being pro-active and not re-purchasing a bi-weekly plastic bag of hay from walmart or petco (less plastic is good!). As well, it makes me feel great to be supporting a small farm vs a large random company and low quality product.

I rarely leave reviews, but this hay absolutely deserves one. My 2-year-old bunny is incredibly picky—she always digs through her hay to find the freshest bits, and I’ve wasted so much money trying different brands and the most expensive. This hay is a total game changer. Some people complain that it comes in disks, but for us, that’s a huge plus. My bunny loves tearing them apart, and there’s almost no waste. After nearly two years of tossing out uneaten hay, I finally found one she devours! It I really hope the quality stays consistent with future purchases. For picky bunnies this is the one. It looks delicious and smells so fresh!

I have two small rabbits. They love this hay and so do I. The compressed bales are incredibly convenient. I have indoor rabits and live in a townhouse. Hay is cheaper when you buy 10+ lbs at a time, but it usually comes in huge boxes. These mini bales save a ton of space. They are also way less messy for me because I can easily put them in a plastic tub without spilling any hay (that part of the process is usually a huge mess and frustrating because I the tubs usually only fit about half the box of other kinds of hay). And I can fit more hay into a feeder at a time which makes my life easier (only need to feed them every other day now). The bunnies love the hay and seem to eat all of what I give them and then flop down in their way that indicates they are happy and satiated. The bales have smaller cuts of hay with more stems/ fewer flowering seed pods than some other brands of hay, but my bunnies don't seem to care. From what I've read, the stems are perfectly fine for nutrition ( some bunnies apparently have taste preferences for the seeds, but mine don't). And the price is right. I paid about $2.50 per pound for a 10 lbs box, which is about as cheap as any hay I've seen on this site. Complaints about dust/ small flakes seem overblown. Yes, there's some dust, but I've never found a brand that doesn't have that. And I appreciate that it comes in plastic bags (some brands don't which really sucks when the cardboard box gets wet in the rain).

But it has way too much dust it makes my rabbit sneeze alot and honestly that is a deal breaker for me. The dust I feel can make them sick because it causes them to sneeze and it makes me worried alot. I like this hay it's very fresh but the dust is a no go. But I appreciate the low cost of this hay I just wish they somehow shook the hay and got the dust out before they packaged it. And also it is very compressed which is fine just tussle the hay a bit before taking it out thebag and put it in your rabbits feeding bin. Other than that I guess I would still buy it but shake the dust out myself somehow.

My guinea pigs love this hay. It is nice and green and seems to be good quality. It looks and feels better than others I have bought. They jumped right in and started eating it up so it must taste good too. For me it comes in cute compact little hay bales, so cute and functional. It breaks up very easily into little slabs that makes it more manageable than the bag types. If you use hay you know what I mean, it gets everywhere!! It will all come apart very easily but I like it in the slabs so they can play breaking it up. I would recommend buying.

Wow, what a disappointment. Make that a shock, after reading the product details and watching their video. The first shock was opening the bag and finding a pretty pale looking block, with no fresh hay fragrance at all coming from it. Maybe the mini-bale I got was one that got forgotten somewhere for months? Next shock: it' turns out to be almost completely unusable, putting out pieces that aren't big enough to actually serve up. A mysterious mini-brick of hard stuff that you get to fight with to unpack into - a mega-mess. So all in, a waste of money - and time. Because make no mistake the clean up of the mega-mess is a major hassle, and a real health hazard for vacuum cleaners - as well as for any being that breathes. Which isn't actually a joke. Inhaling those fine particles even if they're organic ones is seriously not OK for any species, including not for us! So much for "low dust" hay. I first thought maybe I didn't know how to work with the compressed hay. So I tried to figure this out before I wrote a review. This is what I found. When I eventually pried apart one the superglued slabs (I can't see these as "flakes": they're good and solid wads, nothing flake-like or " Soft-Textured Formulation" about them) and tried to "fluff" it like in the video, I ended up with a pile of tiny fragments and itty-bitty stalky bits with some flattened and broken up seed heads, and.... a whole lot of dust, I mean a LOT of crushed into powder leaf etc. Then I tried to see if I could get better results, meaning more actually usable sized pieces and also less powdery fall out, by gently, slowly teasing the wads apart, and NOT bashing the "flakes" up like in the video. That's when I saw with certainty that the reason I was ending up with itty-bitty stuff wan't because I was crushing it up trying to get it apart, but because the wads themselves are made up of really little bits, fragments, and powdery stuff all compressed together. That's also pretty much, what my eyes were warning me when I watched the video. But I wanted to believe what the nice demonstrator said, that it's really "nice long pieces". The video also says their way of packing hay is designed to reduce mess. Which is true - so long as you don't take the hay out of the bag to use it. Maybe some critters could decide to eat this like it was a giant gnawing block or giant food pellet. I thought of trying that. But I dropped the idea because that seems like literally letting them shove their noses into wads of stuff that is going to release rounds of fine particles right into their faces as they gnaw. Not OK. My takeaway is really wanting to know what exactly their "patented hand sifting process" is - and why it's not actually producing what they tell us they're producing, and if it's going to if they get it right. Because a handy, safe, and also fairly cost-effective compressed - low dust AND organic - pack of Timothy hay IS a really great idea! Meanwhile I just don't get it. They don't say that they're starting out by chopping up regular bales of hay into little bits and pieces. Short of doing that, the only part of a regular bale of first cut, and a more mature second cut Timothy hay you can "hand sift" is the itty-bitty stuff that falls out of the regular or big hay bales as they get handled and stacked/moved around. Cutting up, and/or handling super dried out hay bales both generate a lot of bits and pieces and powder level crushed stuff. Maybe they will work out a better "process" to get that. Maybe I got a bottom-of-the-barrel one and they need to work on better quality control. Maybe they make enough profit doing it this way that they don't need to do anything. Meanwhile it's back to reading reviews for me. I really appreciate the many other people who share their experiences so I can try to make more informed choices.

So i have 5 guinea pigs that are all full grown. They go through a lot of hay. I've tried many different brands and for this brand alone i've bought about 4 10lb bales. The first one was the best, if you watched their demo video the bale broke apart perfectly just like the video. The pigs went through it very fast so i got another one. This bale was fine up until the halfway point through the bale where the stack was all twisted up but still very compacted so it was very difficult to take apart neatly. I figured this wouldn't be a reoccurring issue so after that one went by quickly i purchased another one. This one was even worse than the prior with most of the bale being twisted up but still heavily compacted so tearing off a small sheet was impossible. I also started realizing why the hay was going by so fast. Not because my pigs were chowing it down fast but because the hay from being so compacted was super brittle and would just kinda crumble into pieces even when not feeling like it was too dry or anything. I never tried the less compacted lower weight versions so this could just be an issue with the 10lb since the fit double the size in the same packaging. I ordered one more bale thinking maybe it was a rough batch but it was just as bad as the one prior again so i have stopped buying these. Its not horrible hay but the compacted bale really crushes the hay. The fox tails that my pigs love in timothy hay just loot like pressed book leafs that crumble on touch. I recommend non compacted hay it lasts longer for the pigs and you get more for your money for that.

After going through all 10 lbs I was concerned to get another one while waiting on shipping. I tired another brand, supposedly one of the best, and the hay did not even come close to comparing to Grandpas Timothy hay. The hay that we bought from here was much softer, and when we got our rabbit, he hardly ate any hay. But when we tried the hay, my rabbit ate so much so fast that I ran out faster than I wanted to! He will it touch the other brand at all, and it was much thicker, drier, and harder for him to chew. He doesn't eat it as fast as the grandpa hay. His poop also looked larger and more healthier. I am just anxiously waiting for grandpa's hay to come quickly so that I can give him what he originally loves. It's too bad about these other reviews because the rabbit and I have really loved this hay. It has changed his poop significantly then when we first got him which means he is very very healthy on this hay. Hope this reviews brings light to how great this product is. I don't mind pulling it apart. Once pulled apart, it's fluffy and great to work with. There were some yellow hay here and there, but not disappointed by it.