The Hay Under the Whole Thing
Spotlight: Border Valley Trading
Border Valley Trading has spent thirty-seven years proving hay quality to buyers in thirteen countries. Now they are bringing that standard to the horse in your trailer, and they can hand you the lab work on the bale you are feeding.
Jared Brady has a question he likes to ask horse people, and most cannot answer it.
He is the president of Border Valley Trading in Brawley, California, and when he started taking the company’s equine products to ropings and barrel races, riders kept asking what made his hay different. So, he started asking one back. What are you feeding your horse right now, from a feed analysis standpoint?
The answer is always some version of the same thing. “Well, I am not 100% sure. We prefer a fine stem, green hay that looks good.”
“I know,” he says, “but what’s the test?”
Nobody knows. That is not a knock on the horseman. For most of the history of this business, nobody has offered to tell them.
Greg Braun, an Imperial Valley kid who had gone off to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, came home and founded Border Valley Trading in 1989. With the help of his team, he built it into one of the largest privately owned hay processing operations in the western United States, with about a hundred employees, and in 2022 it partnered with The DeLong Co., a Wisconsin family business in agriculture since 1913.
Roughly seventy percent of their business services the export markets on an annual basis; thirty percent services the domestic market here in the U.S. Annually, Border Valley supplies 350,000 tons of forage to various consumers in the U.S. and thirteen countries around the world, feeding the dairy cattle, beef cattle and horse industries. In those markets, hay sells on tests as much as appearance. Buyers in Southeast Asia care how the hay looks, but the deciding factor is whether the load matches the paper that sold it.
But the number that ought to matter most to anybody holding this magazine is seventy-five to a hundred. That is how many growers Border Valley buys from across southeastern California and into central Arizona. Family farms in Border Valley’s own backyard, with its buyers standing in their fields year after year. When this company ships that much forage around the world, their customer base has come to depend on consistent supply year round and that is exactly what they provide. Border Valley built a quality system to survive that scrutiny, and they are bringing it to the high-end equine retail customer. Follow one stack through their hands and you will understand the difference.
A Commitment to Safe, Quality Feed
It starts on the farm. A buyer inspects, grades and takes a core sample of the hay at the grower’s place at time of purchase. That stack is labeled in their system and keeps that identity all the way to its destination. The core sample goes to an NFTA-certified laboratory, and the analysis that comes back belongs to that stack and no other. Alfalfa, Bermuda, Teff, Orchard Grass, Timothy Hay and Straw, every commodity gets the same treatment. Lab work is the only part of the process they do not do in-house, on purpose. All core samples go to independent labs to keep their own thumb off the scale.
At the yard every truck is inspected upon arrival, checking moisture levels, possible contamination, inspecting for weeds and any potential damage that can impact quality. What passes goes into storage sorted by bale size, commodity and grade. As products are scheduled for production they are again inspected prior to processing. Hay is then transferred to production barns where it is processed through double compression equipment, and this is where it gets almost obsessive. During the double compression process every bale is inspected by Border Valley’s own team. By the time a bale is finished and ready for final loading it has been handled and inspected six to eight times at different points in their process.
Border Valley’s core driving principle is a commitment made to their customer base 37 years ago, “A Commitment to Safe, Quality Feed.” Brady says he would never trade quality for quantity: “We want to ensure that every bale leaving our facility meets and exceeds our consumers’ expectations and our own standards.”
Does it work? They have shipped various products to one customer in Japan for thirty-five years, better than forty thousand metric tons a year, and that customer tracks their performance down to the individual bale. The failure rate is under half of one percent.
The Product
Here is what that means for somebody hauling to a roping this weekend. Every lot Border Valley processes is lab tested, and the label on each bale is not a generic range. It is the true feed analysis for that lot specifically, giving the consumer real numbers from the exact lot of inventory that bale originated from. Riley Bishop, who handles their California sales, compares it to reading the nutrition panel on a water bottle. We expect that on everything we eat. We have never had it on hay.
That opens a door most horse owners have never walked through. If a barrel horse is running hard and not holding weight, Border Valley can go into inventory and put a number in front of you, protein between 17 and 20 percent with a relative feed value of 150 to 170, the high end of the scale. Feed that same hay to a weekend pleasure horse and he will gain weight and get hot. Brady puts it plainly. You do not go to the gym for two hours and then order a milkshake. Feeding an equine athlete works the same way, and you cannot manage it without knowing what is in the bag. That’s the standard Border Valley is offering, and standing behind.
Clayton Edsall, of Edsall Performance Horses, feeds it.
“The quality of hay we get from Border Valley Trading is second to none,” he said. “In our program, we have horses competing at the highest level, so consistency and nutrition are incredibly important to us. Every pallet comes with nutritional testing results, which takes the guesswork out of what we’re feeding and gives us peace of mind knowing exactly what our horses are getting. Border Valley Trading delivers exceptional quality we can count on, load after load, and we’re proud to have them as a partner of Edsall Performance Horses.”
The other thing worth knowing is what double compression actually does, because the industry has done a poor job explaining it to the consumer.
A traditional three-tie bale gets pressed in half lengthwise and then cut in half horizontally. The compression breaks down the stem and softens it, and the original fiber length is cut to half of its original size. That makes it easier to eat and more palatable for horses, which is why the waste drops off. Riley watches his own horse pick through ordinary hay and leave a pile of stems, then clean up the compressed product with nothing left behind. There is a quality filter built into the process, too. You cannot press hay that is too wet or too dry, so the bale tells on the hay before anybody else does.
When horse owners know exactly what’s in every bale, they can feed with confidence.
The athletes Border Valley sponsors run through the top of this sport, and every one of them is now feeding hay they can put a number to. Two-time PRCA world champion header Clay Smith. Four-time WPRA world champion barrel racer Hailey Kinsel. Twenty-three-time world champion Jackie Crawford. Four-time World’s Greatest Horseman Clayton Edsall. Rising 1D barrel racer Arielle Phillips. And Brandi Wilson, the first athlete the company worked with and the one who has been with them longest. These are people whose horses have to perform on a Saturday, and for the first time none of them are guessing what is in the bag.
The reach goes past individual athletes. Border Valley recently entered a three-year partnership with South Point Arena and Equestrian Center, one of the most respected venues in the sport. Brady says it is a chance to bring the same standard, premium tested forage and dependable supply, to the competitors and horse owners who come through there from all over the country.
Brady will tell you straight that this hay costs more than a three-tie bale. Border Valley Trading works with its grower network to produce the highest horse quality hay possible, test it, reprocess it, inspect it a half dozen times, and package it, and that comes at a cost. He is not claiming it will replace the traditional bale.
It is built for a narrower customer. The one who cares what is in the bale and has never once been handed the paperwork.
Somebody in this sport was always going to ask for this. The barrel racers, breakaway ropers and team ropers who read the label on everything else in their cart have been asking harder questions about feed for years, and getting a shrug and something about how green it looks.
The product is showing up at retailers and Border Valley is bringing on more. You can order directly through their website or buy it through Amazon and Chewy. But the best thing you can do is ask your own feed store whether they carry it, and ask them to stock it if they do not. Feed stores shelve what people walk in and ask for.
Ask what the test says. Somebody finally has an answer.
The People Behind the Product
- Greg Braun, Chairman
- Jared Brady, President
- Riley Bishop, Domestic Equine Sales (Central/Northern CA)
Border Valley Trading 604 Mead Road, Brawley, California (760) 344-6700 bordervalley.com
