Hay Oxbow products

Kaytee is a crappy brand, good thing you changed to Oxbow. I personally think they have very nice hay, and use only their brand (as opposed to other pet store brands). By the way, Orchard Grass and Timothy are basically the same thing, so you can replace the timothy with orchard if wanted/needed. Orchard just tastes sweeter, I suppose. It still has plenty of silica to grind piggies' teeth down.

Oxbow's pellets are great. That's what I use and as far as pet store hay goes, theirs seems to be the best quality And the best price (here at least). I still find that it's really dusty and a quarter of the bag's contents are those little pieces and dust tat the pigs wouldn't eat if you gave to them anyway.

I have started buying bales of hay at the local feed store. It is unbelievably cheap and excellent quality hay that lasts us a very long time. They will also usually sell their hay in smaller units if you can't store a bale and it still works out cheaper.

Oxbow is great quality!

I just recently got a 10lb box of Jojo's best and WOW is it ever nice hay! Way better then the last Oxbow box I bought!

I also get Timothy hay by the bale , my piggies live in it .... 1/2 of my cage is paper litter ( Carefresh Natural ) the other half is Timothy Hay .... I only buy Oxbow for them to eat . The fleece was a lot of work , Elmer loves to pee all over, Nellie on the other hand only pees in 1 spot , they are not caged together even tho Elmer has been neutered ..

My pigs eat both Oxbow's adult pellets and their hay. I use to buy Timothy hay for them but for the past few months Oxbow's hasn't looked very nice so I switched my girls to their orchard grass and they love it!

PiggleLove2013 said:

Kaytee is a crappy brand, good thing you changed to Oxbow. I personally think they have very nice hay, and use only their brand (as opposed to other pet store brands). By the way, Orchard Grass and Timothy are basically the same thing, so you can replace the timothy with orchard if wanted/needed. Orchard just tastes sweeter, I suppose. It still has plenty of silica to grind piggies' teeth down.

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Timothy and orchard grass are not basically the same thing. Both are grass hays but timothy is higher in calcium. Orchard grass looks very much like a long stemmed blue grass. No matter what time of season I've gotten orchard grass, it always looks the same. Certain cuts of timothy at different times of the growing season will have more stems and seed heads. Sometimes guinea pigs will show a preference for one or another and might take a couple of days to get used to the switch from one another. I buy 50 lbs of Oxbow orchard grass when it goes on sale at Drs Foster & Smith. It's under $60 with no shipping charge.

Yes I ordered through Drs. foster and smith as well. I tried a local feed store up they only sold hay by the bale. They gave me some of the hay for free that fell off the bales but it didn't seem very fresh and my piggy didn't eat very much of it the way he eats store bought hay. The oxbow hay I ordered is a much bigger bundle than I can get from the pet stores around here and I'm hoping it's good quality. Along with the Timothy I got the orchard grass and a botanical blend to try. It says it's Timothy hay and other I guess floral type grasses so I got a small bag to see. I ordered an assortment of stuff to make the shipping worth my while and to see what my pig likes.

@pinky thank you for the correction. Good to know! I suppose I meant that they serve the same purpose and are both long strand hays.

My piggies and bunnies love their oxbow Timothy hay and pellets! Oxbow is my favorite brand and you can get tons and tons of hay for good prices. I bought 60lb for $50 once! It was so nice and fresh and my bunnies looooved it!

Oxbow has great products, but I wouldn't recommend buying them from a pet store. Ordering online will get you MUCH fresher products. I have never seen a green bag of Oxbow hay locally. If I run out of KMS/Kleenmama's (another great brand) before my next shipment gets in, I usually get a bag of Kaytee because its low price and high turnover makes it more likely to be fresh.

Holy macaroni that's alot of money for hay... I pay $15-$25 for a bale of fresh orchard grass...I don't know if it's 50lbs but I'd say at least. It's so heavy and huge I can't carry it on my own and when I split it up to put it inside it fills two extra-long/large Rubbermaid bins plus several garbage bags. We have to fold the back seats down to fit it in my hatchback...I'll have to call and ask how large the feed stores bales are to confirm.

If you are lucky enough to have a feed or tack store or farm in your area I'd recommend calling around because they sell huge quantities at what is a much better price than even I realized for horses and large animals. For $15 vs $50 or $60 it might even be worth a nice relaxing scenic drive to go pick some up.

Also, my local store also sells big bags of hay if you can't accommodate a bale. The value isn't as good though. They charge $8 or $10 for a bag that I would judge as less than a quarter of a bale...it's still probably 6-10 pet store sized bags though. I find usually stores are very accommodating if you ask for what you want so they might make you a bag even if that isn't a unit they normally sell by.

I buy ALL my guinea pig supplies online... The company I use has " auto ship ".... I get all my stuff , food, hay and bedding every 2 months .... I easily save 50% over pet smart prices ..... I still love to go to Pet Smart and look at all the animals and donate a few bucks ( my Nellie was a rescue pet from Pet Smart , she had a neurological issue and they could not sell her ) she had a real bad head bobbing problem , I fell in love with her and she grew out of the problem, she is fine today other than her little ears are all chewed up, she would be dead today from other pigs dominating her ( the girl at Pet Smart who gave me Nellie also loved her ) me and Nellie are so lucky , Mike

Yeah I got the Kaytee in a pinch and I looked through them carefully to find a really green fresh one. I don't have a lot of Pet Smarts near me but they are around so I looked in their site and Oxbow is nearly double the price I paid for it online so yeah. I compared a couple of different sites and I think I got a pretty good deal. The people at the feed store I went to first were super nice and helpful but there are 2 other ones in my area I'd like to check out to see how their hay comes and they might be a little closer to me than that one. I'm going to be moving shortly so I'm just trying to figure out everything before I have bins of hay laying around lol