UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
BULLETIN No. 980 
\g£* Contribution from the Bureau of Markets j*m*i 
Y^&* and Crop Estimates % Sj^y ; 
J&T'^J-U H. C. TAYLOR, Chief J&fy*$5L 
Washington, D. C. ▼ November 16, 1921 
INSPECTION AND GRADING OF HAY. 
By H. B. McClure, Specialist in Hay Marketing, and G. A. Collier, Investigator 
in Hay Marketing. 
CONTENTS. 
Page. Page. 
Grades and inspection service 2 I Certificates of grade and their uses- 13 
How hay is inspected and graded 7 Uniform grades and inspection 15 
In theory, hay is inspected for the purpose of promoting better 
business relationship between the various agencies engaged in hand- 
ling or marketing hay, especially those which do not come into per- 
sonal contact with each other, such as the country shipper and the 
distributor. In actual practice the inspection often proves highly 
satisfactory to one of the interested parties and quite the reverse to 
the other. 
The necessity for inspection of hay arose with the advent of the 
trunk-line railroads and the invention of the baling press. These 
factors greatly widened the heretofore rather unimportant local 
market by making it possible and often very profitable to ship baled 
hay many hundreds of miles. As soon as baled hay was shipped in 
appreciable quantities difficulties between shipper and receiver arose 
because they did not have the same ideas as to what constituted cer- 
tain qualities or grades, or they were unable to describe such qual- 
ities accurately. 
Considerable progress has been made in the inspection of hay dur- 
ing the last 30 years, as is evidenced by the large volume of business 
done in the marketing of hay, but the inspection has not yet reached 
a really satisfactory stage. 
It is the purpose of this bulletin to describe methods of inspection 
in vogue to-day, indicate the relative merits of each kind, and give 
information obtained by a comprehensive study of the subject re- 
cently made in the leading hay markets of the country for the bene- 
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