Anyone seen this before?

Riding around with a friend on his ranch and we pulled up to his hay barn - he feeds square bales with full shell peanuts mixed in. I have never seen this before - $11 a bale and he says 30% protein

Yes I have they are like deer magnets. Where does he buy them?

Not sure but I will ask - he is near Burnet

I fed peanut hay in the early 90's to exotics and whitetails on a ranch when alfalfa was hard to get. Deer will mainly sift thru the stalks and eat only the peanuts. Exotics will eat most of the bale. They are high protein but it is hit or miss on the amount of peanuts in a bale. The best way to tell (beside visually seeing peanuts) if a bale has a lot of peanuts is to pick it up and drop it on the ground. It will making a "crinkling/snapping" sound from the peanuts as the bale hits the ground. We paid around $7-$8/bale back in the early 90's and you can find it in round bales at times. Lot of sand and grassburs in the bales also. The bales were much lighter than alfalfa though and with all the waste it gets expensive. You can buy the low quality whole peanuts in sacks or in totes. Much more expensive but 100% peanuts and no waste. Just takes time to train deer on them. Once you do they will walk over corn/acorns/protein pellets to eat them. Coons and hogs love them also.

We used to buy it from a peanut farmer near Comanche, but after he retired, I quit doing it.

Ain't seen peanut hay in years!! Good stuff!

Brings back bad memories from when I used to haul the square bales as a kid. Will eat you up. Good stuff though. Best when ground and add in some other ingredients.

Peanut skins is even better, feed both to live stock and deer.

Yelp, I had a big pto mixture I bought off a dairy.

If you store peanut hay in the barn, the rats and mice get on the phone. Back when the government subsidized peanuts, we always had peanut hay. Now, hardly anyone grows them.

They used to grow a bunch in the DeLeon/Gorman area, and they still grow a ton out here at Brownfield/Seminole. We bought peanut round bales the last two years around Gorman. I've never heard it being 30% protein, though. They will certainly pick the peanuts and leave the stalks for later/not at all.

I found a place in FL that sells it. http://www.perennialpeanuthay.org/memberads.php?type=hay You can prob google and find a place closer to your location... I had a deer lease in NC and it had several peanut fields and it would attract a lot of deer.

My grandad used to get peanut hay from time to time when I was a kid, and my cousin and I would grab a handful of cow salt out of a bag, and then sit on the rafters in the barn and pick out peanuts, shell them, then dip them in cow salt and eat them.... Seemed like a pretty good snack at the time!