Senselessly Random: A Hopefully More Effecient Hay Feeder

My male goats and the cows live in the bigger of my pastures and get fed in a corral of sorts in the winter. I don't have the equipment for round bales so we use the small squares. They're easy to handle, but it does kind of suck when it's time to buy hay and we load and unload 7-9 tons of hay by hand. :D

Anyway, we've tried several different things as feeders with a marked lack of success. Using old troughs to put the hay in was a dismal failure. Either the cows would knock it over and scatter the hay or the goats would decide that it made an excellent spot to bed down. Then nobody would eat out of it. For the last couple years I've just tied a piece of cattle panel to the fence and stuffed hay into it.

This technically worked, but there was still a tremendous amount of hay waste. Those pieces of OSB are there because there was just as much hay falling out on my side of the feeder as was being wasted on the animals' side. You can see the piles that ended up in front of the feeders every year. Those panel are roughly 6' high and by the end of winter cattle were about even with the top of the panels.

So, I came up with another sort. It's actually just copying a rather traditional fenceline feeder for cow, but I did have to modify it slightly so the goats wouldn't view it as a revolving door out of the pen/pasture area. This is what I've got so far.

I should have got some pics before I built the hay box, but, you know me...

There are two board across the botton, just like at the top. Then I put shorter boards at an angle that looked good. Very scientific, yes? :D I put them 14" apart to allow room for cow heads. (And, yes, I know, those boards really should have been cut at the correct angle but it was hot and I was tired and just really didn't care if it's not pretty). Then the other. shorter angled boards were put in to make a V shape at the bottom of the headspace area. Generally, the goats don't go through those V shapes if they are roughly chest high. So far, so good in that respect. Then I just built a box out of pallet pieces to hold the hay.

I am going to build another one in the section just to the left of the feeder. I'm thinking of making it with small headspaces, though, so that only the goats can use it. Then the cows will have their spot and the goats will have theirs. Should result in less fighting and more eating, right? Yeah, we'll see.