This harvest of hay has many yellow pieces...it isn't green and soft as in the past.

I am always looking for new hay and a better deal for my bunny. She has gotten to the point where she only likes second cut hay, so I decided to give this brand a try. I have given it two stars rather than one because it is a good price and is softer than some second cut hays, a good thing. I know that the box of hay has a shelf life of YEARS. Perhaps this is true when the hay is bagged as is Gold. However, having grown up on a dairy farm, I know full well hay does not stay fresh for years. This is by far the driest hay I have ever purchased. The green pieces were dry and extremely dull in color, faded. There was not a hint of freshness. I understand the issue of brown, dead grass. My box had about 20% brown grass which bunny does not eat, a higher % than I have ever seen. Bunny is very adept at picking out and discarding the inedible brown grass; it gives her something to do. However, the brown pieces are so numerous and pervasive that she ends up using much of the rest as litter. I now have to order another, more expensive brand having gotten little benefit from my 5 pound Gold purchase. This is the worst, stalest, most unappealing hay in color and odor I have ever purchased. As always, Drs F&S were quick in shipping, accurate and well packed. This negative review is not intended in any way to reflect poorly on them.

I had been purchasing American Pet Diner Timothy Hay for many years. For the first several years, the quality was excellent, and this was the only company I had found that sold the softer, second cut Timothy Hay, which many of my small pets preferred, as well as the first cut, higher fiber with seed heads, that provided variety and more roughage. Plus they both have the longer strands that encouraged them to pull and forage. A couple of years ago I started encountering some inconsistencies with their hay, but I kept with it, knowing that an organic product will not be the same every time. At first, I started noticing more and more dead, brown leaves with both versions, when there really hadn't been any before. I also noticed that sometimes it did not have a sweet smell to it, and there would be dust throughout the product, not just at the bottom of the box. Then came a batch (of the Gold) that had clumps of what looked like peat, or worse, dried dung in it; I was not sure because despite leaving a couple of voice mails with the company, I never got a call back from them. Then one time the Gold apparently got mixed up with the High Fiber, and all of the gold boxes and high fiber boxes I was sent were identical. The only explanation was that the High Fiber had been mistakenly labeled Gold, as the strands were stiff and full of seed heads. Just this month, however, I got the worst batch ever and I am done with American Pet Diner for good. The Gold was about 90 % dead, brown, dusty, bad smelling hay. The High Fiber was not much better, only more yellow than brown branches, and it too was dusty and smelled bad. In short, neither could have any real nutritional value, and if the company was having a bad harvest, they should have shown some integrity and pulled their product from sale. Thankfully, Drs. F & S are always willing to do right by their customers, which is a lot more than can be said for American Pet Diner, and they refunded me my money. Whoever harvested/packed this product at the American Pet Diner plant/warehouse must have seen they were sending their customers an inferior product. This has been a terrible waste of time and now I will have to find a way of disposing of it. I doubt even a goat would eat it, it's that bad, and it's too dusty to use as bedding for my small animals. A sad end to what was once a great brand of Timothy Hay.

The last 10+ bags of the Timothy Gold I have bought have had so much brown hay that my guinea pigs only eat a small portion & I throw away a lot more than they are eating. Since it’s summer, hopefully the hay will be green again & my babies will be happy. Nice the hay is green, I’d give this 5 stars!

I have noticed that a lot of the time, the hay I get for my guinea pigs -- well, you order a certain amount and then a bunch of that is wasted because a lot of the pieces are too short to be interesting for them. The hay also tends to be paper thin and more likely to just disintegrate. This hay has long, thick pieces of hay and lots of grass tops. It is very dusty, but it's hard to tell whether it's more or less dusty than other hays I've ordered. It is probably due to the way it's packaged, which is a BIG con for me. The five-pound high fiber options comes packaged in a plastic bag that has lots of rips in it (I've ordered it several times, and each time the bag has been ripped a lot) in a rectangular cardboard box. So you have this huge rectangle of hay. What do you do with it? Where do you put it? How do you store it, with its weird shape and all the rips? Don't get me wrong, it's an easy problem to solve...but it's still a problem.

I ordered two boxes of the high fiber hay. I received the items quickly but I was disappointed in the quality of the hay. More than half of both boxes were unusable. The hay was brown and didn't even smell good. Of course my piggies refused to eat to it. I have purchased smaller amounts of this hay in stores and found better quality. Having 5 guinea pigs I figured ordering in bulk might be a better option. I have, in the past ordered 50 pound boxes of competitor brands finding the hay of good quality with long pieces. I'm not sure if the hay was old when it was sent, or what happened. Definitely not ordering this brand online again.

I get the 10 lb box for my rabbit and he loves it I get the high fiber since the vet recommended it. I love how he has the bigger strands of the hay and it’s just the right texture for him!!!

The first time I purchased this I was thrilled. It was the best hay I had seen. We ordered a large box. We ordered a box of the gold, which in my opinion is the best. We then purchased a box of each to compare, and felt that the high fiber was not as good. It was a lot of sticks, aka high fiber. Then we purchased another box of the gold and it was terrible! I know hay is seasonal, but this was purchased in early fall... We didn't think it would be so bad. It was a lot of sticks, a lot of small pieces, and a Lot of dust. We shook some of the dust off outside and put the hay in a storage container. We used about half of the box. We didn't get nearly enough of the dust off, and when the container got low we took the rest out and shook it off Again, along with the rest of the box. To get most of the dust, we ended up losing a lot of pieces, but the dust was seriously everywhere. Long story short, this hay is great when in season. I wish they would backorder it rather than send a mess of sticks and hay. The rabbits don't love this batch either, it seems stale and dry.