POWELL - Hay prices remain strong this summer as Wyoming growers enjoy extra water from good snow pack while drought continues in other areas of the country.

"Demand on a nationwide basis is very strong," said Scott Keith, who manages the Livestock and Forage Program in the agribusiness division of the Wyoming Business Council. "It appears to be that there's a lot of demand for Wyoming hay" to go out of state as well.

Prices for dairy-quality hay or horse hay are high, Keith said. Ranchers in southern Colorado regularly pay $7 per bale for horse hay in the field, he said.

Drought has taken a toll in other hay-producing states such as California and Idaho. Ranchers there are looking to buy Wyoming hay to fill in the gaps, Keith said.

"There's a strong demand for hay all over the country," he said.

He said the market for lower-quality or mixed hay, which ranchers may buy to feed beef cows, will get stronger by October or later.

The strong prices come at a time when there could be a lot more hay produced in Wyoming than usual, he said. Increased snowpack runoff and more irrigation water could let growers put more water on land where they haven't grown alfalfa in the past few water-short years, he said.

The University of Wyoming Extension and the Wyoming Business Council operate a web site where buyers can look for hay for sale and hay producers can list hay or seeds they have to sell.

"I think it's a really valuable tool," Keith said. In March, the site counted 22,000 "hits" with another 18,000 recorded in June.

"That's an awful lot of people that are touching the web site looking for hay," Keith said, although "it's hard to translate that to actual sales. I know that there's a lot of repeat buyers and sellers."

Since alfalfa is a non-regulated commodity and prices are not supported by government programs, hay prices could easily fluctuate based on supply and demand, Keith said.

"It's a shifty crop. It's got the potential to be really good or really bad," he said.

But he said demand for high-quality hay for dairy cows and from recreational horse owners should keep prices high overall.