Ditch Hay and Highway Right-of-Way Haying: Rules, Risks and Whether It Pays

By the XES Netting team — bale net-wrap manufacturer · Updated August 9, 2026 · ~13 min read

Drive west in late summer and you will see round bales sitting in the borrow ditch, mile after mile. It looks like free hay. Depending on the state, the year, and what the maintenance crew sprayed, it may be free hay, hay you have to bid on, a misdemeanour, or the most expensive bale you ever put up.

Ditch hay — road ditch hay, right-of-way hay, roadside hay — is one of those practices that is completely normal in one state and unheard of two states over. This guide covers who owns the grass, what the rules actually say in several states, why the cutting dates are set where they are, the herbicide problem that catches people out years later, and how to work out whether it is worth doing at all.

Who owns the grass in the ditch?

Start with the legal frame, because it explains everything downstream. A highway right-of-way is land the state holds for highway purposes. Nebraska's statute states the principle about as plainly as it can be stated: rights-of-way acquired by the department "shall be held inviolate for state highway and departmental purposes and no physical or functional encroachments, structures, or uses shall be permitted within such right-of-way limits, except by written consent of the department."

Cutting and removing a hay crop is a use. So the default answer in most states is that you need permission, even where you own the ground on the other side of the fence and even where you have done it every year since your father did.

Federal law leaves room for the practice rather than blocking it. Under 23 U.S.C. § 319, the wildflower-planting requirement attached to federal-aid landscaping can be waived where a state certifies that "planting areas are limited or otherwise used for agricultural purposes" — a direct acknowledgement that right-of-way land gets farmed. Since 2015 the same section has also directed the Secretary, working with willing states, to "encourage integrated vegetation management practices on roadsides and other transportation rights-of-way, including reduced mowing" and to encourage habitat and forage for monarchs, native pollinators and honey bees. That pollinator mandate is the backdrop to the mowing-date restrictions you will run into next.

What has changed over the years is the allocation. Growers who have been at it a long time describe the shift from handshake to paperwork:

"Years ago it was free and by mutual agreement among farmers you baled the highway sides that corresponded with your land."

"Now most states put it up for bid as people with no dog in the fight complained that farmers were getting free hay on state land."

— jturbo10 · HayTalk thread 17547

What the rules say, state by state

The table below is drawn from state statutes and DOT publications. It is a starting point for the conversation with your district maintenance office, not a substitute for it — these rules get amended, and county and township roads are frequently governed separately from state highways.

Look at what those first three rows do to a farmer near a state line. North Dakota tells you to get it cut before roughly July 1. Minnesota will not let the full width be mowed until after July 31. Iowa says nothing before July 15, then gives you a defined window that closes September 1. Same crop, same equipment, three incompatible calendars.

Two further points worth knowing before you start:

• The neighbour's signature can be the binding constraint. Iowa requires abutting property owners to sign off on every permit, and Minnesota gives adjacent landowners first claim if they apply by the end of February. If you want the frontage across from your place, the deadline that matters may be in the winter.
• Enforcement varies more than the statutes do. Growers routinely report rules that are on the books and quietly ignored — "I don't know of anyone who pays any attention to it" is a common refrain about county-road dates. That is not a defence if you are the one who gets stopped, and it says nothing about the herbicide risk, which does not care whether anyone is enforcing anything.

Why the dates exist — and what they cost you

The late cutting dates are not arbitrary and they are not really about hay. Minnesota's statute states its purpose in the first line: "To provide enhanced roadside habitat for nesting birds and other small wildlife, road authorities may not mow or till the right-of-way of a highway located outside of a home rule charter or statutory city except as allowed in this section." Roadsides are long, undisturbed grassland strips through otherwise cropped country, and in much of the Midwest they are the best nesting cover left. The July dates are set to let ground-nesting birds finish.

Now connect that to your forage test. Cool-season grasses — smooth brome, tall fescue, orchardgrass, the species that dominate Midwest ditches — hit peak quality at boot stage, well before July. A crop that legally cannot be cut until July 15 or August 1 is a crop that will be headed out, stemmy, and low in protein and digestibility by the time you are allowed to touch it. The regulation and the feed value are the same fact viewed from two directions.

Growers notice this without needing the agronomy:

"Same here on US 6 in Bremen, but some of those shoulders are wide enough and long enough to almost qualify as a field anyways."

"You can always tell what it is when it comes to auction as well.… it always seems well past ripe when it does show up at the auctions."

— mlappin · HayTalk thread 17547

The practical conclusion: price and market ditch hay as what it is. It is bulk, low-quality dry-cow, bedding or filler feed. It is not horse hay and it is not going to test like a June first cutting, because the law will not let it be cut in June. If you are buying it, test it rather than guessing.

The herbicide problem nobody warns you about

This is the part of ditch haying that does real financial damage, and it usually surfaces a year later in a field that has nothing to do with the ditch.

The Iowa DOT states the risk in its own harvesting guidance, and the wording is worth reading twice: the department "makes no guarantee as to the quality and quantity of the hay, or presence of any toxic materials or other contaminants," and it tells applicants to "check with the local Iowa DOT maintenance facility for herbicide application records." The state is telling you, in writing, to go ask what was sprayed. Very few people do.

Here is why it matters. North Carolina State University Extension's guidance on herbicide carryover explains that aminopyralid, clopyralid and picloram are pyridine carboxylic acid herbicides registered for pasture, grain crops, lawns, turf, some fruits and vegetables — and roadsides. They control tough broadleaf weeds, which is exactly why highway departments use them. And they do not break down on the normal schedule:

• The hay from a treated area stays active. NCSU notes the herbicides "can also remain active in hay, straw, and grass clippings taken from treated areas," and that "hay has been reported to have residual herbicide activity after three years' storage in dry, dark barns."
• They survive the animal. They "pass through the animal's digestive tract and are excreted in urine and manure," and "can also remain active in the manure even after it is composted."
• Breakdown is unpredictable. "Depending on the situation, the herbicides can be deactivated in as few as 30 days, but some field reports indicate that complete deactivation and breakdown can take several years."
• The forage itself is safe to feed. Based on USDA-EPA and European Union evaluations, treated forage "can be safely consumed by horses and livestock — including livestock produced for human consumption." The damage is downstream, in the manure.

That downstream damage is not theoretical. A grower described exactly how it plays out when cheap ditch hay moves through a feedlot:

"Stopped by a feedlot today that was asking about hay.He had been buying cheap grass hay a.k.a. ditch hay.Well it turns out it is going to cost him 20 acres of soybeans.The county highway dept had sprayed the ditch with Tordon,it was baled sold to feedlot."

"It is quite amazing that the chemical can kill beans after getting ground and mixed in a ration and still kill the beans in the field."

— swmnhay · HayTalk thread 12038

Picloram — the active in Tordon — went from a county spray truck, into a windrow, into a bale, into a ration, through cattle, into a manure pile, onto twenty acres, and killed the beans. The affected ground showed the spread pattern.

Crops that get hurt

NCSU lists as sensitive: beans, carrots, the Compositae family, cotton, dahlias, eggplant, flowers generally, grapes, legumes, lettuce, marigolds, mushrooms, peas, peppers, potatoes, some roses, spinach, sugar beets, strawberries, sunflowers, tobacco, tomatoes, the Umbelliferae family, and vegetables generally. Note that legumes are on that list — which means the manure can also take out clover and alfalfa in a pasture or a new seeding.

Four checks before you bale a ditch

1. Ask for the spray records. Iowa's DOT tells you to do this by name. Ask the district or county maintenance facility what was applied to that segment, and when.
2. Look for legumes in the stand. NCSU offers a useful field indicator: "A simple indicator that these herbicides were likely not used in the production of hay is the presence of legumes such as lespedeza, clovers, or alfalfa. If the hay has legumes in it, it has probably not been treated with any of these herbicides." Clover thriving in the ditch is a good sign. Its absence proves nothing on its own.
3. Run a pot bioassay if you are unsure. Take at least 20 shovelfuls from throughout the pile, deep inside as well as the surface, and mix thoroughly. Fill three to six 4–5 inch pots with a 1:1 mix of the material and a commercial potting mix, plus control pots of potting mix alone. Plant three pea or bean seeds per pot and grow for two to three weeks, to about three sets of true leaves. If the controls look normal and the test pots are twisted, cupped or stunted, you have residue.
4. Tell your buyer. NCSU is explicit: do not sell or give away treated hay — even years old — for use as mulch or compost; it can be sold for livestock feed, but "be sure the purchaser is aware that the herbicide may pass through into the manure." If you are selling ditch hay whose spray history you do not know, say so.

Two more details worth carrying around. Manure clears in roughly three to seven days after animals come off treated forage. And contaminated manure is not waste — it can be safely spread on grass pastures and grass hayfields, just not on ground going to a broadleaf crop. For more on this class of chemistry in your own fields, see our guide to weed control in hay fields.

Trash, debris and dead livestock

A ditch collects everything the travelling public throws out of a window, and your baler will find all of it. How bad this is depends enormously on where you are — and growers who have farmed in two regions describe a night-and-day difference:

"There is basically no trash on our roadways. In Va., I am picking up trash twice a week."

"No one covers their trash when taking it to the landfill and it flies out the back of the pickup.… Tires seem to be the worst for that."

— NDVA HAYMAN · HayTalk thread 17547

The risk splits in two. Hard debris — hubcaps, exhaust parts, bottles, wire — damages sickles, rotors and pickup teeth and can put metal into feed. Soft debris ends up eaten. Growers cite exactly this as the reason they walk away from cheap ditch bids: the prospect of machines "chewing up hazardous waste like discarded car parts," and animals swallowing plastic and paper out of the bale.

If you are going to do it, walk or slowly drive the stretch first and pick it up. That is unglamorous, unpaid, and the single highest-value hour in the job. Feeding-side protection matters too — a magnet in the mixer and a look at what comes off the bale before it goes in front of stock.

Traffic, slopes and the safety rules

The permit conditions are mostly about not getting anyone killed, and they carry real cost.

Iowa's requirements are typical of what a state will impose: work only between 30 minutes after sunrise and 30 minutes before sunset; work performed between the road and the ditch bottom requires traffic control; and all personnel must wear approved safety apparel, which the DOT supplies to the permit holder on approval. Mowing of newly seeded areas is not permitted, and it can take four to five years after seeding for an area to be considered established.

Where a state does not supply the gear, the cost lands on you. One grower who looked into baling a highway in Indiana found the economics turned on compliance rather than hay:

"Also, the insurance was very high to bale along side the road to meet the state requirements. They were real worried about accidents."

"The state also wanted a bunch of warning lights and big orange signs purchased to put in the area."

— downtownjr · HayTalk thread 17547

Beyond the paperwork, three practical safety habits come up again and again from people who actually do this:

• Work from the field side. Enter and operate from the far side of the ditch wherever the geometry allows, so the machine is never between you and traffic. "I only mow from the field side. I would not dare mow from the road," as one North Dakota grower put it.
• Know where the pipes are. Culverts and approach pipes sit at field entrances, often hidden in tall grass, and they will destroy a sickle bar or a mower deck. Mark them before the grass is up if you run the same stretch every year.
• Display the SMV emblem and assume drivers are distracted. Minnesota's statute is representative: implements of husbandry designed for 35 mph or less must display the triangular slow-moving vehicle emblem, visible from at least 600 feet to the rear. Agriculture already carries one of the highest fatal injury rates of any US industry — 18.6 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalents in 2022 against 3.7 for all industries, with transportation incidents the leading cause. Roadside work puts you directly in that exposure.

Geography decides whether any of this is even possible. North Dakota's ditches are hayable because they are built wide and shallow to catch blowing snow — "very sweeping and wide. No steep dropoffs," as one grower described them, mown with a sickle mower and handled with a loader tractor. Elsewhere the ditches are three feet deep with steep sides, and the honest answer is that you cannot make hay out of them safely at any price. Do not force it because it worked for someone two states away.

Where bales can sit and when they must be gone

Making the hay is only half the permit. States care just as much about the bales afterwards, because a round bale is a fixed roadside hazard and a snow-drift generator.

North Dakota's rules are specific and a good model for what to expect anywhere: hay must be stored on the outer edge of the right-of-way; large round bales should not be placed on inslopes or within 60 feet of the roadway; and all hay stored on the right-of-way must be removed by November 1, so the ditches are clear for snow management. Minnesota's permit likewise specifies how long hay may be left in the right-of-way.

Two things follow for anyone planning the job. First, build hauling into the schedule, not into the "sometime this fall" pile — a removal deadline is a hard date and missing it can mean a fine or the state removing the bales. Second, those bales are sitting out in the open, unstacked, on state ground, through the wettest part of autumn. Ditch hay is exactly the situation where wrap quality earns its keep: a tightly wrapped bale with full edge-to-edge coverage sheds rain and holds its shape through handling far better than a loose or under-wrapped one. If you are putting up bales that will sit outside until the removal deadline, see our notes on net wrap not covering to the edge and the wrap we build for outdoor storage.

Is ditch hay worth making?

Sometimes clearly yes — in dry years, on wide western ditches, with your own equipment already sitting idle, the tonnage is real and the feed goes to cows that do not need dairy-quality forage. Sometimes clearly no. The most useful summary anyone has offered came from an Iowa grower explaining why his family now signs off and lets someone else do the frontage:

"On state highways, I thought they didn't allow cutting it until July 15th.… We've had a guy who pays a fee to the state to cut the ditches on a state highway for years. That hay is usually at the hay auction within the week."

"We've always signed off to let him cut what we have for frontage, because it only took one time doing a small part of it ourselves before we knew free was too expensive."

— RFI90 · AgTalk thread 859809

"Free was too expensive" is the right frame. Before you commit, price the whole job honestly:

• Permit fee or bid price, plus the time to get the abutting owner's signature
• Liability insurance at roadside rates, plus signs, lights and flagging if the state requires them and does not provide them
• A walk-through to clear debris on every stretch, every year
• Repair budget for sickle sections, teeth and tires — assume higher than field work
• Extra travel and handling: ditches are long, narrow and far apart
• A forage test, because late-cut roadside grass will not price like field hay
• Hauling before the removal deadline, whatever the weather is doing
• The tail risk on herbicide residue, which is small in probability and large in consequence

Run those numbers against the tonnage and the feed value you will actually get. In a drought year with cows to feed, it can pencil out easily. In a normal year, on narrow ditches, against a stemmy August cutting, it often does not.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to bale hay in a road ditch?

Usually only with permission. Highway rights-of-way are held for highway purposes, and most states treat haying as a use requiring a permit or written consent — Nebraska's statute holds rights-of-way "inviolate" absent written consent from the department. Iowa requires a permit plus the abutting owner's signature. Rules for county and township roads are often separate, so check both.

When can I cut ditch hay?

It depends entirely on the state. Iowa prohibits roadside mowing before July 15 and permits harvest July 15 to September 1 for cool-season species. Minnesota allows the full right-of-way to be mowed only after July 31, though the first eight feet from the shoulder may be mowed any time. North Dakota expects landowners to cut before the state mows in mid-June to July 1.

Why are there mowing date restrictions on highway right-of-way?

To protect nesting wildlife. Minnesota's statute states its purpose directly: to provide enhanced roadside habitat for nesting birds and other small wildlife. Federal law since 2015 has also directed states to encourage reduced mowing and pollinator habitat on transportation rights-of-way. Roadsides are often the best remaining nesting cover in cropped country.

Is ditch hay safe to feed?

The forage itself is generally safe. Where roadside herbicides such as aminopyralid, clopyralid or picloram were used, extension guidance is that treated forage can still be safely consumed by livestock and horses. The real risks are physical debris in the bale and residue passing through into manure that later kills broadleaf crops. Ask the maintenance office for spray records and check bales for trash.

Can herbicide sprayed on a road ditch hurt my crops the next year?

Yes, through the manure. Aminopyralid, clopyralid and picloram survive the animal's digestive tract, remain active in manure even after composting, and can persist in stored hay — with reported activity after three years in a dry barn. Manure from cattle fed treated ditch hay has killed soybeans on ground where it was spread. Spread suspect manure only on grass pasture or grass hay ground.

The short version

Treat ditch hay as a permitted operation on someone else's land, not as free grass. Find out who issues the permit and when the application is due — in Minnesota that deadline is in February, and in Iowa your neighbour has to sign. Learn your state's cutting date and accept that it caps your quality, because the date exists for nesting birds rather than for feed value. Ask for the herbicide records in writing, look for clover in the stand, and bioassay if you are unsure. Walk the stretch for debris. Work from the field side. And get the bales off the right-of-way before the deadline, wrapped well enough to sit in the weather until you do.

Right-of-way rules change and vary by state, by county and by road classification, and the summaries above are current to the sources cited rather than legal advice. Confirm permit requirements, dates and conditions with your state DOT district office or county engineer before cutting anything on a public right-of-way.

Featured photo: Hay Bales, Highway 203, Medical Springs by Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives, released under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.