Hay for the Needy

From the Blue Mountain Eagle, Grant County Oregon’s newspaper since 1868. Eight semi-trucks recently rolled into John Day OR, each loaded with 25 to 30 tons of hay to be donated to local ranchers with livestock displaced by the Canyon Creek Complex fire. Behind the big rigs were three additional pickups pulling trailers filled with hay to add to the stacks at the “Hay for John Day” site at the old Grant Western Lumber Company. Jim Hamsher of Prairie City and others were there to help unload the contributions, coming mostly from central Oregon farms and ranches. Hamsher said they currently have 500 tons of hay in the barn. “ After seeing these people get burnt out, I don’t have a lot of money

but I have a lot of contacts and I have sometimes so I thought maybe I could gathering up hay for all of these people who had lost all of their hay, burned their pastures up and lost everything, I thought if I could start gathering hay up, at least I could take that one little worry off of them. I put a post on Facebook and within six or seven minutes, this girl that I had never met put a post on there and thought about doing the same thing. She saw mine and said why don’t we team up and start trying to get donations. We built a Facebook page “Hay for John Day” and pretty soon people just started calling in and wanting to help. Right now I have about 540 tons of hay in the barn.

For more information, visit Hay for John Day on Facebook or call Hamsher at 541-620-2861.