01/08/2026
It's fun to see our history pop up in people's stories from time to time. That's one of the joys of the legacy a family business creates.
If you are not from Washington, it is hard to explain that the west side and the east side are basically two different worlds that just happen to share a state line.
Western Washington is dairies and berries. Green fields, pasture grass that never seems to quit, cows grazing under clouds that cannot decide what they want to do. It is cool, mild, and wet enough that grass grows easily and consistently. That makes it perfect for dairy cows and for raising calves. It is also why berries thrive here. Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, all of them love that steady moisture and cooler air. Things grow. A lot.
But that same climate is exactly why the west side is not great for hay.
Hay needs dry weather. Not just a nice afternoon, but several days in a row where grass can be cut, dried, turned, and baled without getting rained on, misted on, or fogged on. On the west side, you might get the grass cut and then immediately get rain. Or the kind of marine layer that does not technically count as rain but absolutely ruins hay anyway. Mold risk is high. Drying windows are unpredictable. You can grow forage just fine, but making good dry hay is always a gamble.
And it is not just a quality issue. It is a safety issue.
Baling hay when it is too wet is dangerous. When wet hay is packed tightly into a bale, the moisture allows microbes to start breaking the plant material down. That process creates heat. If the moisture is high enough, that heat cannot escape. The bale warms. Then it gets hotter. Sometimes hot enough to smolder. Sometimes hot enough to spontaneously combust. That is how barns burn down. Not from sparks or lightning, but from a hidden wet spot inside a stack of hay that slowly heats up in storage until one day it ignites. That risk alone makes west side haymaking incredibly stressful and often not worth it.
Eastern Washington is built differently. Dry air. Hot sun. Big open skies. Rain is not something you casually rely on, which is exactly why irrigation matters so much. When hay is cut on the east side, it actually dries. Predictably. Cleanly. You can irrigate to grow the crop, then shut the water off and let the sun finish the job. That makes safer hay. Stable hay. Hay that will not mold, heat, or turn into a barn fire waiting to happen. That is why so much of the hay fed to west side dairies comes from the east side. The climate simply makes it possible to do it right.
That brings me to a story from when my dad was a kid.
His aunt and uncle, the Kooys, grew hay on the east side of Washington. One year, they knew ahead of time that the hay they were baling was going to be shipped to my dad’s family. So as they baled, they slipped pieces of cardboard into some of the bales. On those pieces were handwritten notes for my dad and his siblings. Little messages meant to be found later, months down the road, when someone split a bale open to feed cows and instead found a note tucked inside.
It was hay, yes. But it was also family. It was connection across the mountains. It was a quiet reminder that the work you do on one side of the state matters deeply to people on the other.
The Kooys also understood something early on that still defines eastern Washington agriculture today. Water is everything. That understanding eventually led to the start of Kooy Irrigation. Irrigation is what makes hay possible on the east side. It turns dry ground into productive fields and allows farmers to grow feed reliably in a climate where rain cannot be counted on. Without it, much of the east side simply could not do what it does.
So west side or east side is not a competition. It is a system. Dairies and berries on the west. Hay and open ground on the east. A mountain range in between. And a whole lot of quiet cooperation that keeps farms running, animals fed, barns standing, and stories traveling back and forth across the pass.
