Feed stores charge small barns the highest prices in the market. A Pool flips that. Your barn and your neighbors split a full flatbed straight from the grower, freight shared by weight, and every dollar visible on an open ledger. The truck only rolls when it fills, and if it does not, you are never charged.
Pick a pool, choose your bundles, and join a delivery stop near you. You authorize a maximum and will pay that number or less.
Watch the flatbed load as neighbors join. Every new share lowers everyone's freight split. At the fill bar, the pool confirms and the truck rolls.
Big barns take a whole delivery. Smaller buyers collect from their stop's Host, with lot-traced bales and a spec sheet included.
A share of one full flatbed load of hay, straight from the grower. Shares come in bundles, and one bundle is roughly two horse-months of hay. Buy one bundle or enough to fill a whole delivery stop.
Never while the pool is filling. When you join, you authorize a worst-case maximum. This is a payment authorization, not an escrow: nobody holds your money while the pool fills. If the truck fills and the grower confirms, you are charged once, your final number, which is always your maximum or less. Every neighbor who joins after you lowers your freight split, so the number usually falls.
Every pool has a minimum load that makes the truck worth sending. When committed shares reach that bar and every stop qualifies, the pool confirms and the truck rolls. Cutoff is four days before departure, and it is the last moment a pool takes a commitment: after it the grower books the carrier against the weight already in, so the load cannot still be changing size underneath them. If the bar is never reached by the cutoff, the pool closes, everyone's authorization is released, and nobody pays a cent.
There is no minimum purchase: buy a single bundle by joining a stop. The floor is on the delivery stop, not on you. By the ton, a stop qualifies for the route at one sixth of the load, and it can get there one of two ways: one barn takes it all, or neighbors share the stop until it adds up. Every listing shows that floor three ways together, bales, pounds, and dollars, because bale weight varies by grower and a count alone would mean a different amount of hay from one farm to the next.
One truck, one published freight quote, split across everyone on it by weight. AgBid takes nothing from the freight line, ever: the carrier is paid exactly the published quote, and every line item sits on an open ledger you can read.
AgBid adds 8 percent on the hay only, shown on the ledger like everything else. Freight passes through at cost with zero AgBid margin, and the grower is paid the full price of their hay with nothing deducted. Two products, two prices. In the marketplace, you do the choosing: you post what you need, compare the bids that come in, and pick your own supplier. We charge 3 percent for running that marketplace. In a Pool, we do the work: we find the grower, check the hay, book the truck, plan the route, and split the freight by weight. We charge 8 percent for that. Either way the fee is on the feed only, never on the freight, and the seller is never charged a thing.
The truck makes a handful of delivery stops. A big barn can take a whole stop at its own address. Smaller buyers join a nearby stop, and the person whose address receives the load is the Host. Hosts approve each member before anyone sees the address, and can publish a small handling fee for their forklift time.
After the truck delivers to your Host, you have 72 hours to collect your bales from their yard. You will get the address, the pickup window, and a reminder by email. Hosts are neighbors keeping your hay dry, not warehouses.
You get 1 hour to fix it from My Pools, with a countdown and a Fix payment button. If it is not fixed in time your share is released so the rest of the pool keeps moving, and you are not charged.
We are launching in Ocala. Each pool serves a claim zone, a radius around the delivery area, and inviting friends inside that radius is the fastest way to fill a truck and lower everyone's freight.