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Sorry to hear about your hay barn. I suppose there is no time now to replace it, what with haying season and other spring/summer chores. Growing up, I lived on a small ranch. We had a pretty good barn and I have stacked many thousands of the small square bales in it, clear to the rafters. A few exceptional hay years, we had too much to fit in the barn, and so had to stack the excess outside. The way our feeder was set up, we ended up dragging bales down the feed bunk and opening them more or less where they would be fed. So our outside stack was always just outside the back door of the barn for convenience. We always fed the outside hay first, since it was the least protected from the weather. My Dad had a huge canvas tarp that we draped over the pyramided stack. The tarp was very heavy, especially when it was raining or there was snow on it. I was always glad when the outside stack was gone and I didn't have to fight that darn tarp anymore! It was also a pain trying to tie the tarp down. We didn't have anything like bungee cords, but mostly used baling wire or rope that would fit through the grommets in the tarp. I remember one time the wind was real strong and hit the stack just right and pulled the whole tarp off and away over the field--what a pain in the rear to fix that mess! Anyhow, I don't know where you live or how much precipitation you get, but it sounds like tarping your hay is your only good option this year. I like the idea of using pallets to keep the hay off the ground. I don't know how much of a problem it will make to move the large bales--I would worry about the pallets freezing down here and making it so you couldn't drive a tractor there. I have found that the cheap, thin blue tarps work pretty well in the short term, especially if you run rope over top of them a few times, to prevent the tarp flapping in the wind. You still have to tie them down real well, though. If you get much snow where you are, I predict that you will get real tired of those tarps before the winter is over... Hope you can get a new hay barn built. Good luck!
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