Dakota people- need help

eastern tourist here- Had the pleasure of visiting western S.D and N.D. over the weekend. What a great part of the USA. Had a lot of questions, but one straightforward one here: saw stacks of round bales galore. Why do you have so much hay around in May? Did you not have a winter and use no hay? Or do you have to feed hay right thru the summer? Also another dumm question- why is it common to see tires hanging off fenceposts?

The extra bales are the result of a very wet year which produced a lot of hay. It is not uncommon to see hay stacked outside eventually end up unusable after a few years, don't understand this practice.

Tires on fence posts which say NO HUNTING are generally used because they last a long time and even stand up to the bozo's that shoot at them.

Around here a tire can hold rocks to hold a post in the ground in a low spot. The tight wire wants to lift it out.

I have Never stacked hay inside, I am in Wyoming,, depends on how they are stacked if they last,, I have had small squares stacked for 35 years before and was as nice and green after the outside bales as the day we baled them,, rounds you cannot stack or they suck up the water,, I "stack" mine in double rows but never any on top and they will last many years also,, it takes a lot of barn room to stack 200 to 500 ton of them like I put up every year,, not a thing wrong with outside storage out here,, just the way it been done for hundreds of years,, I always laugh when those not from here think they know whats best,,

I am in eastern SD, but the extra hay is held over for a drought. Ranchers in the west will rarely sell extra hay, because they know they will need it sooner or later. Some years, it is so dry that they get no hay to harvest, or hail storms destroy what was growing. Hard winters burn up a lot of feed as well. It does not rain enough to spoil much of the stacked hay. People ranching in that environment are resourceful and resilient, and have been through more extreme weather events than most people east of the Mississippi river have experienced.

The Dakotas are a land of boom and bust. Especially west of the Missouri River. Not uncommon for some ranchers to have 2-3 years of hay on hand. Next year you may not have any. It is also usually dry enough that there is minimal spoilage in stored hay, as Case Nutty noted below.

Where I grew up in the northeast US, a couple months outside would render hay unfit for most anything. Way more moisture. Western SD and SW ND are borderline desert many years.

Did you happen to see any bales stored inside fenced in area surrounded by a chain link fence? If so, that was probably an abandoned underground missile site. During the cold war, if western SD & western ND had left the union union and formed their own country, it would have been a major nuclear power. Subsequently, there are a lot of old missile sites. After the USAF removed the missiles filed the hole ("silo") and abandoned the sites, they & any other abandoned property reverted to the current owner of the surrounding land. Many left the fenced off area as it was. It is often used to store hay to keep the "goats"(antelope) & deer off the bales. All those sites were connected with underground multi-wire copper cables. They got that too. Some of the guys can tell you how many miles of copper cable a 150HP can pull out of the ground before it'll break the wire. That way they can decide where to go to find an end to cut & where to start another pull.

To add to that above, 2019 was the wettest year in SD's recorded history. Two or three before 2019, those guys out there were buying hay where ever they could find it and it was impossible to find less than a couple hundred of miles away.
They were also culling herd size to bare bones. By spring lots of good younger stock had found its way to McDonalds or Burger King instead of sheltered draws raising great calves.

What is the average annual rainfall and record high annual rainfall in that area: less than 18 inches per year average with an all time record is still under than 30 inches in a year?

That's probably about right. I don't live in the area, but did work up there with a couple of rural water systems. Shallow (anything under 200 feet is considered shallow) ground water is hard to find, poor quality and limited quantity. (I worked in water development in the state for 32 years.)
In NW SD, one of the rural water systems gets its water from a ND rural system that pumps water from the Missouri River. The Missouri has a main stem dam (Garrison) in central ND. It was built for flood control and irrigation, and now provides for domestic water usage, too. A large rural water system serves much of SW ND & a system in SD.
SD also has a a couple of large rural water system too. The main stem resivours in SD cover 530,000 acres to prevent folding in the lower Missouri River valley & the Mississippi River below St Louis. (ND has over 400,000 acres under water for the same reason.) That's why the Bureau of Reclamation & Corps of Engineers have helped finance some of these systems.
Down stream state residents have no clue how much water we keep up here to prevent flooding down stream. The Corps of Engineers can tell how much water and when to release it from Gavin's Point Dam in Yankton, SD to keep boats floating in late summer in New Orleans. The water originates in the Montana mountains, not the Dakotas, we just store it up here.

Yes, thanks Jal, that was definitely another question. I was 99% sure ranchers would not have built a chain link fence to create a secure site for hay bales, so it certainly looked odd.

A lot of the bales you saw might have been corn stalk ones. They roll a lot of them up for bedding and feed also here in the eastern part of the state. The tires on the fence post are a way to get ride of them. LOL

In extreme N MN we built a shed in 1960 that would hold 8,000 small squares, that would feed our herd through the winter. I think we usually had about 40 bred cows to calf in the spring, and maybe a few young stock. I fed a lot of bales out of that shed, sure beat digging them out of the snow! Small squares were labor intensive, so when I left dad bought a big round baler.

When I put up small squares I baled 120,000 to 180,000 of them take a big barn to hold them lol I am SO Glad I went to 99.9% round bales

Here we get a average of 14" liquid total for the year including snow,, I have raised crops on 3" of H20 through the whole growing season more than once,, that is one reason we summer fallow out here and no-till does not work where I am