There are plenty of reasons farmers shouldn’t leave hay out in the field, but Perry Mobley can list three right off the top of his head: Safety, economics and nutrition.”Hay needs to be in the barn,” said Mobley, who serves as director of the Hay and Forage Division for the Alabama Farmers Federation. “If you’re not putting it in a barn, you’re going to pay for a barn whether you build one or not. … You’re going to lose a lot of money in storage losses that you could have spent on building a barn anyway.”The economic losses caused by inferior quality hay can be significant. But failing to store hay in the barn can also lead to catastrophic losses due to fire, said Rex Seabrook, manager of farm underwriting for Alfa Insurance.Often overlooked as one of a farm’s more valuable assets, Seabrook reminds farm policyholders that hay is not automatically covered. Instead, it can be insured one of two ways — either as scheduled or unscheduled.Because of the premium advantage, most farmers select Coverage E — Scheduled Farm Property which requires specific insurance on all farm property. Under this option, coverage for hay is available as an option. Although any coverage amount can be selected for hay under this option, Seabrook said it is critical that farmers understand that hay stacked in the open is limited to $5,000 coverage for any one stack.”That means if you insure $30,000 in hay, it is covered up to the full amount while it is in the barn, but any single stack is only covered for up to $5,000 while in the open,” said Seabrook. The farm policy, he said, specifically describes a “stack” of hay in the open as a stack “separated by clear space of 100 feet or more from any other hay in the open.” So, each stack must be at least 100 feet away from another stack. That’s the distance typically considered “safe” by the insurance industry and is meant to encourage movement of hay into a barn.However, it’s not the distance you’ll see on many farms. Mobley said just about all square bales are stored in barns, but most farmers leave round bales in the field for their cattle to feed on. What’s worse, he said, is it’s not unusual to see 20 to 30 bales in a stack, although he has seen some stacks lined up two-by-two, side-by-side for as much as one-eighth mile down the length of a field.That, he said, is risky business. “Once a hay fire starts, it doesn’t go out,” he said. “It just burns out.”Hay can also be covered automatically under Alfa Insurance’s Coverage F — Unscheduled Farm Personal Property with some exclusions. However, even this more expensive coverage is subject to the $5,000 limit for any single stack of hay in the open or 10 percent of all unscheduled farm personal property, whichever is less.Regardless of the coverage, Mobley said there are other reasons to get hay into a barn. “Most people don’t store hay in a barn — they store it out in the open,” said Mobley. “And by the time they feed that hay, they’ve lost 15 to 20 percent of that dry matter just by leaving it outside. So, if they put it in a barn or cover it with some sort of hay tarp and get it up off the ground, they would nearly eliminate their storage losses.”People who put their hay up in the barn feed a lot higher quality hay than those who leave their hay out in the weather. So it’s good to do that from a safety standpoint, an economic standpoint and a nutrition standpoint.”