In this day and age just about every rancher has a pickup of some kind.  One step further would be to get a bale bed to put on that pickup.  It could be any of several manufactured brands (Hydra-Bed, Dew-Eze, Bessler, Krogmann, Cannonball), or it could be a home-made deal that would work just as well. 

"Usually" :wink:  a pickup starts more easily on a cold morning than does a tractor.  Usally a rancher makes the rounds on a cold winter day, anyway, to check water and break ice so the cattle can drink.  Why not just roll out the correct number of bales to feed a bunch of cows at this time?  There are quite a few advantages to doing it this way.  There is very little waste of hay.  No electric fencing needs to be messed with.  A different area can be fed on each day which spreads the manure more evenly across a meadow or pasture.  Another big advantage is that the cattle tend to "like" the hay provider and will follow the hay dispensing vehicle quite well, if they need to be moved.

We have not started a tractor all winter.  Both Peach and I have one-ton pickups with Hydra-beds on them.  Both pickups also have cakers mounted on the front of the bed.  She can carry a thousand pounds of cake besides two 1500 pound bales of hay on her eight-foot bed.  My pickup bed is eleven feet long, and the caker on it holds 1500 pounds of cake besides two 1500 pound bales of hay.  If the snow gets deep we would probably need to use tractors but until then the Hydra-Beds work very well.