Stacking hay pictures-past & present

[DiamondSCattleCo]

[coulee]

Hey TXTibbs,

I took some pictures hay stacking at our outfit in SD. We put up around 100 13 ton stacks a year, but with the lack of rain, we won't get that many this year. We roll up most of our hay, but stacks give us some flexability and we are just a little old fashioned; we don't want to give up the old ways. It takes a little more time, but the hay quality in those stacks stays good for years.

[Faster horses]

That looks like dandy hay, coulee.

[TXTibbs]

[Jinglebob]

Dad would build them like that and when he was done, they were as square as a house. Stacking a good stack, loose, is a dying art. Wish I would have learned, but he got a Haybuster and put me on it to run it. I did get to where I could make a pretty decent looking stack with it.

[Ranch Mom]

Looks good coulee, nice and green going up. You are right about how the hay keeps for years, and it is just nice to be able to feed some loose hay.

[ranchwife]

I simply cannot help but wonder what would happen to that stack of hay in this wonderful, ever present, hurricane-strength wind here in the madison valley!!!!

[Jinglebob]

When they are built right, wind doesn't bother them. You don't get any more or harder winds than we do.

[TXTibbs]

Jingle Bob is right....if they are built right they are sorta woven together and packed to a degree that the wind generally just bounces off them. There have been some instances when a storm went through and would blow the tops out of them, but not often.

[ranchwife]

[Jinglebob]

Dad always told the story of the old man who homesteaded just east of us. (My family eventually bought the homestedsa fromhis widow).

Phil was a slow moving, but never quit, kind of person. He would leave his tobacco in the house and when he wanted a smoke, he would walk back to the house, from wherever he was on his 900 acre ranch/farm. Dad said he saw him, on a windy day, go on the downwind side of a stack of hay, and clean up all the hay that wasn't on the stack, with a pitchfork. Then he'd carry it around to the upwind side and throw it on top. Most would blow over and land on the ground again. So he would go on the downwind side and clean it up and carry it back and throw it up on top. Again, and again, until as Dad put it, "It was all on top or at least wore out or blew away".

When it was too cold or windy to do anything else, he'd clean his barn and pitych the manure into a wagon and drive it out to the top of a hill and pitch it out. Tuff?????? Tenasious(sp)? Crazy? Ahhh, thats what them oldtimers was made of.

[Anne M. Shaw]

I'm frustrated because I wanted to see the pictures Google sent me to of haying with horses, overshot stacker etc. These were not available. Why? Comments said they were great. I'm writing a young adult novel about life in the 1930s. It's a sequel to my first book just published. "Roscoe and Tooey: Montana Runaways" where two boys run away down the Missouri River rather than sell their mares and move back to the city after their parents are killed in a car accident. The sequel will start right after the other ends and illustrates the type of farm work that took place in 1930. This will lead them to a rustling operation in north central Montana. It will be called "Roscoe and Tooey Ride the Bootlegger Trail."
The boys are working on my father's Teton River Ranch out of Fort Benton, Montana and Roscoe is describing how two city boys learn about ranch work. Since I wasn't born until 1935, I'm a little sketchy about haying with horses. I can remember my father working with horses, but I was quite young. The captions of the pictures not found looks to be just what I'm looking for.
Anne Shaw