Stacking hay pictures-past & present

[Ranch Mom]

This first picture is from the earliest settlers here in Lacreek valley.
They pitched hay in wagons, brought the hay to the stack, put as much hay as would stay into a loop of rope that went up over the stack and was attached to a team of horses on the other side, who pulled the hay in the loop up onto the stack. The men topping out the stack spread it around. They made longer taller stacks back then (stationery).


This next picture is of an overshot stacker as things got a little more mechanized. There was a stacker head and a back stop. They pulled it ahead and built up the hay behind it. Again they made longer stacks that were stationery (built in one place and fed out of the same place, fenced out as the stackyard).


These pics are last year, after mowing an area, we straight rake it with a dump rake.


Then we push the hay up the windrows into bunches with a hay sweep.


Bunches


More Bunches


A bunch is pushed up to the stacker head with a sweep.


Pushing a bunch onto the stacker head


The header pushes the bunch up over and into the cage


A view from the back side as a bunch goes into the cage.


The bunch goes up and over, the big steel arm you see sticking out at the top is for packing the hay and moving it around some to get an even stack as it is built.


Opening up the cage in the back to pull the stacker away from a completed stack.


Cleaning up around the stack with the sweep


After that we scatter rake the whole area to get any loose hay picked back up.

[EastTexasGal]

Thank you Ranch Mom..that is very interesting to a Southern Gal!! Still amazes me how differently we all do things. Great pictures...

Easty

[HAY MAKER]

Thanks for the picture story Ranch mom,I have never seen hay handled that way................good luck

[IL Rancher]

Wow.... The old haystacks around here were more like the first one, smaller as they had to come to a point almost to shed the water... No one does it that way... Most everyone is using the round balers now with a few folks still using small squares and now the big squares are starting to move in... You have to do a lot of hay to afford one of those big squares however...


Oh, the other thing folks have around here is something that make loafs I think they are called... I have never seen it here but up North 40 miles or so you start seeing them. used mostly for making bales of fodder..

[Tap]

Those are so cool Ranch Mom. Thanks for posting them. I don't think there are a lot of places anymore that put up hay like you guys do on a large scale. Mostly it fits meadow country don't you think? We still use two double mowers, and sometimes a single too, but we use a twenty wheel Rowse V rake, and two balers. I have raked a lot of hay with a 42 ft. Rowse dump rake, but we round baled our windrows then too. I could figure 20 acres an hour with the 42 ft. rake. But all that clutching was dang hard on my leg and knee. I figured after a season of dump raking I probably could have kicked a football out of a football stadium.

One other thing on the loose stacked hay. One of the guys I neighbor with told me an interesting story about loose hay. He came into this country about 6-7 yrs ago, and I also knew the previous owner of the ranch that he is now on. It is in a country where they don't feed a lot of hay. So the first owner always said that he had kept this certain stack of really old loose hay in a spot that was real easy to see from the road into the ranch. He always called this stack his "banker hay" so the banker could see he still had some hay when he made his annual trip to the ranch. This stack got to be kind of a joke with him. So then after he sold the ranch, this next guy (the one I neighbor with) decides that he should just eliminate the stack as it had shrunk down badly and the posts had even rotted off and fell against the stack, but still no livestock bothered it. Then one day he tore the fence down, and thought maybe he would scatter the hay a little and try and burn it or something, but to his surprise it was still as green of hay as it had ever been when he got into the stack a ways. So he just fed it to his cows, and they ate most all of it up.

Try that with a modern round bale stored out in the open for years. So maybe you are on to something, but most hay doesn't have a chance to get old with our dry spells we have been in this decade.

[Jinglebob]

Great pix!

We used to stack loose, with a farmhand, then we went to a Haybuster, then a round baler. Now, I just let the cattle put up the hay.

[Ranch Mom]

Il. Rancher: We also have a bread loafer (think thats what you are referring to with the fodder loaf) It is a John Deere stacker, chops up the feed and spits it into a smaller bread loaf shaped stack. unless your talking about those big long plastic wrapped things of hay, that's different.

Jinglebob, we bought a haybuster last year for k_ranch and I in the future, works pretty slick... Definately a trick to getting them right, but he's a quick study. My Dad used a farmhand to stack, but I guess I was too little, I only remember bales.

We also have a round baler and a small square baler. k_ranch and I have tried to collect enough equipment to be ready for any type of hay needs. It was really interesting in one of our meadows last year. We were experimenting/fixing/testing our new used equipment and there were slide stacks, bread loafs, little square bales, haybuster stacks and some round bales all in the same little meadow. But for our current needs/situation, we love slide stacking.

[the_jersey_lilly_2000]

Ok that's somethin I've never seen before...interesting, and thanks for sharin those pictures. now...when it comes time to feed, do you just go in with a front end loader or forks and grab some and scatter it to the cows or what?

[Clarence]

Didn't I see a stackmover with a hydrafork in the background of one of your branding pictures? Could you post it again for some to see?
We have used about all methods of putting up hay here. Years ago Dad just pushed it into sweep buches and toped them out, fed with a hayrack. Then we used an overshot stacker, never had a slide stacker though. Stacked a lot of hay with a farmhand loader. We had three different breadloaf stackers, two Hestons and a John Deere. Fed these stacks with a stackmover with a hydrafork. Now we use the big round baler, feed with a bale processor. We even had an Allis Challmers small round baler at one time, didn't pick these bales up though, just let the cows eat them in the field. It was surprising how well that worked, they didn't waste very much.

[Cowpuncher]

All of those old pictures looked thoroughly modern to me.

Back when I was a young'un, we had no tractor. We had a five foot
international mower and a 12 foot dump rake. Both were two horsepower.

When the hay was raked and shocked (sometimes the shocking was done with a pitchfork), we hooked the same two horses up to a steel-wheeled hayrack. With one person on each side of the wagon, we moved through the field throwing the hay on the wagon with a pitchfork.

When the wagon was loaded - about a ton - we drove to the stackyard and pitched the hay onto a stack. Loads were unloaded on alternate sides to make the stack even. We would do about 10 or 11 loads each day until the job was done. We usually worked hay from mid-June until the first of August. The third cutting of alfalfa was cut in Mid-September and we got out of some of that for school.

There was nothing worse than going back to the field after dinner and the temperature was about 100 degrees, the wind was blowing and the hay was dry so that the chaff blew back on you as the hay was handled. It wasn't until 1957 that we ever had a tractor on the place - we hired a neighbor to custom bale about 30 tons. That episode turned out poorly and led to the Ol' Cowpuncher throwing in the towel and going to the University.

Fifty years later, we have all the modern stuff, but I still let the hired guys to the hay work.

Getting the hay out of the stack wasn't too bad - you generally were able to pick the hay up with a pitchfork in about the reverse order it had gone into the stack. If you didn't want to use a whole stack, you cut the stack in two with a hay knife.

Again, we fed in the winter with the same hayrack and team of horses. Only real problem was crossing the creek in the winter when it was ice-covered. Then, one of us young-uns would chop a hole in the ice and dig iout sand and spread it where the horses walked.

This may have seemed hard, but we never had an injury to man or beast. You also developed some fierce muscles. When I went into the military, I was as strong as anyone, but I was only 17. It took about 40 years for those muscles to wither mostly away.

There were a lot of people in the area that retired with money, including my Dad. But he was the only one who had made the money by ranching and not by selling the land./

[Ranch Mom]

Lilly, we have a stack mover with a hydrafork. I'll post a picture or two.

AND I am trying to put in a video here with the stacker actually working and feeding with the hydrafork... Just can't figure out how to do it without making the whole album available...

The bed tilts and chains pull the stack up on the bed


This is the whole outfit with a stack loaded


This is k_ranch feeding out some hay with the hydrafork


from inside the tractor


This pic is after the hay is strung out and stackmover is empty.

[Ranch Mom]

Yep cowpuncher, we are thoroughly spoiled, that is for sure.

The only pics that were old were the top two. The first one was taken in 1910, and as you can see it is all horsepower and rope ingenuity. The second one says 1921 on the bottom, and they were starting to use the head to flip the hay, but all still horsework and pitchforks.

k_ranch's parents didn't buy a stackmover with hydrafork until he was in high school (1990's) They used a hay sled and pitched all the hay off by hand to feed it, (so he hears you on the muscles/strength built by pitching hay) they did have a wood stacker working with a tractor to put up the stacks though.