Stewart Grain Shock Loader Lightened the Load

Shocks shoot up

Volunteers run the Stewart during parades at the Minnesota Machinery Museum and Pioneer Power Threshing Show & Old Timer’s Reunion each year. “We put out half a dozen shocks and run them through the machine and into the hay rack,” Lowell says. “The chains run at high speed and the shocks shoot right up on the hay rack, really fast. You can load a load of shocks in no time at all: it’s that fast. It’s kind of interesting. But we’ve found there’s a lot of waste with that, as the oats fall off the shocks going into that pickup and up into the elevator.”

Because of that, he speculates the loader was better suited to grains like wheat. “I’m sure wheat would work better because it doesn’t shell very easily,” Lowell says. “But all we have in Hanley Falls is oats to test the machine.”

In the old days, shocks were typically gathered into stacks to make picking them up easier. But in the case of the Stewart, Lowell thinks the shocks were just set up one or two at a time or left on the ground in a line in the field, and the loader was driven around the field from shock to shock. “You needed to have a hayrack beside the machine to catch them,” he explains. “Those old hayracks had fronts and sides, not like the modern ones used for hay bales. When we’re running the loader during the show parade, we’ve found it takes a little practice to get everything coordinated so it would work well. People are kind of in awe to see it work, because most of them have never seen anything like it. I was never exposed to anything like that in my 74 years around here.”

Lowell says he’s sure the machine gave operators fits in the old days. “Those long chains running the elevator eventually wear and break, and they’d have trouble with them,” he says. “But we have the original chains on ours yet, and they still work.”

Saving labor on the farm

“I think a lot of people would be surprised that people actually used a machine like that. Many people today don’t even know anything about shocks, but in the old days, that was a tough job, loading all those shocks,” he muses. “So it was quite a thing if you could eliminate that phase. A machine like this would eliminate two or three men working in the field, and the work would have been a lot easier than the dusty work of hauling and loading those shocks by hand into the hayrack. I’d say having a machine like this was just as big as when the combine came in and you didn’t have to pitch the shocks into the threshing machine.”