Building Stacks of Hay
The article by Clell G. Ballard (“The Hay Hook,” Farm Collector, July 2016) was interesting, and its point about the advantages of a hay hook was very much on target. It made me tired to learn how many times bales were handled in the system the author described. An alternate system my father developed for use building stacks on a farm in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, employed a hydraulic hay stacker mounted on a tractor (in our case, a 1941 John Deere A). His first stacker was a Superior, the predecessor to the Farmhand. He sold it very soon after acquiring it. His second stacker – the one I used – was a Johnson.
Its main advantage was that it could be mounted and removed from the tractor far more easily. The stacker had a basket with wooden teeth on the front. The basket was about 12 feet wide and extended about 9 feet in front of the tractor. The tractor/stacker would fill its basket with hay from the windrows made by a side-delivery rake, then turn around, fill it again and pile it on top of the first bunch in order to get a full, level basket before taking it to the stack.
A rectangular base would be created by pushing together several baskets of hay. Additional baskets of hay were carefully placed on that base. Each layer involved two baskets on one side, two on the other and one from each end. A man in the stack moved just enough hay to keep the stack level and square. When the stack was as high as the stacker would go (about 20 feet), the man in the stack would pull hay from the basket and create a rounded top. The result was a stack that looked a little like a large loaf of bread, rounded just enough to shed water.
When my father purchased his first hydraulic stacker in the early 1940s, one of his neighbors scoffed, saying he could pitch a lot of hay for $600 (its cost). But soon he and others were asking my father to help put up their hay, and for a time he stacked hay for many nearby farmers. In those days, all of them had at least eight or 10 cows to milk and usually other livestock. Then, when it took too much time away from his own farm work, he encouraged them to purchase their own.
A local implement dealer would sell a Johnson stacker, and he would help mount it on whatever brand of tractor the farmer had. Others purchased Farmhand stackers from a dealer in a neighboring town.
In the fall, he would remove the hay basket and mount a homemade attachment with a grapple fork to the front of the hay stacker. The four tines of the grapple fork would be inserted in the haystack. The stacker would lift a bunch of hay and place it in a hayrack on top of a rope sling, then another and another. The hayrack would be pulled home, placed in front of the barn and, with a small tractor hooked to the end of the hay rope, the slings full of hay would be pulled up and into the haymow.
