overshot hay stacker quotation

1913DavidsonAg. Engin. 269, Field hay stackers are divided into two classes, the plain overshot and the swinging stacker. The first has a row of teeth, corresponding to the teeth of the sweep rake, on the end of long arms hinged near the ground. The hay is left upon these teeth by backing away the sweep rake. By means of a rope and pulleys the teeth are raised to a vertical position and the load of hay allowed to slide back onto the stack.1919U.S. Dept. Ag.Farmers’ Bulletin 1009.4, The overshot stacker . . is so called because the hay is carried up and over the stacker frame and delivered at one point on the stack.Ibid 5, The “overshot” stacker is in general use in the Middle West, and can be used for large or small stacks.[1929AmSp 5.56 NE [Cattle country talk], The “stacker” might be of the “over-shot” variety which shoots rather than piles the hay into stacks: the “stack-horse” (or horses) pulls, and an enormous wooden fork “shoots” the hay up.]1958AmSp 33.271 eWA [Ranching terms], Overshot stacker. A fork-like arrangement, used in conjunction with a buck rake, which throws the hay backward onto the stack.1975Independent–Rec. (Helena MT) 5 Oct 15/1, [Caption:] The arm of the overshot stacker worked like a big catapult to toss hay onto the stack. This picture shows a horse-powered overshot stacker being used.1984DoigEnglish Creek 223 nMT, An overshot stacker worked as its name suggests, tossing a load of hay up over a high wide framework which served as a sort of scaffolding for the front of the haystack.1986KlinkenborgMaking Hay 25 wMT, A hundred and fifty horses . . [were] used to pull Case or McCormick and Deering mowers or push buckrakes or draw haywagons or work the Mormon derricks or overshot stackers or beaverslides.

According to the dictionary, the jayhawk is a fictitious bird. But the Jayhawk at the Wykoff, Minn., home of Marv Grabau swoops through the air, bearing a 600-pound load of hay.

Marv’s Jayhawk is an overshot hay stacker, a piece of horse-drawn farm equipment patented in 1915. Manufactured by the F. Wyatt Mfg. Co. (which evolved into what is today the Hesston Corp.) in Salina, Kan., the long and leggy Jayhawk is a clutch-driven creature that stumps almost every onlooker. Measuring 12 feet wide, 30 feet long and 12 feet high with an 80-inch rear axle, the Jayhawk has a “head” (or “sweep”) originally used to lift hay into bins or cribs. “The head trips like a trip bucket on a tractor,” Marv says. “When it gets up so high, there’s a lever that dumps the load.” The sweep could hold approximately 600 pounds of loose hay as it swept overhead.

The Jayhawk dates to an era when cut hay was left in the fields, and later mounded for storage. “You had your hay windrowed with the old-fashioned dump rake,” Marv explains. “This sweep, or head, would push up, and when the sweep or head was full, you’d go over to a basket or crib – sometimes they had a crib, sometimes they didn’t – and stack it up inside. This particular stacker is 12 feet high, so you could get stacks of hay approximately 12 feet high. Then you’d pack it down and form a top on it like a bread loaf to help it shed water. You just kept moving around in the field, making these stacks until you were done.”

Last August, Marv loaded the stacker onto a trailer and hauled it to Spring Valley, Minn., for the annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Fest tractor show. An unwieldy critter, the Jayhawk fought the process. “It took me three hours just to load it onto the trailer and tie it down, plus the hauling time to town,” Marv says. But it was worth the trouble. “The Jayhawk was the center of attention,” he recalls. “They had about 95 tractors there and 34 implements, and this one drew the most curiosity.

Although the Jayhawk is a deceptively simple conglomeration of steel and cables, chains and wood, Marv invested nearly 40 hours in its restoration. He had to find new rear wheels because the original ones had been removed to allow a tractor to push the stacker. “When they converted it for use with a tractor, it was just a convenience,” he says. “I don’t know if they hooked it to a loader-type tractor or not. A mechanical lift on the front of a tractor is like a fifth wheel on a truck. That’s why they had to get rid of the rear wheels.”

Marv used two tractors with trip buckets to hold the raised sweep up as he worked to loosen the gears. “I had no one to show me how,” he says, “so it was all experimental.” Replacing the 8-foot wood tines on the head involved study and patience, as well as a search for the metal “teeth” that cover the ends of the tines. “The teeth keep the head from digging into the ground and breaking the tines,” he says. “They’re factory metal.” When Marv got the stacker, it had just four tines on it. He needed eight more, and found exactly that number in Waverly, Iowa. The formidable-looking tines now stand supported by a hay bin Marv built to accompany the stacker in the field.

The Jayhawk’s glory days ended in the middle part of the last century when mechanized implements and changing haying methods made the hay stacker obsolete. “After the 1915 horse-drawn model,” Marv says, “it was called a ‘Stackhand’ farm stacker. It was the same as this, only it was self-propelled, more or less. The reason they didn’t (sell well in the north) was that the weather here is so humid that hay rots more easily, so it was better to have it in a hay mow.”

Hay loaders and balers served farmers in a slightly different capacity than the Jayhawk. “The hay loader was the other thing that would’ve come after the hay stacker,” Marv says. “I’ve got a dump rake and the old side-delivery rake here, and the horse mower. I have a chain of command of haying pieces.” Several other restoration projects await, but for now, Marv is simply pleased to be able to display his haying equipment, including the flightless Jayhawk.

In the American midwest, dairy barns all had a hay track down the peak, and either a bank barn with a ramp to the second floor to back the hay wagon into, or the track extended past the end and the wagon was parked at the end. Originally horses and a long rope were used to hoist the hay, when it got to the top it released and rolled inside, where it hit another stop on the track and released. Louden, Myers and probably dozens of others made the trolleys, they"re popular for kitsch decorations lately. Also was an additional two tracks half way down the rafters that carried a slide to divert the hay to either side, to save forking labor in the hay mow, that was always the hottest, stickiest dustiest job.

Loose hay could be put up a few percentage points wetter than small square bales. I"ve seen limp alfalfa/lucerne put into an Amish hay mow, that I thought would be about right for wrapping, they said it would be fine? must have been spread out in the mow.

On the Minnesota farm where I was raised in the 1940s, McCormick’s reaper was still drawn by two big Belgians and a Percheron, Sally, Dick, and Rex. A similar machine cut and bound cornstalks. Hay was cut by the new gear-driven mower with its reciprocating blades, and gathered by the ton with a supremely efficient, high-wheeled rake employing a mechanically powered, foot-activated dumping mechanism. Wagonloads of hay were hoisted into a tall, round-roofed barn by means of a track-and-pulley arrangement powered by horses, and, out in the field, an overshot stacker thrust its wooden arms high into the air and slammed huge loads of hay down onto the tops of stacks.

A main attraction of horse power is that it runs on homegrown fuel — hay you’ve raised yourself or maybe purchased from a neighbor. At worst, you feed grain raised in a neighboring state. In my native Minnesota, our workhorses stayed fat and healthy over the winter eating the coarse wild slough grass that would otherwise have gone to waste, along with leftover alfalfa from which the dairy cows had taken the better parts. Oat straw, another waste product, sometimes formed an important part of winter rations in those northern states, and horses everywhere have often been grazed on rough or irregular pastures that have no other use. The essential point is that they draw their energy from the surroundings, or at least from within the nation — not from Saudi Arabia or Nigeria.

Though advocates of horse power have such numbers in their support, in the end their arguments fall back upon the less ponderable. We all like the horse’s versatility. He is an endlessly adaptable power unit that can perform a surprisingly wide variety of tasks. On the same day, you might haul a load of feed up a steep muddy hill to unload at the barn, where you pick up a few bales of hay to take out to the cows and a load of firewood for the house. After lunch, you move some trash and maybe plow the garden, then split the team and drag some poles out of the woods with one of them while your wife gives the kids a ride on the other.

I’VE TRIED TO AVOID ROMANTICIZING, but working with our fellow creatures is romantic — if you’re content to farm a small acreage, if you don’t mind being tied down, if you have the necessary self-discipline and family cohesion, and, especially, if you like the smell of horse sweat, the jingle of trace chains, and the cozy munching sounds when you’ve pulled the harness off your tired team and thrown them their sun-drenched hay.