overshot hay stacker supplier

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.

Efficient and adaptable, Circle C"s hay bailing equipment is able to load and stack multiple sizes of bales automatically while in motion with a push of a button.

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).

On a fine summer day more than 165 years ago, a rancher in the Flint Hills of Kansas hitched a team to an overshot hay stacker and, with his hired men, went to work stacking hay.

I thought I should thank everyone for responding to my letter (Farm Collector, July 2002) concerning a hay stacker. I received one letter and two phone calls.

In 1900 the company was moved to Ottumwa, Iowa, where Dain produced harvesting equipment including sickle mowers, hay loaders, hay stackers and side-delivery rakes, as well as other pieces of farm equipment such as pump jacks, farm mixers, feed mills, corn cutters and hay presses.

Fairfield, Idaho, sits centered in a high, flat prairie north of Mountain Home. The alfalfa hay raised there is usually lower than most in protein but also much lower in both acid detergent fiber and neutral detergent fiber, making the hay high in energy and very desirable for milk cow hay, even with the lower protein.

The hay hauler involved that summer had an interesting mismatch of trucks and trailers. One was a Ford, single-axle, with an overshot over the cab. That’s a flat spot suitable for stacking three layers of hay bales above the cab (at least you drove in the shade). The Ford also pulled a short trailer.

A Chevy was in the mix – straight truck only, also with an overshot. The other truck was an old R-model International Harvester. It was a two-axle semi-tractor and pulled a two-axle trailer about 40 feet long. All the trucks ran gasoline engines, with the International running a 450- or 500-cubic-inch six-cylinder engine.

In 1968, I shortly drove a 1954 Mack concrete mixer truck with the (approximately) 400-cubic-inch flat-head Mack gas engine – Mack 5x4 transmission. It wasn’t a racehorse, but it got there and back. Similar power plants by various manufacturers were the norm on the highways and under the hoods or beneath the “doghouses” of hay trucks in the late ’40s into the late ’50s.

The 400-horse Hall-Scotts and Budas were said to get about 1 mile per gallon on propane and a little more on gasoline. My last truck, with a 400 Cummins, was good for around 4.5 mpg, and my son’s 500 Caterpillar, also hauling circa 100,000-pound gross vehicle weights hauling hay, 4.5 to 4.7 mpg.

When I was growing up we used a overthrow or overshot stacker and cage. There was one guy in the cage (before the hydrafork was invented) topping off the stack to shed water. I believe the stacks were 5 to 6 ton. Some used a slide stacker and maybe made 7 to 8 ton stacks. To feed I would cable a stack onto a underslung with a winch, drive to the cows and would put the tractor (IHC M) in first gear and let it go. I would use a drag fork to pull the hay off as the tractor went along. Later on I had a loader and would unhook the underslung and take the hay off with the loader and feed it that way. That stack in the video is just plain amazing. Took some skill to get it to stand fast, them old boys knew what they were doing for sure. Thanks for sharing that.