The Art of Stacking Hay Bales

Across the Fence #555

 Once upon a time, hay bales were the norm when it came to harvesting hay. Now hay is chopped into wagons and stored in long “white worms.” There are still some bales, but they are huge, round bales that need a forklift to load. There are also some very large rectangular bales that get wrapped in white plastic. All those bales are not the ones I want to talk about. Lets talk about the ones that were held together with baler twine and one person could lift them from the baler chute and stack them on the hay wagon.

That stacking became a real art, in order to keep the load straight so it wouldn’t tip. If that happened, we had a real problem and Dad was not a happy camper.

I'm old enough to remember when we used horses that pulled the wagon and hay loader. The loader had twines that raked the windrowed hay onto the loader where other twines raked it up and onto the wagon. Then the big load of loose hay was hauled to the barn where we used a harpoon-like fork with two “spears” that went into the hay, and a series of pulleys and ropes. Dad set the fork into the hay and the horses would pull the rope that went through those series of pulleys. The hay went up into the haymow. When the load reached the point in the mow where Dad wanted it dumped, the person in the mow would yell, “Dump” and Dad would pull the rope and trip the load. The person in the haymow had the hot, dirty, dusty job. Using a pitchfork, he spread the loose hay around the haymow.

The introduction of the hay baler certainly revolutionized the harvesting of hay. Around 1950, a John Deere B tractor replaced King and Queen, our draft horses. The John Deere B took over the heavy work the horses had been doing for all those years.  

The introduction of the hay baler is when we became “experts” at loading a wagon so it wouldn’t tip before reaching the barn. There was an art to the stacking of the bales so they intertwined and held the load together.

Dad drove the tractor and pulled the baler and wagon. David and I were on the wagon. We worked with no gloves or shirts. Our hands became as tough as leather. We took turns pulling the bales from the hay chute of the baler and carrying them back to the end of the wagon, where we piled them in rows. Then we piled another layer perpendicular to them on top of that row. If everything was squared up, we had a very secure load. We piled those loads seven or eight layers high. If we got in a hurry, our load wasn’t as secure. We did have a few times when we lost half a load when Dad made a tight turn on a sloping piece of ground. Then the fun began, as we had to unscramble the mess and restack all the bales that had fallen off. The ones that had busted had to be fed through the baler again.

The introduction of bales certainly changed how we got hay from the wagon into the haymow. We no longer used the hayfork and rope and pulley system. Instead we used an elevator. Dad was on the wagon and loaded the bales onto the elevator. David and I were in the hot, dusty haymow and piled the bales as they fell off the elevator. It was hard keeping up at times because Dad tended to get in a hurry and sent the bales up one right after another. Then we began the art of stacking the bales in the haymow. 

To gain access to the haymow, we went up a homemade wooden ladder and through a small door in the side of the haymow, located above the main door entrance to the barn. When we stacked the bales, we had to make sure we left an opening to that door and we ended up with a shaft with steps made from the way we stacked the bales. It was an art. The higher up the bales went the longer and steeper the shaft became. When the haymow was full, we had bales stacked to the roof of the barn and right up to the track that ran the length of the barn. That was a lot of weight on the floor and old beams of that barn. It must have been built much stronger than we thought. 

It became very interesting in the winter when it was dark and we had to go up and throw down bales to feed the cows. There wasn’t any light in the haymow and it was really dark. We only had a flashlight to find our way around, and the light made a lot of strange, scary shadows dance among the bales. You never knew what “monsters” might be lurking among the dark shadows, waiting to pounce on you.

We didn’t spend a lot of time in the dark haymow. We threw the bales down the chute as fast as we could and then shimmied down our entrance shaft and escaped out the door and headed down the ladder as fast as we could, before some monster could grab us and pull us back into the dark haymow. 

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