Grandpa love hay loader

This looks like it could be a Graves loader like we had when we were young enough to hall square bales. Was made in Graves, Oklahoma. I liked it because you could pull the bales off near the front of the truck to start your load. It was far more economical than the “pop up” loader.

I have one out back. It is an IH loader. Have never used it.Lots better than loading by hand.

I like that one. Never seen one in the south.

I can see that they worked, but why not just slide the bales up a shoot from the baler to the wagon? Somebody has to ride the truck and load, so ride the wagon and load. I suppose if it was necessary to transport a long distance on truck maybe...

I AGREE 100%. Fewer times you handle something, especially something heavy & awkward like a hay or straw bale the better. The big round and square bales popular now probably save time, but for some things wouldn't work at all. We used to bed with small straw bales, 14"x16"x48", could do 2 or 3 small hog houses 6 ft by 8 ft, and also bed hog shelters, big loafing sheds 7 ft, 8 ft, or wider on special order up to 12 & 14 ft and 16 ft long and 4, 5, or 6 ft high. Took a couple small bales of straw to bed them.
But how many of both do you think a big square bale could bed?
Neighbors used to bale onto the ground, then come along with a low hay cart to pick the bales off the ground. You could step on&off the cart easily even when moving. But they had one guy baling, one guy driving tractor pulling hay cart, three men on cart picking & stacking bales. They would go to the barn and one unload the cart and three stack the haymow.
Our whole baling crew was 2 men and a small boy. I started driving the tractor pulling the baler when I was about 8 or 9. Neighbor who owned the baler rode the rack, Dad hauled in and unloaded, and the bales stayed exactly where they stopped rolling after falling off the end of the elevator. The lack of hands eliminated the chance of having to handle bales too much.
Last time Dad and I baled we did 20 acres of Alfalfa, 2nd cutting I think, between 900 and 1000 bales in an afternoon, tiny bales out of an IH #37 baler. Think between 90 and 100 per load, baled both racks full, pulled them home and unloaded. If we had baled with the IH #55T with the monster bales it made would have been 700-750 bales, and probably taken two days.

My dad bought a new Graves bale loader in 1972. Looked just like the one in the photo. You could pull the bale off of the loader anywhere you wanted. I'm sure price was a factor in my dad's decision. Used it for several years, pretty much trouble free.

The logistics just didn’t work out well in our area for tractors and wagons. Our barns were very different. Didn’t need to house livestock inside thus no mows (lofts as we called them)and we needed no elevators to run the hay into the barn. You didn’t spend long in the barn unloading. We had that loader on a 46 11/2 ton Chevy. A good driver and one stout young buck could have a hundred bale load headed to the barn in 15 minutes or less. Back into a poll barn and unload in not much more than that time. On a haul of more than a a couple of miles we went six high with 15 bales on a little headache rack giving us a 135 bale load. 2 guys can move a lot of hay in a day especially if one doesn’t own the truck himself and not take a turn at stacking LOL.
Andy

The reason we picked the bales up instead of putting them on a wagon we baled all night then stacked in the day either with a truck mounted loader or a New Holland stack wagon

First hay job I ever did was for a neighbor, driving his new John Deere 720, pulling a wagon with one of those on the right side of the wagon. Must have been 10 or 11 years old at the time.

Kinda hard to pull a two ton truck behind a baler.

Yes but a two ton truck can fetch twos loaded wagons hooked together,down the road at 25mph just fine.. I pulled thousands of bales the five miles between my two farms behind my livestock truck.

Father-in-law built one in his shop after seeing a picture of it.
It was mounted on an Oliver 70 tractor.

Loading onto a wagon directly behind the baler is too slow. Have to unhook, find another wagon and hookup. Much faster to just bale. Don't have to watch out for the person on the wagon or over work them. It would take two persons on the wagon to stack in good hay.

Using a kicker or pan thrower is somewhat faster but still have to change wagons, if there is one there.

I guess it really depends on your location an the need to get the hay under cover. We always had trouble getting enough days without rain just getting hay dry enough to bale, so it needed to go straight from the baler into the barn the same day . If you lived in a area where little rain felt, and could bale hay and leave it in the field till you were ready to pick it up, would be a very different story. We had 4 wagons, each would easy hold 125 bales, so 500 bales on, in load and load another 500 and store in the shed and on barn floor over night, and unload after morning milking. Not too bad for two guys. Didn’t seem slow at the time, and we had a dryer in the mow, to assure the hay didn’t heat , and mould.

Also depends what you had to work with. Grew up in an area where you absolutely did not want to leave bales out overnight. We only had one wagon. Neighbor had three we would borrow. After those were full, we would hook the Henry hay loader on a tandem farm truck with a 20’? bed and load it. Then came a 45’ and a 48’ semi trailers. If I remember right, it was just north of 1500 bales. We had places to get everything under cover.

Usually had 3 people stacking on the trucks. I was too young to stack at the time, but would move bales on the corners and get them lined up so the loader could grab them.