Here we have three photos from different sources that I believe show the progress of filling the hay rick. First, we see an empty hay rick with a big pile of hay behind it. Yes, this may have been the end but humor me, since it is a nice picture of an empty hay rick.
This one, I can’t be sure exactly what it is, but it looks like loading the hay rick, or possibly putting harvested wheat into a thresher?
Finally we have a full hay rick with the notation “Donald Hintz” on it. I assume that is he standing on the back of the wagon.
Being a city girl, I don’t know an awful lot about farming, so if you know more than I do, please chime in with a comment to correct me if I’m wrong.
Who Were They? 
Donald Hintz – well, there are 21 one of them listed in the SSN death index and nearly all of them came from Wisconsin. So odds are, at least one of these pictures was taken in Wisconsin.
I think the one rick is being unloaded into a thresher. Not much of a farmer myself.
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I have never heard it called a hay rick..I would call it a hay wagon. In the second photo they are threshing some kind of small grain. The man on the wagon would throw pitchforks full of grain stalks into the threshing machine..it separates the grain from the chaff. The long belts you see provided the power needed to help run the thresher. When I was a little girl that is how they threshed wheat at our farm. A group of neighbors would get together with a machine and go from farm to farm until all the wheat or oats was harvested.
The last wagon looks to be loaded with hay. Before hay balers this was the only way to transport hay..loose and piled high on the wagon.
Great old farming photos! :)
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You are pretty much right on the money. This is the way my father farmed his whole life. The term hay rick was used to describe the pile of harvested material, which was usually wheat, on Dad’s farm. On his farm the worker’s, including he and his neighbors, would cut the wheat fields by hand, using large scythes. The wheat stalks would then be piled into huge piles, like large igloos on the landscape. Second step was to gather the huge piles onto the wagons and haul them to the area of the farm where the thresher was set up. At our location, this was a large steam engine that would drive to the farms and set up just long enough to thresh off the wheat, then move on to the neighbor. After seperating the wheat, the wagons would be loaded again and hauled to locations where the straw or hay would be stored until needed on the farm. My favorite photo of my Father is of him standing on top of a huge wagon load of hay, being pulled by a team of horses. The date was circa. 1940.
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