if it was for animal fodder, it was piled into haystacks
Perhaps I can just add a small amount to dixby's evocative description since there are a few other associated terms of art... and there is a distinct difference in the handling of hay and grain crops.
Hay was never gathered into stooks (other regional forms of this word include stoops and similar variants) - it was cut loose, originally by hand with sickle or its larger cousin the scythe, latterly in Victorian times by finger-bar mowers drawn by horsepower. The resulting swathes were laid to dry in windrows, turned occasionaly, then raked into heaps and pitched onto carts for transport to the storage area close to the livestock buildings - this area was sometimes known as a fold amongst other things. As horse-drawn mechanisation came in to force the pace, the turning and the side-raking became mechanised too.
Grain crops were as dixby describes: initially the crop was cut by similar manual means to the hay crop, but then by finger-bar mowers and later by binders - these latter were enormously heavy pieces of machinery and were known as 'horse-killers' since they often required three horses in a unicorn hitch (one leading, then two in a side-by-side harness). These resulted in ready-tied sheaves dropped in a neat line, rather than the previous manually tied versions bound with a twist of straw. In both cases the sheaves still had to be gathered into stooks, which sometimes needed to be turned and re-ordered in order to dry enough to make safe in a compacted stack. If the crop was not pre-dried enough, the rick could catch fire from the exothermic reaction of a close-packed stack, or the grain could go mouldy. Whereas hay was best stacked as soon as it was sun-dried, corn crops always needed further wind conditioning, and hence it was stooked in the fields for a while. After transport they were built into an enormous circular stack known typically as a rick, which gives the alternative name of a rickyard. To keep rats from devouring the grain, the ricks were often built on a platform raised from the ground on staddle stones ~ imagine large stone mushrooms and you're close! The overhang was to prevent the rats climbing aboard.
Once in the stacks and ricks the job was only half done. Both forms of material needed a thatched roof to keep the weather out, and they were characteristically decorated at the apex with a corn dolly. Hay had to be cut from the stack with a massive blade - think of something like a large spade with a tee-handle, with one straight edge and one curved sharp edge meeting the straight edge at a point. Sawing down through dense-packed hay with one of those was really some job. By contrast, ricks storing oats, barley or wheat would typically be taken down in one 'all-hands' operation, and the sheaves fed through a thresher, which varied widely in scale, power source and output. When the smaller kits were used there might be a seperate winnowing operation, which tumbled the grain through a fan-box to separate the grain from the chaff. The straw would then be built back into a haystack-type stack, unless it was one of the more specialist kinds as used for Capfka's thatching.
I have worked with Shire horses on all of these tasks, and I can assure you it is murderous hard work :)
