We weren’t there. Nobody at HayBuster today was in that shop in 1966 when the company started (although we still have one employee who works 10 hours a week who started up at that workshop in Minot back in 1968). The story wasn’t written down the way it should have been. But the blizzard was. The history books remember that storm in detail, and if you line up the dates, you realize something worth thinking about.
HayBuster was founded in 1966. The same year the worst blizzard in North Dakota history shut the state down for four days straight.
Joe Anderson had an idea. He built a machine that would chop hay into precise lengths so cattle wasted less of it and ranchers could stretch their winter feed. Sixty years later, that idea is still the core of what we do. The question I keep coming back to is simple. Was it a coincidence that the worst winter anyone had ever seen hit the exact same year a man decided to invent a better way to feed cows through winter? Or was it the storm itself that put him in the shop in the first place?
I think it was the storm.
What that blizzard actually did
The storm hit on Wednesday, March 2, 1966, and it did not let up until Friday the 4th. In some places it kept going into Saturday. This was not a cold snap with some blowing snow. This was a full four-day shutdown of an entire state.
Here is what the record books say:
- Sustained winds over 70 mph (113 km/h). Gusts recorded at 100 mph (161 km/h).
- Up to 32 inches (81 cm) of snow in the northeast part of the state.
- Snowdrifts 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 meters) high in open country.
- 43 straight hours of zero or near-zero visibility in Bismarck.
- Temperatures in the teens Fahrenheit during the storm. Below zero right after.
- Power and telephone lines down for days.
- Three transcontinental trains stuck in railway cuts with 500 passengers stranded.
Five people died. One of them was a six-year-old girl from Strasburg who got separated from her brothers on a 60-foot walk from the house to the barn. They found her two days later, a quarter mile from home. Fully dressed for the weather. It wasn’t enough.
The livestock numbers from that storm still make ranchers quiet when you bring them up.
- 18,500 cattle lost.
- 7,500 sheep lost.
- 600 hogs lost.
- 7,000 turkeys on one single farm in eastern North Dakota.
- Total estimated loss around 4 million 1966 dollars (roughly 40 million in 2026 dollars).
Cattle suffocated inside barns that had been completely sealed in by snow. Other cattle milled around in the yards, trampling the snow down until it packed higher than the fence line, then walked right out over the top and wandered off into the open country and perished. That is the kind of storm this was.
Joe Anderson, snowed in
Nobody flew to the beach in 1966 when winter got hard. There were no cheap flights. There was no escape. The cows still had to eat. That was the deal you signed up for when you put your family on a ranch in North Dakota.
So imagine Joe Anderson somewhere near Minot, North Dakota, snowed in, watching a storm that had already gone from ugly to historic. The phone line is down. The power might be out. He cannot get to town. He cannot move his vehicle. He can get to the barn and he can get to the shop, and that is about it. He’s got hay to get through the rest of the winter, and he knows exactly how much of it his cows are wasting every single day.
I can picture him in that shop. Wood stove going. Workbench covered in steel. Hands cold. And a very simple question running in his head.
How do I make the hay I have last longer?
That is not a romantic question. That is the question every rancher from that generation asked every single fall. You counted your bales going into winter and you prayed the math worked. You lost animals when it didn’t. In a winter like 1966, if you had bought the wrong bales or if your cattle were wasting too much, you were in real trouble.
Joe Anderson knew what most ranchers knew. Cattle eat what they want. They push the rest onto the ground. They bed on it, they trample it, they contaminate it, and then they won’t touch it. A round bale thrown whole into a feeder could lose 30 to 40 percent before the cattle ever got it into their mouths. In a normal winter, that hurt the bottom line. In a winter where you were already rationing everything, it was the difference between a calf crop and a disaster.
His answer was to chop the hay. Not roughly. Not by hand. Machine it into precise, controlled lengths so the cattle ate what you fed them and ranchers could actually manage their feed inventory instead of hoping it worked out.
That idea became HayBuster.
Why the story matters now
HayBuster has been building tub grinders and bale processors ever since. We moved to Jamestown later. We ship machines to dealers in South Africa, France, the Czech Republic, Australia, the Middle East and all over the world. The machines have gotten bigger and smarter. The H-1130 and the new H-1155 can process bales that Joe Anderson in 1966 would not have believed were even legal to stack on a wagon. But the DNA is the exact same thing. You put hay in the top. You get feed out the bottom. Your cattle eat more of what you bought. Your ranch makes it through the winter. If they eat beef or drink milk, now there is probably a HayBuster there.
Dependability and simplicity were the whole point back then. When you are snowed in 60 miles from the nearest tractor dealer and the windchill is 40 below, you cannot afford a machine with a dozen fancy electronics and a touchscreen that needs a software update. You need a machine that starts, runs, and chops hay. Joe built it that way because he had to. He knew what it was to be cut off from help.
We still build them that way. Sixty years in, the North Dakota winters have not gotten any softer. Neither has the expectation that the machine in your yard will run when you need it to run. A rancher in Alberta, a dairy operator in Normandy, a feedlot in the Karoo, they all need the same thing Joe Anderson needed in that shop in 1966. Something that will not quit on them when the weather does.
That is not marketing. That is a lesson the weather taught somebody a long time ago, and we have never unlearned it.
We still work with the same kind of partners too. Every single HayBuster that has rolled off the assembly line since 1966 has a belt on it that was made just down the road at WCCO Belting. Same state. Same generation. Same understanding of what a machine has to do to earn its keep out here.
That is what this post is really about. HayBuster was not born in a boardroom. It was not born from a market study. It was born in a shop in the middle of a storm that killed five people and close to 35,000 animals, because a rancher looked at what the weather was doing to his herd and said there has to be a better way to feed these cattle.
Sixty years later, ranchers in 30 countries are still using the answer he came up with.
