I recently made some lovely hay with almost no effort, or having to rush because of the weather.

It got me thinking about how things were when I was a child. From my memory it seemed like the good weather lasted all summer and if you weren’t making hay you were in the bog at turf. There never seemed to be any shortage of suitable weather.

Another thing that sticks in my mind is the amount of help that there was. If you were making hay all of your neighbours would arrive in the field. And if your neighbour was at hay you would go and help him. It was the same in the bog at the turf. Everyone helped each other out.

Then there was the potato harvest when you would have a field full of people. There was never any money involved. It was just you help me, and I’ll help you in return. Maybe, occasionally, a few bags of potatoes or turf or bales of hay might change hands.

The mothers and grandmothers would bring tea out to the field and there’d be a real picnic. Fresh soda bread, homemade jam and fresh rhubarb tart. All was brought out in baskets and, as children, we would eat a lot more than we would have received in the house.

Times have changed. If you made a field of small square bales of hay now you wouldn’t get many family members to help, not alone your neighbours. I would go as far as saying that excuses would be made to avoid lifting a few bales.

That said, I’m not very fond of small bales myself. We now make all our hay in round bales that can be lifted with the tractor.

But there’s more to it than just an unwillingness to help your neighbour. There just is not the same amount of people making a living from the land.

Families are a lot smaller and the young people only want to help if it involves driving a tractor and even then, there needs to be some cash changing hands.

Farming has also changed in that we have all had to get bigger to survive in business. Fifty years ago, my father had a good standard of living with about 70 cattle and could afford to pay a workman.

Now we have almost 300 cattle and 150 ewes. There is still only two of us full-time and one part-time.

I know that mechanisation has helped, but we are busy and the reality is that while we do try to help people out, we just don’t have a lot of time.

Contractor

One way of freeing up some time on the farm is to employ contractors, but sometimes I wonder how long will this last?

I have several contractors who do various jobs for me, and they are all saying the same thing. They just can’t get any part-time workers to drive machines for them.

Why is this? I presume it is because most people are now in full-time employment and don’t want the long hours and working conditions that comes from doing farm work.

Although it’s not only contractors who can’t get help. It is almost impossible to get some part-time labour on farms.

The reality is that farmers can’t offer a nine to five job, and farmers make that little money they can’t afford to pay enough to incentivise people to work for them.

If this continues, I fear the whole issue of labour is going to pose a bigger problem to farmers into the future than the much talked about Brexit.

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