Haymaking

In the old days, less than a hundred years ago, haymaking was hard work, involving many people and could take a long time. It was a major event during the farming season, usually towards the end of July/early August and a good harvest meant your animals had enough feed during the winter.

Today is different. Outside my porch I have two rater large fields, you can see one of them in the Blip, where one of the local farmers gets his hay. Yesterday afternoon around four o'clock when I went for my walk, the farmer arrived with his tractor and some sort of modern mowing machine to cut the grass. He was finished before I got back, an hour later. This morning when I had my morning coffee he came back with a new machine that that whizzed around in the grass, gathering it in strings, as you can see in the picture. It was done in less than an hour. This afternoon he, and someone to keep him company in the tractor, was back a third time, this time to gather the grass in the big wagon after the tractor. It's all automatic. Something in the front of the wagon gathers the grass and somehow transports it into the wagon. This was also done within an hour, even though he had to drive off and empty the wagon once. Now, the field is empty. Three to four hours of work of mowing, gathering it and driving it home to the barn, as far as I could see, done by two people, probably chatting to each other in the tractor while doing it.Compared to several days of work for several people, having a big feast when it was all done.
Todays farmer can, if the circumstances are perfect, get four harvests out of one season. Last year they got three, a hundred years ago they got one. At best.

Of course my knowledge of the amount of work involved is not at all detailed and in my painting of the picture I'm using really big brushes but I'm sure the people from a hundred years ago wouldn't have understood how it was possible and the two people in the tractor wouldn't be and probably couldn't have done the job in the old way.