Although I have spent nearly all my working life in and around farms and farming machinery, I have never actually been a farmer. I came late to it and am just finding out stuff now that proper farmers learned as kids.
The old days
Take haymaking, for instance. We used to buy our hay in the early days. There were quite a few farms around us that made hay and were happy to sell us a few bales. In fact, the first few years we were here back in the Seventies local farmers used to mow the grass at the side of the lanes and quiet roads round about the area.
They left it for a couple of days, then they would come in the evening when there was very little traffic to bale it and lead it away on trailers. We thought at the time what a good idea it was, making use of something that was normally just mowed down two or three times a year and left.
But over the years local haymaking got less and less as the livestock kept dwindling. In the end, it was just a couple of farms, and they made big
