[MAK]

dressed up ?
mmmmm Ski boots, several layers, 2 scarves, hat and even man gloves so I guess I look a bit Michelin or those Jeux Sans Frontieres  giants from Ghent.
Ran out of water so we are drinking copious amounts of wine and beer ( home made cider is probably frozen in the barn) so sitting here with a scarf and hat in front of a few smouldering logs seems funny - dressed to kill! 

[Small Farmer]

I have to say that Robert is mostly right in this thread.  It was idyllic in the mind of the well-fed watcher, not to the labourer whose life expectancy was well short of the guy in the air-conditioned tractor today.

Some knowledge of the skills and techniques will remain because some remain valid or come back into fashion, but health and safety and minimum wage will favour hydraulics over muscles.

I'm laid up for a couple of weeks, but the workload hasn't got any easier to compensate.  It's different when the years catch up.  My boys, when they come home, don't open gates, they just jump them.  Ten years ago I might have thought about doing the same.  Now I just do more gate maintenance.

[SingingShearer]

That is your opinion, there is enough room for traditional and modern methods.
Many people will choose a tractor over manual labour any day but there are people who like me enjoy hard work and feel a sense of achievement after a job well done.
Traditional methods require skills which are dying out thanks to mechanisation, if these skills are lost it will be a great shame.

[Sylvia]

Singing Shearer, I agree totally. The lovely thing about living now is that you can enjoy hard work when you are young (I thought nothing of working a 14-16 hour day of hard work, keeping up with the men, when I was young) but when it gets too much, no-one expects or asks you to work too hard these days. Long may it last
Small Farmer, my younger son also jumps over our five-bar gate, never opens it. I was telling my neighbour about this, he is a 47 year old office worker. He showed me he could do it as well!! It's as much as I can do at 60 odd to CLIMB over a gate now 

[deepinthewoods]

i make bespoke sash windows by hand, the old fashioned way, planes and chisels, wedges and dowels. i could buy a machine to do it all for me, i found one that could make a sash from stock timber in 8 minutes, but i can gaurantee it wouldnt last as long or be as good quality because machines cant 'read' the material, spot how the grain is running or account for flaws such as knots in the timber.
  im sure this is the advantage of hand made over mechanised, being able to control the quality of a process.
 i taught myself from my grandads old books, dating back to 1930, and im forever repairing more modern machine made windows because they just dont last because they werent made right in the first place. the oldest window ive restored was 270yrs old and is still in use in its original condition today, but the amount of 30yr old windows ive had to rip out and replace is what keeps me in buisness.

[SingingShearer]

Hi deepinthewoods,

Good to hear, people are starting to realise that you may pay a little more for a proper craftsman/woman made item but it will probably last many more years than machine made.

[Bramblecot]

Re the hay.  The years before we had some stock of our own I let a local farmer cut and take our hay (I know, I know, but we were desperate to get it cut).  One year there was so much still laying in the field, and I hate waste, so I dragged a big builders bag around and filled it with loose hay.  I filled several bags and the hay stored really well in a shed on pallets.  We used it up to 2 years later and it was fine.  Now a friend bales our hay using a decrepit old baler, and I follow on collecting the loose stuff.  The builders bags are great to tug along, and seem to be breathable.
We also use the old sisal twine for baling and I plait it into ropes when I open a bale.  When the fencing contractor saw me plaiting baler twine he was in hysterics as he hadn't seen anyone making ropes for 40 years! 

The days of leaping gates are long gone for me too.

[robert waddell]

how do you cope with the joints on the twine every 6 feet  when twisting rope

[SallyintNorth]

How blessed we are to have the luxury of choosing automation or manual labour 

Emotionally I am with SS, how much nicer a day's work with hay out in the air, feeling the sun on one's back, the ache of honest toil in one's muscles and honest sweat on one's brow. 

But when, as last so-called 'summer', we had only one 6-day window in which to make all our forage, how lucky we can also instruct the contractor to come and round bale the other 14 acres while we enjoy working through the 6 we can manage in small bales!   

[robert waddell]

sally what a lovely picture you have outlined    and one i am sure everybody visualizes as them when  they get a piece of land     only some can see the futility and drudgery of it    there are as many posters on here that also wish for that mechanical boost to there daily tasks  having done both i will stick with the mechanical version
it would not do if we all thought the same or acted the same

[MAK]

How blessed we are to have the luxury of choosing automation or manual labour 

I agree. Maybe sometimes the scale of what we are doing, am mount of land, numbers of animals etc dictate a lean to mechanical help. We chose to do things on a smallish scale so that we can keep fit and get closer to the land and past ways. Oh - and I am essentially mean and would rather get up at 06:00 to dig the veg plot than buy a rotavator. OH just echoed that I am very mean !

[SingingShearer]

We chose to do things on a smallish scale so that we can keep fit and get closer to the land and past ways.

Some people pay a gym subscription to keep fit, those of us who choose manual labour don't have to.

[Pasture Farm]

Im with Robert 99.99999%   I dont do work if the tractor or anything else i have purchased can do the job for me.

So can i keep hay outside or not  without breaking into a sweat and employing half the villlage 

[robert waddell]

yes you can   pallets under it to stop drawing dampness build the stack in a triangle and cover with polythene with a net over it or a tarpaulin to weigh it down(built in a triangle to shed water off )

[Small Farmer]

BSG Tractors in Colchester used to sell an pyramid frame to build a stack against but it cost an arm an a leg.  Someone handy with a welder could make one for a lot less.

When you get to my age - the same as Robert - you don't always have a choice when it comes to physical labour.  So I came out of hospital on wednesday with a handy leaflet saying take lots of rest and no heavy lifting for a month.  Then Friday night went down to -15C here in the soft south and all the drinkers froze, the diesel in the tractor turned into wax, the drains stopped working and all the animals had to be looked after. 

Less the ache of honest toil and more the completely ****ing knackered after 8 hours in the fields.  Age puts limits on what you can do.