People who keep horses know how important it is to have a good supply of hay. The problem is getting hold of a supply of good hay. Imagine how important it was to get good hay in the past.

The main method of transport involved horses. Horses eat hay. Nearly all farms had sheep, cattle or pigs. Some farms had them all. All farms had horses to do much of the work tractors do now. They all had to be fed.

During the summer, animals harvested their own food, straight from the fields. When winter came, grass, then as now the cheapest form of animal feed, did not grow. But stock still ate.

Hay time filled the barns with the vital winter feed. It was absolutely crucial.

There were other feeds for animals, but hay was the staple diet. The whole year depended on getting good hay. The problem is that to make good hay a period of fine sunny weather is necessary.

When we read old books, and when we think back, memory fades out the rain. There were wet times in the past, as there are now.

To make hay the grass has to be cut, allowed to dry, turned to let the sun dry it thoroughly and then baled and taken to the barn. Make hay while the sun shines was not a chance comment.

This process, if the sun shone, took about a week. If the sun did not shine, it was anybody's guess.

Sometimes the constant turning to try to dry the hay reduced it to dust and it was not worth baling.

These days there are other ways of preserving grass for use later. The making of silage has removed some of the uncertainly, since it is not necessary to get it dry in quite the same way.

Silage time is still pretty fraught. The main reason for the change is the ability, improved since plastics became cheap and plentiful, to use them to keep air out of preserved grass.

Things do not rot if the air is kept out. So we see bales in the field neatly wrapped in black plastic.

All the farmer is doing is stopping further change. The bale is held as it is. It is preserved grass. It is still pretty important to those who try to feed stock in traditional ways.

The BSE crisis was blamed on the extraction of protein from animal carcasses and the feeding of that protein, after mixing into compound feed, back to bovines.

You still see beef advertised in butchers and elsewhere as 'grass fed' and there is more confidence in consumers' minds that this traditional method is more reliable.

The number of BSE cases is dropping dramatically, but the effects of that crisis still reverberate down the years.

The traditional time for cutting hay was the end of June and the beginning of July, so we are right in the middle of it now.

This fact clashed in a way that was, at least, inconvenient for some. It was the middle of the show season and, in some places more importantly, it interfered with cricket at the weekends and cup cricket in the evenings.

Nothing, however, could be allowed to interfere with hay time. People arranged their weddings to avoid it. Hay making had to be dealt with when it was necessary.

Whatever advances we may have made in farming the weather still rules.

Man, used to being all powerful, must be reminded that he is not. If it rains, the hay is spoiled.

Updated: 10:40 Tuesday, July 02, 2002