By SUZANNE McFADDEN
The golden days of young men heaving hay bales from sunburnt fields are virtually over as the art of haymaking changes.
Nowadays, paddocks look like a giant's picnic, with a spread of monster pinwheel sandwiches and green-iced lamingtons the size of small cars laid out in a feast fit for a beast.
The huge rounds and long squares, each weighing around a tonne, are too heavy for school kids to pick up.
The traditional small squares of old are still being spat out the back of balers, but farmers are struggling to find people to hoist the hay out of the paddocks.
Joe Heng works until 3 am most mornings in a hay gang, set up by Helensville Young Farmers.
There is a non-stop demand for his team.
"Teenagers are too lazy to do it these days," he said. "When I was a kid, I used to have to fight to get on to a hay gang. You would put your name down with every gang in the district and wait until someone got kicked off.
"Now you see 15-year-olds on skateboards in the main street of Helensville doing nothing. A lot of them just don't have the work ethic.
"We've all got day jobs, so we don't start picking up until six o'clock, and we don't often finish before three in the morning."
Dave Scott started dragging bales from the day he could walk, but now he uses Machinery worth millions of dollars to lug the massive mounds across the paddocks.
The hay contractor from Waitoki, northwest of Auckland, shies away from the small bales these days, partly because of a lack of labour.
"This year we had to do 1000 conventional bales for Cornwall Park," says Dave's wife, Anne. "Dave and I had to pick them all up.
"That was okay when I was 19, but it's not so good when you're 37 with three little kids."
The Scotts now specialise in haylage - a new mixture somewhere between dry hay and wet, smelly silage.
They make bales that weigh up to 900kg, and then wrap them in aquamarine plastic raincoats so they can be left in the fields until they are fed out.
"Some of the 10-acre blockies are realising, why cart around 10 bales when you can have one?
"You don't have to have a barn, you just use big forks on the front of your tractor," Anne Scott says.
January was a frustrating month for the Scotts. It is usually the peak of the season, but the weeks of drizzly weather kept them out of the hay paddocks.
Now that sunny days have returned they are trying to catch up, getting help from Dave's brother John and John's daughter Susan, a physiotherapy student who drives a tractor.
In the Waikato, farmers have bemoaned a dry spell and are crying out for spare hay. Six weeks ago, farmers were forced to let their animals graze the paddocks they had shut up to make extra fodder. Now they have nothing to make hay from.
They are buying from the North, Manawatu and Hawkes Bay to make sure their cattle don't go hungry this winter.
Farmers are also facing rising haymaking costs because of the surging price of petrol. It affects diesel for the machinery, and twine and plastic covers - both made from petro-chemicals.
Where have the hay men gone?
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