The Yorkshire Dale farmers have been busy cutting hay in the meadows for the past week or so with the tractors working from dawn to dusk on fine days. The meadows are first cut, then the hay is turned several times, and then finally it’s baled into the shape of big sweet-smelling green-yellow cylinders and taken away for storage.

I had a chat with one of the farmers as they were going up the lane near my house. He was pleased with the hay crop in the upper part of the Dale this year and told me the harvest in the lower dale was below expectations because of the dry months of early summer. “That’ll give us a good price for our hay” he said.

Rain from the west tips over the high point of Shunner Fell and although tourists and long-distance walkers on the Pennine Way might complain about the weather, it makes all the difference to the stocks of winter feed.

Timing of the hay harvest is embedded in the cycle of the seasons. In Spring the meadows are full of sheep with their lambs. Then they are taken to higher pastures in early summer so that the meadows can soak up the summer sun and grow ready for mowing around Lammas Tide, halfway between the summer solstice and autumn equinox. 

Not so long ago the cutting and storage of hay was much harder work than it is now. A farmer told me what it was like when he was a young man in the 1970s. The hay was mown, dried in the field, and then brought to the dry-stone barns that are such a feature of the Yorkshire Dales landscape.

The dry hay was pitched up to the upper level of the barn with a hay fork, or, if they were lucky, there was a conveyor belt. The youngsters had to arrange it in the hay loft and stamp it down so that it was tightly stored. He talked about his memories fondly, how his mother would bring food in wicker baskets to the teams working in the fields; but doesn’t regret the advent of bigger machines and bailers from the perspective of no longer needing raw muscle power.

The loss of communities working together at harvest time, replaced by a single tractor driver spending the day alone, has had an effect on mental health. Surveys indicate that mental health is one of the biggest problems in modern agriculture. Isolation in combination with worries about the weather, changing government policies, price fluctuations of produce, increasing costs of inputs and reduction in rural services, all lead to anxiety and worry.

It's not only mechanisation in farming that has caused people in work to become isolated. The advent of the internet and email means that many people are now working remotely away from an office and other co-workers. Whilst that has advantages, for example I can get my washing done and clean the house in between Zoom calls, it prevents the causal interactions and socialising that it could be argued make us human. As I approach retirement, I’m beginning to realise that isolation at work has led to classic ‘burnout’ symptoms and one of the things I need to do as soon as I’m released from being stuck to a computer screen all day is get more involved with community activities.

Have you felt that changing work practices, whether its increasing mechanisation of farming or the rise of internet-based remote working, has affected your mental health? Any suggestions on positive steps to address isolation at work are welcome!

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member

List of organisations offering wellbeing support to those in the farming community:

https://defrafarming.blog.gov.uk/wellbeing-support-for-farmers/