I bout krapped myself when the hay dealer was telling me about the cows who are walked and massaged daily. The "handlers" or whatever their called,, it is a profession, they massage/walk cows every day.

The huge long tables where workers sit and pick apart a bale was even more astounding. Bale comes in gets strings cut and a guy walks down the tables putting a flake in front of each worker.The workers then pull the flake apart and seperate/grade each piece of hay in that flake.  For 'farmers' *I imagine that's who they're refered as* who raise say chickens or rabbits.. they go to a 'feed' store and buy little plastic packages of timothy for their 'livestock'. Of course all the hand graded individual pieces of timothy are priced differently.

Local dealer (I've know for 15-20 years) who was telling me about his trip to Japan to see what happened "on the other end of the pipeline"  said he was completely awestruck the differences between farms and farming here in the U.S. and how it's done in Japan.

1/2 the guys on this site have front yards as big as alot of the "farms" in Japan. (here we would call them "big gardens" there,,, The people are farmers and have "farmer status".

Being a "farmer" in Japan gives a person the same sort of Political Clout as being a Kennedy or Polosi, or (name your own favorite congressman)  Another thing I found out about when Japan puts on a "import embargo",, alot of times it's the Farmer's who tell the politicians to put on an embargo.  Japan as a Nation holds their Farmers in very high esteem,, Farmers tell the legislators what they want done,, Legislators do it.