OKLAHOMA CITY - Summer used to be the season for country boys across the United States to bale hay into 50-pound blocks, stack them on a trailer and haul them to the barn for use as cattle feed.

This idyllic picture of farm life is slowly becoming outdated, though. With advances in technology, what used to be a four- or five-person job now takes just one or two workers. Machines produce large, round bales of hay that weigh up to a ton and are moved by specially equipped tractors or trucks.

It's a more efficient, less labor-intensive process that helps farmers at a time when it's difficult to find seasonal labor and federal labor regulations make it more difficult to employ teenage workers, experts say.

Allen Baker, an economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said that in the last 30 years the hay business has become almost completely mechanized.

"It's a matter of trying to find people who would do that kind of work when you needed them. You just don't need someone on a full-time basis because you might have just two or three cuttings a year," Baker said.

Walter Fick, professor of range management at Kansas State University, said years ago a farmer could produce enough hay using existing manpower on smaller acreage. When he was a teen, he said he stacked hay with his father and other relatives into piles as heavy as 10 tons, which they would then run through a bailer.

It was dusty work performed under a blazing sun.

"Now in order to make a livelihood the size of the farm has gone up and the labor pool has gone down," he said.

The face of hay fields across the country began to change in the 1970s with the advent of the machine invented by Gary Vermeer of Pella, Iowa, that makes the large, round bales, said Dan Belzer, marketing manager for Vermeer Manufacturing.

"I have heard it said that when they went out to demonstrate the bailer people would follow from county to county just to watch it operate," Belzer said.

Despite the changes in the industry, though, the smaller hay bales didn't disappear immediately. Nor is everyone signaling their death knell.

Jack Carson, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, said he thinks they could become a niche market for the smaller producer or the hobby farmer.

But the heavy labor required to make the smaller bales is not something that typically inspires farmer nostalgia.

Mark Hughes, of Bristow, started working in the hay fields in the early 1970s while in high school. He and two of his friends would work from daylight to dark. If the barn had lights, it would often be later.

Accidents were often a concern, he said. Hay bales would fall, dust would infiltrate the lungs, snakes could even hide in the hay. Sunburn and dehydration were common and baling machines could be dangerous to life and limb.

"It is dirty and nasty; your eyes are always full of hay and dust," Hughes said.

Added Greg Nowakowski, a Harrah hay farmer: "My sons are in their 30s and they have worn themselves out hauling hay."