Making hay while the sun shines

I never really grasped the literal meaning of 'making hay while the sun shines' until I moved to the Colorado Rockies. You see in Australia it's warm enough all year round to have plenty of pasture (except when there's drought, but that's a different story). Here in the high country you need to store enough fodder to sustain you're livestock for the four to six months that your pasture is buried under feet of snow or they won't survive the winter. And to do that, you've literally got to make hay while the sun shines so everywhere you go in the summer you see ranchers like this hard at work from dawn till dusk.