'It's a boy!' Celebrating birth with a giant hay bale teddy bear 🐻👶

How do you tell the world you’re having a baby? Most people take out a classified ad or do a social media update. Rodney Broom, a hay producer in Bridgewater, Central Victoria, is not most people.

In May 2014, Rodney made a giant teddy bear of hay bales in his front paddock. The teddy sat cheerfully in the paddock corner, looking out on cars and trucks hurtling up the Calder highway and over fields of grain and hay.

"We just wanted to announce to the world, ‘Here’s our little bloke’," said Rodney. Rodney got the idea from his sister, who texted him a photo of Irish "hay art". He showed the photo to his wife Narelle and she jumped at the idea.

Being a hay farmer, Rodney had all the art materials he needed lying around his farm. He used a loader to stack the hay bale teddy, and painted stock trough floats and an old suction hose black for the eyes, nose and mouth.

"When Josiah arrived, I came home from the hospital and quickly spray painted the bow blue. That completed him then. Until then we didn’t know if it was going to be a pink or blue."

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