What is "year-long"

Usage examples of "year-long".

Carrie had managed to secure a year-long contract with a wine merchants in Bermondsey, which entailed collecting casks of sherry and pipes of port from the wharves in Tooley Street and making an occasional journey to the coopers in Stepney.

Fruit eaters like Roamer lingered only in the tropical woodlands of Africa and southern Asia, clinging to the year-long food supply these forests still provided.

Here's in the regions of year-long snow and ice, where, in winter, even the waters of the Barents Sea ran a milky white, to find this ebony mass towering fifteen hundred vertical feet up into the grey overcast evoked the same feeling of total disbelief, the same numbing impact, although here magnified a hundredfold, as does the first glimpse of the black cliff of the north face of the Eiger rearing up its appalling grandeur among the snows of the Bernese Oberland: this benumbment of the senses stemmed from a dichotomous struggle to accept the evidence before the eyes for while reason said that it had to be so that primeval part of the mind that existed long before man knew what reason was just flatly refused to accept it.

Can you imagine a year-long athletic contest in which everyone on a planet participates?