Late on a hot and humid summer afternoon, cars and trucks are lined up along the lane at the Fischer family’s Flat Point Farm, where the haying operation is in full swing. Family, friends, and neighbors are here to help gather the harvest. At the barn, the bales are tossed into the loft from the top of a fully loaded hay wagon. Their rhythmic thump echoes out from below where sheep pens have replaced the stanchions that once held milk cows. Shafts of late afternoon sunlight pierce the dense shade of the oaks at the back of the barn, where people take a break after the wagon is emptied, wiping sweat from their faces. Coronitas are broken out – mini-beers just big enough to quench thirst and clear the throat of hay dust. A border collie pants heavily, its tongue dripping, as it stares intently at the stick it has just dropped at a potential thrower’s feet, and a couple of kids wrestle on the wagon bed.

Flat Point Farm lies down a long one-lane dirt road in West Tisbury, at the far end of Tisbury Great Pond’s Muddy Cove. Here, ducks poke busily into the mucky shoals and an ancient rowboat is marooned among the bushes and trees that have grown up at the end of the inlet. From the cove, the farm fields spread across the outwash plains of Great Neck, some of the most level and fertile land on the Island. A dignified old two-story house, a barn, and sheds of various ages mark the heart of the hundred-acre farm.

It’s a typical haying-season afternoon for the Fischer family, who has been cutting the meadows here for nearly sixty years. The farm was bought in 1939 by Arnie Fischer Sr., who milked cows here until he sold the herd in the early 1960s. Now Arnie Fischer Jr. is in charge of the hay cutting and baling, which he does with the help of his son, Mason. Arnie’s sister, Eleanor Neubert, is responsible for assembling the crew of volunteers to bring in the bales.

Some of the volunteers who are heaving bales have been helping out most of their lives. Family members start young. “Everybody does it when they’re kids,” Arnie says with a chuckle. “They kind of disappear when they’re teenagers for a while and then come back again when they get to be twenty.”

Haying gives people a sense of belonging – to a community, to a tradition – and the satisfaction of shared physical work. Michael Post, who started helping about fifteen years ago, says, “To me, it’s about as religious an experience as I can have – walking through the fields at sunset, among friends. Only
occasionally is it really work, because there’s always so many hands.” People come back year after year, people who might not see each other the whole rest of the year.

One of the reasons Arnie hays the farm is for his three children and for the future generations. It’s a tradition he grew up with and one Mason would like to continue as well. Mason would have hayed on high school graduation day last year, rather than attend the ceremony, but his dad wouldn’t let him.

There are about twenty people between the ages of ten and sixty to collect hay on this particular afternoon. Christa, Arnie’s wife, says that’s a good number for picking up the 690 bales ready to come in from the fields – usually the number is 300 or 400 bales a day. She adds, “When you have really heavy bales and not many people, then you just have to laugh.”

Arnie and Christa’s daughter Emily, a graduate of Bard College who moved back to the Island about a year ago, is helping out. After her job is over for the day, their other daughter, Lila, who graduated last year from Vassar, rides her bike out into the field to catch up with the others. Their aunt Eleanor and cousin Rebecca Potter reminisce about how Lila used to flip right over the bales in the field when she was little.

The pace is unhurried as the tractor turns around and heads out for another load. A few people run and jump onto the flatbed, where they sit at the edge, dangling their feet for the ride back to the field. There, the tractor loops around near the hay that has been baled earlier that day, while people stroll chatting as they follow behind. Whoever is nearest a bale picks it up and loads it onto the wagon, tossing or struggling depending on their size and age and mood of the moment. Kids push against the back of the wagon when it stops, feeling absolute power as it slowly begins to move again. There is a sense of time past, when work like this was just an ordinary part of a summer’s day.

Arnie uses a mower/conditioner bought in 1986 to cut the hay. It has a sickle bar to sever the grass while the conditioner crushes the stems, like in an old-fashioned wringer washing machine, which saves almost a day in drying time. Most farmers like the newer disk mowers with multiple blades, but Arnie figures this machine will last another ten years.

After cutting, he tedders the hay two or three times, which means stirring it up with a machine like a double eggbeater to help it dry. The hay is raked into rows when it’s ready to bale. The baling machine picks up the hay, compresses it into bales, secures the bales with string, and spits them back out onto the field. Before balers were invented, loose hay was picked up off the field by the pitchfork-full. The farm’s baler, twenty years old, seems amazingly sophisticated compared to that, but Arnie jokes, “There’s two little monkeys in there that tie the knots.”

Today’s bales are from hay cut nearly a week ago. Usually the hay is cut one day, left to dry, and then baled the afternoon of the third day. Only once in twenty-five years has Arnie cut, raked, and baled a batch of hay all in the same day. This hay had gotten a little rain, so it took a bit longer than usual to dry.

Hay that is rained on twice is good only for mulch, and a big pile of it sits outside the shed. Arnie imitates the low, growly voice of his friend Fred Fisher, owner of Nip ’n Tuck Farm, saying, “It’s like a tea bag. You can make tea with it a second time, but after that, it’s no damn good.”

But, “Good hay sells itself,” Arnie says. Good hay is hay that’s dry when it’s baled, smells sweet not “winey” – which would mean it’s fermented – and is free of dust. Most of the farm’s best hay is sold on-Island for “regular-quality horses, not fancy horses,” and for sheep.

The first cutting has the most volume, but the second growth is more grassy and lush. The second cutting, usually done in August or September, is a better quality hay, although a couple years ago, the season was so dry that, for the first time, Arnie didn’t get a second cutting.

Hayfields should be reseeded every four or five years because naturalized grasses, like the kinds that grow alongside roads, are always taking over. Arnie likes to plant the fields with a half-and-half mix of timothy and alfalfa. He reseeded about a quarter of the hayfields this spring, but other ones haven’t been reseeded for longer – up to twenty years, which is why the hay is good for regular-quality horses rather than fancy ones.

At Flat Point, farming is basically a labor of love. The farm compensates Arnie and Mason for tractor work, but otherwise the job is unpaid. Arnie’s landscaping business, Moonlight Gardening, is the main support for his family. The hay, about 3,000 bales a season, is sold on the Island and is most of the farm’s income, but the money barely covers the upkeep of land, barns, and machinery. Because of the high cost of farming here, Arnie says people can buy better hay from off-Island for about the same price.

“We try to make the farm break even, but of course, we’re not paying the real estate tax,” he says. “In other words, don’t look at the picture too closely because we’d definitely be losing money. The taxes are paid by my mom [Priscilla Fischer] and her rentals, really. Flat Point Farm Inc. is the farm operation owned by my sister and me, but it doesn’t own any of the real estate.”

Besides selling the hay, the farm makes a little money off meat from some of the ten beef cows and forty-eight sheep raised in the pastures near the barn. But, Arnie says, “We’d be making more money if we had no animals and sold all the hay, but then you don’t have a farm.”

The tractor that pulls the hay wagon belongs to Steve Schwab, cousin Rebecca’s husband. It’s a 1950 Farmall – Steve’s pride and joy – a small tractor that originally came complete with all the implements needed to work a family farm. Back at the barn, Steve maneuvers the tractor to place the hay wagon the perfect distance alongside the wall – just below the loft opening so that hay can be passed into the barn, without any bales or people slipping down the crack. He’s quite pleased with himself; his fifteen years of haying shows, and the family jokes about his scraping off half the load as he pulled next to the barn in his early years have lost their sting.

A couple of people begin to toss the bales from the wagon into the loft, heaving them up from farther and farther below as the load diminishes. Everyone else stacks the bales inside, packing them up against the hay already piled to the ceiling in the back. Easy conversation unfolds in sporadic bits and pieces. There’s a discussion about blimps: one spotted on the Island, what they’re made of, if they have propellers. Botox is another topic. Then someone asks about former haying regulars, like John George whose on-the-job nickname was “Forklift.”

In the shed next to the barn, where the hay to be sold first is stored, it’s damper and the bales there need to be stacked on edge to save the strings. But here in the loft, Arnie tells people they can place the bales in the bottom row flat, giving the piles more stability. Bales weigh about thirty-five or forty pounds, depending on how dry the hay is and how tightly packed; Mason throws one up into the fifth row and calls out, “Did anyone see that? I threw it right into position!” A couple of kids argue over who gets the last bale, and one sits on it as the other drags it into place.

The sun is a glowing ball of red on the hazy horizon as the fifth and last wagon-full is finally loaded up in the field. The kids and a few adults climb on top for the ride back to the barn. Up six bales high, it’s a little wobbly, but the view out over the meadows to the barn and the cove is worth the climb.

After unloading the final bales, people begin to head home to a late dinner, weary but content. As they drive away, the lights come on at the farmhouse, and in the twilight at the edge of the field, a couple of kids play, gleaning the last bit of fun from the day.