The yearly drama of the hay meadow

August 22, 2025
Owl Feather Farm, San Juan Island

How can grass be dramatic? It’s just… grass. Water it, mow it, forget it.

That’s the classic suburban backyard perspective. We have a different view at Owl Feather Farm, where there is great drama in our 10-acre hay meadow.

First of all, it’s naturally scenic, providing aesthetic value humans have cherished for hundreds of thousands of years. A vast, rolling sward of green at Memorial Day, some of our hay grass reaches past 4 feet, creating the same expansive prairie vista that humans have found comforting since the long-ago days our ancestors breathed sighs of relief that the rains had once again revived the African veldt. Here at OFF, having supper at our barbecue picnic table looking out over the meadow, it’s as calming as overnight rain.

The yearly drama of the hay meadow
A fortune in dry grass

Our two Weimaraners take great delight in it, carousing around out of sight in tall grass way over the heads, sometimes hopping up and down like wallabies as they try to track each other and their canine-friend guests. They are not small dogs, but we lose sight of them, only to have them burst out of the grass-jungle like stampeding ponies, come back to check the status of the ribeyes.

A month later the grass is matured, seed-heads bobbing in the breeze like fishing bobbers on a bluegill pond. This is when the drama really starts… Will we get the hay cut this year? Will it be done before the hay room is empty in the barn? Before late summer showers render it spoiled?

Since a full-scale American hay setup consists of five pieces of farm machinery running near $100K, we don’t have our own—and the lead farmer (Eric) is not a mechanic and plans to stay that way. Thus we rely on island hay-cutters, and these guys (yes, all guys) are as peripatetic as goshawks, keen workers but not tightly tied to annoying schedules.

In nine years here at the farm we’ve been through three hayers. Two different summers there was no one; we bought hay 😳 and cut the entire 10 acres ourselves with our awesome but time-consuming five foot rotary mower.

This year our recently reliable cutter was a month later than last summer; he took on a massive 200-acre hay meadow at a nearby farm, and did not arrive at OFF until mid-August. But his full-scale hay setup allowed him to do it all in just 4 days, including time out for his best friend’s wedding, and with the help of neighbors and friends we got our usual 150 bales in the hay room one day before it rained.

Now we can feed Cocoa and Cereus through the winter ahead, and we celebrate this late summer relief with the ghosts of country people going back thousands of years. An adequate hay store could literally mean the difference between life and death, because without their livestock small farmers were logistically bankrupt. Don’t misunderstand this history: People did not feed their animals in order to eat them (except pigs, and they got slops). They were the farm machinery of many millennia, and if you lost your ox, milk cow and draft horse, you were in deep trouble.

The yearly drama of the hay meadow
Happy horse, happy farm

This relationship was so full and deep that small farmsteaders often shared their homes with their animals—or had their living quarters attached to or above the barn. You can see that to this day in the Swiss alps, where huge homes are the second story of equally large barns.

Given that history it’s easy to grasp why the bond between people and animals is so naturally strong and healthy. Our horses, dogs, cattle and more (cats) have all relied on us, and we on them, since before philosophers started thinking about it. It’s an ancient gift our animals bring us.

Should you wonder about all this, please come visit our big guy, Cereus, the wondrous, gentlemanly 17-hand Polish warmblood gelding who’s Owl Feather Farm’s lead animal. Call him up from his own meadow, give him a hank of hay and inquire whether he agrees that grass is dramatically important and that we are all bonded in trust and care here at the farm, and he will literally nod his head up and down in answer. Then he’ll head back into his empire of grass, and the drama’s over, an episode in the spiritual rhythm of country life, sure to return a year from now.

—Eric Lucas

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