Ben Gifford has been making hay since he was a young teenager in the 1970s. Over the years, he’s honed the four-step process of cutting hay, spreading it to dry, raking it together into windrows and then baling it with a tractor.
He’s likely one of the last people haying for landowners on the Blue Hill peninsula, where he manages and harvests fields in exchange for several thousand bales to sell for local farmers and homesteaders to feed their animals. Gifford, 66, knows of one other person in his line of work locally, who is also past retirement age.
In the near future, Gifford said it’s possible that not much local production will continue here, where farms are smaller and growing conditions more challenging for hay than farther inland. But for now, he enjoys the work, which helps supply local farmers with a vital source of food for their own livestock.
And while farming does consume natural resources, he’s also learned lessons about preserving habitat for local wildlife that other landowners can apply to their own fields, regardless of whether they’re used for hay.
“I just think that people need to know we share this planet,” Gifford recently said on a former dairy farm in Blue Hill where he hays, manages a patch of wildflowers for pollinators, keeps a habitat corridor for wildlife and maintains nesting boxes for birds. “Other than personal interest, it’s an interest in doing my part to make the planet an enjoyable place for all species, not just us.”
Grassland birds such as the bobolink, which arrive in Maine from South America each May and nest in large hayfields, are a particular focus. Hay operations typically mow two or three times in a growing season beginning in June, before the young birds can fly out of their path.
Grassland habitat is disappearing around the country, and grassland bird populations have dropped 53 percent since 1970, according to research by Cornell University.
Since 2016, the Somerset County-based program Ag Allies — where Gifford volunteers — has paid a growing network of Maine farmers to preserve some of that habitat by leaving unmowed blocks or cutting later in the season. Payments from the group offset the decline in quality from hay as it ages.
That’s easier to manage in Hancock County, where most of Gifford’s customers are small farms and homesteads feeding their own livestock instead of commercial dairies that need top quality hay for their cows to produce the best milk. More business is there if he wants it.
Gifford started haying with a neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts, in his youth, “got hooked” and has done it intermittently ever since, along with farm work and construction. He moved to family land in Penobscot 13 years ago to start his own sheep farm, and local haying jobs found him soon after.
It’s difficult, sweaty and itchy work that comes with high-stakes, nervewracking guesswork around the weather. The rainy and foggy conditions along the coast complicate harvests, which can be ruined if it precipitates between cutting and baling. Recent years have been too dry for good growth, others too wet.
But Gifford likes working outside with machinery and enjoys keeping a few old farms on the peninsula going. Plus, there’s a good market: he sells every bale he makes.
He knows of numerous fields more than 25 acres in size within 10 miles of his own farm in Penobscot. If they aren’t hayed regularly, woody plants will appear and the clearings will eventually turn from grassland back to woods, as they have done around the peninsula over recent decades.
“I don’t know how much interest there is in haying from younger kids and whatnot,” he said. “Probably not a real lot. So, maybe hay will end up coming from a little distance in the future for people that have their small homesteads.”
Hay is Maine’s third most valuable crop, according to the U.S. Census, and supports the state’s dairy, livestock and horse industries. It’s also grown across the country, especially in western states, and Canada.
But Gifford appears to work in a part of Maine with far less hay production. The University of Maine’s hay directory lists him as the only seller in Hancock County, and just three other sellers are listed in eastern Washington County, leaving a big empty stretch on the map between Ellsworth and Columbia Falls. By contrast, dozens of other hay farmers are concentrated through southern and central Maine, the midcoast and up in Aroostook County.
Because there are few hay farmers nearby who could use Ag Allies funding, Gifford’s work with the program isn’t focused on the Blue Hill peninsula. But his methods of “habitat conscious farming” also have applications for homeowners.
“Some of the bigger fields that are not good hay fields should be left alone all year, because that is where some of these endangered birds such as the bobolinks go,” he said.
He wants homeowners to leave their fields unmowed until the birds are gone in October, or just mow walking pathways through them, which preserves biodiversity and habitat for other birds, animals and the pollinators ecosystems and crops need.
