The crisp air of autumn settled over the Ag Hall this past Saturday, as the grounds filled with families and friends celebrating the season’s harvest. Children darted between the hay maze and the cow pens, and live music by the Flying Elbows spilled out from the hall. The fifth annual Harvest Festival brought Islanders together to celebrate not just the season’s bounty but the Island’s agricultural community, which makes it possible.
The festival is a family-focused event that features iconic fall activities. More than 20 nonprofits and individuals participated, offering hands-on activities for kids, and demonstrations highlighting self-sufficiency and community generosity. Educational activities included a shucking lesson and demo with M.V. Shellfish Group, line throwing with the U.S. Coast Guard, deer breakdown demo with M.V. Hunt Club, cider pressing with Island Grown Initiative, and saving and sharing seeds with the M.V. Community Seed Library. The festival also included contests like corn husking, pie baking, and pie eating. The West Tisbury Farmers Market was also present, with local food vendors, produce, and warm beverages.
Lucy Grinnan, the Agricultural Society program coordinator, described the festival as a mini fair for locals. She said that it evolved from the Living Local Festival, organized by Navette Previd.
“It’s just a really nice gathering,” said Grinnan, “I think this time of year a lot of people are finally slowing down a little. So it’s fun to get together and celebrate the fall. I feel proud that our Harvest Festival really continues to connect people to the natural rhythms of this time of year.”
Grinnan is very inspired by the former Living Local Festival, and is always thinking how she can expand to be more like it in different ways. “Our harvest festival is really focused on offering family-friendly activities, offering interesting education for kids and adults,” said Grinnan.
Grinnan credits the success of the festival to fundamental community generosity. “I feel really grateful every single time that I put it on by how much people are willing to help out and willing to make this fun, free thing happen,” said Grinnan. “It’s a really special event. Running big events is really hard and a lot of work, but it is so exciting to see how many community members are involved, and how many community members help to make things like this happen.”
The Harvest Festival is not only a fun family gathering, it also teaches attendees about self-sufficiency. “People on this Island are very aware that anything that they can’t make themselves has to come from off-Island,” said Grinnan. “That can make certain kinds of self-sufficiency even more important here. That’s definitely crucial to our mission of building community through agriculture and helping farms on the Island to thrive.”
Grinnan hopes that the festival offers locals a moment to slow down. “I hope people can take a second to really appreciate how beautiful fall is. I think that this is, in a lot of ways, one of the most beautiful seasons here on the Island,” said Grinnan. “I think it is really important, because it often can just pass because everyone’s so tired from summer, and then we’re in winter.”
While the festival has fun activities for children, it also attracts people eager to learn about living off the land. “We’re really lucky on the Island, because Island Grown Schools does such a good job reaching children,” said Grinnan, noting that Island children have a very adept skill set when it comes to agriculture and farming. Not only do children understand how to compost very young, but they have an appreciation of everything that’s involved in farming, because they have been gardening at school since first grade. “I feel like there’s a lot of knowledge and a lot of appreciation. Kids here seem comfortable, in a lot of ways, with livestock, and really interested in the natural world,” added Grinnan.
At the festival inside the Hall, the M.V. Seed Library showed visitors how to clean, sort, and package seeds for next year’s growing season. Guests were welcome to bring their own unprocessed plant material with mature seeds. Local seed savers were available to help process and label seeds, and answer questions about seed saving.
“Our goal is to have a bunch of seeds that are really well adapted to the Island,” said Rebecca Sanders, who co-founded the Seed Library. Also present was guest Petra Page-Mann of Fruition Seeds, who is on the Island for a week talking to different schools about the importance of regionally adapted seeds.
Norah Van Riper was also there with an exhibit showing visitors what life was like on the Island before 1850 and the invention of modern refrigeration. Her table included different foods organized by the season that are available today thanks to refrigeration and “ye old Stop & Shop.” Food on display included scallops, potatoes, grain, berries, and a fish head.
Outside the hall there was a hay maze filled with children calling out to one another and poking their heads up through the hay roof. Aside from some gaps, the maze had plywood panels and scattered hay over the top, enticing children passing by to crawl through the dimly lit tunnels in search of the exit.
Past the maze toward the barn there was the M.V. Hunt Club, showing a small crowd how to skin and process a white-tailed deer. Although the process might have been gory to some, hunting is useful to combat the increasing deer population and corresponding increase in ticks, and this group promotes ethical and sustainable bow-hunting activities.
While processing the meat, the president of the club, Joe Capece, explained that the Island has extended its hunting season in an effort to combat the rise in deer and thus in ticks. The specific deer they were butchering was shot in Chilmark a week and a half ago, and had been stored in the club’s walk-in fridge since. He presented the hindquarters of the animal to the crowd, explaining that in his opinion this is where the best steaks come from. Capece carefully removed a small gland from the meat, explaining that you can tell the health of the deer by the color of the gland. He also emphasized that if the gland is cut into,your knife and butchering area must immediately be sanitized due to the toxic nature of the organ.
Across the grounds, one of several Island 4-H clubs, Katama Cowpokes, featured “Cow Chip Bingo,” selling bingo squares to festival attendees. 4-H stands for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health, and the organization offers programs for kids ages 5 to 18, focusing on areas such as agriculture, science, and civic engagement. The Cowpokes are volunteers between 8 and 15 years old who work hard to train cattle to be oxen. An ox, 12-year-old Penny Athearn explained, requires “six years of training,” and is “like a cow with a job.”
At their bingo stand, participants bought a square of grass in the pen where two young cows, Newt and Toad, were spending the afternoon. The players wrote their name on their ticket and waited for their calf to poop. If the calf they selected pooped in their square, they won, and picked from a list of prizes including merchandise from Morning Glory Farms, or fresh meat from Slough Farms.
The young cows playing bingo were bottle-fed twice a day all summer by 4-H kids, and are being trained to walk on a halter and work on a yoke. “We have been training them since they were a month old, weaning them off the bottle. They still get electrolytes and grain because they are developing their rumen, which is how they digest grass,” said Penny Athearn.
To demonstrate how the yoke works, Athearn, accompanied by 15-year-old Emmy Carrol, removed the wooden pins and placed the wooden harness over their heads, securing themselves into the frame. After they were latched into the yoke, they began explaining how the contraption joins the cows together to make it possible for them to pull heavy loads.
“This attaches to a chain, and they can pull pretty much anything,” said Carrol, pulling on a metal ring in the middle of the yoke. “A plow, a sled, a tram, a group of children in a cart.” She gestured toward Chilmark, the bull who was carting groups of children across the Ag Hall grounds.
With sack races, corn husking, a pie-eating contest, and live music all afternoon, the Island came together to celebrate the changing seasons and everything that fall has to offer. As the afternoon passed and the crowd at the Ag Hall thinned out, guests were reminded that the Harvest Festival is as much about community as it is about the crops. Rooted in Island tradition and shared generosity, it continues to bring people together to honor the land, the season, and one another.