The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society has issued a call for applicants for its annual grant program. Eligible are all farm-related individuals or organizations whose goal is to improve the quality of life and contribute to the sustainability of the Vineyard agricultural community.
Fifteen years ago, the New Hampshire barn that had been dismantled, shipped and reassembled off Panhandle Road in West Tisbury was finished, and officially became the New Agricultural Society Hall. While a decade and a half of potlucks, dances, meetings and exhibitions have taken the new out of its name, the Ag Hall remains something to celebrate. Saturday’s Barnraisers’ Ball will do just that, with help from Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish. The barn doors open at 7:30 p.m., and admission is a dessert to share.
The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society won four awards including the Best of Show honor at the 2009 Massachusetts Agricultural Fairs’ Association Media Awards competition held this month in Marlborough.
The fair’s poster, by the Vineyard Gazette’s Morgan Lucero, was awarded best of show.
The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society has issued a call for applicants for their annual grant program. Eligible are all farm related individuals or organizations whose goal is to improve the quality of life and contribute to the sustainability of the Martha’s Vineyard agricultural community.
The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society has announced its 2009 grant awards. Breezy Pines Farms will receive $400 for seed and soil; the Farm Institute will receive $1,000 for a mobile hen house; Down Island Farm will receive $1,000 for herb, berry and nut production; Glenn Jackson will receive $1,000 for fencing and a small hoop house; Vineyard Open Land Foundation will receive $750 toward their organic cranberry bog weeding project; the Whiting Farm will receive $850 for pastured poultry equipment.
Every August, Vineyarders flood the fair grounds at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Hall in West Tisbury. Every fall, we are treated to the harvest festival to celebrate the season’s bounty, and every winter we have Island artisans’ fairs, community potlucks or most recently the winter farmers’ markets. The Vineyard is a place of tradition, and the Ag Hall is a beacon of that.
The Martha’s Vineyard Museum is close to selling the West Tisbury land once envisioned as its future home to the neighbors, the Polly Hill Arboretum and the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society.
The sale is likely to be completed by the end of the week, arboretum executive director Tim Boland said. Surveying work was underway and everything was going very positively, he said.
“We both could see real utilitarian needs [for the land] ... and we feel strongly about keeping it in the agrarian spirit,” Mr. Boland said of the unified purchase with the agricultural society.
The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society and Island Grown Initiative have joined forces in a venture to build a slaughterhouse behind the fairgrounds in West Tisbury.
The project is still in the very early stages of discussion and no permits have been obtained, but preliminary talks between the agricultural society and the nonprofit IGI are under way to allow a slaughterhouse facility to be built behind the new barn on society land.
The following letter was sent to the Edgartown selectmen:
The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society, founded in 1859, has had as its mission these many years to improve breeds, promote agriculture and educate in the “mechanic and domestic arts.” We currently have over 1,200 dues-paying members, many of whom are Edgartown citizens, and our affairs are administered by a 16-member board of trustees. At our meeting on Jan. 12 the board unanimously voted to instruct me to send this letter to you.
