Dairying is a nice lifestyle, but you have to make money off of it so the feed business was where I settled into. We like our customers; we like to work with them and take care of them. We envision having the store for quite a few years.”

Ray Raposa

Hay Ray’s Farm and Feed, located at 1077 Main Road in Westport, sells hay, straw, bagged animal feed, poultry supply, spruce wood shavings and more. Ray Raposa, who is also head of Westport Agricultural Commission, runs the shop with his partner Tina Newell. They make a dynamic duo as they triage customer orders both large and small. As I wait for Ray to return from hauling back a load of hay from one of his fields, Tina describes some of her 11 saved garlic varieties to a customer looking for planting stock. The shop is open Wednesday to Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 8 to 5 p.m.

What do you produce?

Hay, both round bales and square bales, more round bales lately, just because of the demand from the cattle industry. The square bales are more difficult to make because you depend so much on the weather.  You need three to four good days to make a dry square bale, but you can mow a round bale at night and bale it the next day. It’s pretty easy to do, and fortunately there’s a demand for it these days.

Tell me about how you sell your product, here in the shop.

It’s always been word of mouth. I’ve never advertised. The farm hay has always been regional. I bale it in Westport, Dartmouth, Little Compton, Tiverton, and of course on this farm. I just picked up Paul Costa when the Santos brothers stopped using it so I planted those. Those were corn, I planted them to hay last year and this year I put seedings in.

Yesterday it was kind of a nice scene, Mike Ferry was across the road cutting silage and I was cutting hay. People driving by got a nice view of what it looks like to be farming at this time of year.  Baling hay on one side of the road, chopping silage on the other side. It’s dry right now so it’s a good time to make hay.

How was your haul this year?

The first crop was average, the second crop was well below average. This year it’s all spoken for, so there won’t be any carry over of crop to next year.

How is your family involved in your current farming operation?

My son Taylor helps with the hay part time. He recently purchased his own farm. We baled hay off it this year.

Here in the shop, Tina has vendors she works with and orders she puts together. She’s as much of a farmer as I am, on a smaller scale. She’s got a green thumb and I could never ever compare. She grows all our food, and she’s great with animals. I’m not an animal person even though my whole adult life has been supplying feed for animals. I did milk cows, I enjoyed that life. If milking cows was profitable, I probably would have ventured off into the dairy business, but it hasn’t been profitable and it just gets worse and worse. Dairying is a nice lifestyle, but you have to make money off of it so the feed business was where I settled into. We like our customers; we like to work with them and take care of them. We envision having the store for quite a few years.

How big is this farm?

It’s 120 acres, maybe 20 acres of pasture. This farm was the family’s farm, so I remember cows being here when I was a little boy. They had 30 milking cows. They used vacuum pumps and were mechanized for quite some time. In 1960 my father knew they had to modernize or go out of business, so he decided to close the business. It was what he needed to do, so it was a good move for him. I was five or six years old. Later on, I was able to buy the land from my father and uncle because of the APR program. It took three long excruciating years to execute the sale. It was one of the first ones in the state, and without it I wouldn’t have been able to purchase the farm. We have another one of the first APR farms in the state here in Westport; Danny Sousa was one of the first ones.

You landed back in farming even though your family had closed their farm business?

Well back when I was a kid we had no place to go, so we hung out at the neighbor’s farm. It was a dairy so I learned to milk. I was 14 years old, milking 40 cows at the neighbor’s farm. Once he knew I knew how to milk, it was over. I did all the night chores, cleaning the bulk tank, clean the barn, throw down silage for night and morning, clear out the barn, bring the cows in, milk the cows. In the summer I would put the cows back out. I was 14 years old. For a 14-year-old all alone, you know I was motivated and that was my interest. I got $10 a week to do that, Monday through Friday, and pumped gas on the weekends at Village Gas station. My mother kicked us out of the house — there was nothing else to do. I got paid $1.25 an hour, and that was pretty good money for a 14-year-old kid in the '60s and I didn’t spend a penny of it. It all went in the bank, and that was my first car and first motorcycle.

At the gas station I learned auto mechanics as an apprentice and from there worked at Hillside Equipment fixing tractors and equipment. I had gone to college for a year, majoring in accounting at SMU, but I wanted to work, I didn’t want to go to school. My parents weren’t happy about that. I got into motorcycles when I worked as a mechanic, but eventually when I was ready to start a family I sold the motorcycles and bought my first tractor from Ernie Ferry at Hillside Mechanics in 1974. It seemed like a nice family thing to do, have a farm and raise a family. I did the haying part time until 1978 and after that I was self-employed from then on. When I first started farming I did custom work because I didn’t have storage or the land, but people knew that I had the equipment so I started doing custom hay baling and one of the first farmers that I did hay for was Seraphine Perry, Mike Perry’s Father. I’ve known Mike all my life. His son Louis comes into the store, and his son Travis comes into the store, so I’ve done business with four generations.

Tell me about how the trucking business and the shop tie-in to your farming life.

1980 was when I had a trailer built and I bought a truck to haul my farm tractors around because I had land all over. After that I started trucking hay. I went quite a bit to Canada, but mostly New York.  Trucking was my main source of income. The farming ... I’ve always considered it a hobby. It’s work but it doesn’t feel like work, it’s a pleasure to do it. Things really took off when we put up the building and we went into the feed business. That gave me a lot more of a cash flow, and then I started buying all the farm equipment. I cut hay for 30 years with one tractor but when they started modernizing the equipment then one tractor couldn’t do everything. There are so many different connections for different pieces of equipment you couldn’t possibly do it all with one or even two tractors today.

How many tractors do you have?

I have four. A 75H, 85H, another 75H, and 115H, that’s the new tractor. I sold the trucks and trailers this year and I bought that new tractor with the loader and the cab. I hauled hay for 40 years for that.  I’m very happy with that tractor.

How old were you when you learned how to drive a tractor?

Well, I started driving in my father’s lap at about four years old. So, this was a dairy farm. And we were picking up hay in the back field on a long flat-bed truck and they didn’t want an adult driving the truck, it was a “waste of an adult.” I was five years old and I was able to sit on the seat and steer the truck. It was a carburetor so they upped the idle of the carburetor and I got the hang of jumping off the seat and pressing on the clutch and the brake when they said to stop and when they said to go I would let the clutch out and then I would jump back up on the seat and they would say where to go. The truck was going slow enough I didn’t have to stop much. That was five years old when I first started driving.