Living the Good Life 2.0

FEATURE-July/August 2009
by Peter A. Smith
Photographs by Jonathan Levitt

Young, organic farmers are greening up the state.

At 3:15 a.m., Chris Cavendish rolls out of bed, puts on a pot of coffee, splashes water on his face, and packs his van with wooden crates of carrots, lettuce, escarole, beets, and Boothby blond cucumbers. This way, he’ll be the first one at the Portland Farmers’ Market. When the door to his Club Wagon slams shut, the Time and Temperature sign will be blinking 5:15.

Getting up this early is part of the tradeoff for being outside every day on his Bowdoinham farm, instead of using his liberal arts degree to work in an office from nine to five. Cavendish is trying to change the world—to make a more sustainable, just, and ecological future—by selling organic vegetables in Brunswick and in Portland. He’s also trying to make a living.

At least six of the 28 vendors in Monument Square are young, ambitious, socially-conscious, twenty- and thirty-somethings. They stand behind boxes of Freedom Farm lettuce (“the new rock ’n’ roll”), Fishbowl Farm kohlrabi (“great with cheese and beer”), and Thirty-Acre Farm micro-green carrot tops (“yep, they’re edible”). These young farmers aren’t dreaming of the back-to-the-land whimsy. They are living the Good Life 2.0.

Farming might sound like something to do if your beard is long and you are seeking a rural existence filled with inner peace and world peace, like Helen and Scott Nearing, those godly godparents of the back-to-the-land movement, sought when they left Vermont and settled down in the remote coastal outpost of Harborside, Maine, in 1952. Maybe some first-generation gardeners got their start dreaming of a never-never land, alone, farming the rugged coast of Maine. But those aren’t the ones you’ll find at the state’s farmers’ markets.

“In the beginning, we got a lot of idealistic, dreamy young people. That has really changed in the last two to three years,” says Esther Lacognata, who coordinates the Maine Farmland Trust’s FarmLink program. It has connected farmers with available land and landowners since 2002. “Now,” she says, “there are young farmers that have a lot of experience.”

In 2008, one of the largest organic salad-green companies on the East Coast—Bowdoinham’s Angelic Organic, which sells under the Locally Known label—was started by a group of five investors, the oldest of whom was 28. The youngest of the five, Ben Dobson, 24, started his first community-supported agriculture farm when he was just 16.

The Time and Temperature Building sign blinks 8:00, and the fog begins to lift. The market bustles with men in business suits, women in floppy hats, and a young architect in a crinkly, cotton dress.

Simon Frost of Whitefield’s Thirty-Acre Farm sets up his stand, laying out sauerkraut, kimchi, nasturtium blossoms, and pints of ground cherries on a burlap sack. He checks on the pork loins and cuts of bacon in his cooler. In marketing terms, he’s selling value-added pork and value-added cabbage.

“It’s not just growing stuff. You’ve got to be selling your stuff too,” Frost says. “It seems like that’s what I spend most of my time doing … calling people seeing if they want to buy more sauerkraut.”

Farmers double as distribution managers, often organizing Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share programs. And despite more competition, the
demand for this kind of food appears to be keeping pace.

Consumer interest in local and organic food has grown alongside rising fuel and transportation costs and increasing concerns about food safety and health. In 2008, the country had its largest-ever beef recall, two widespread E. coli scares in tomatoes and jalapeño peppers, and a Salmonella outbreak in peanuts—all originating from large-scale, industrial, food manufacturers outside the state. In the last five years, the trend in Maine is nearly the opposite: small farms (under 179 acres) grew 20 to 30 percent, organic farms increased 139 percent, and direct sales increased 17 percent.

“I would say that we’re seeing an increase in customers,” Larry Bruns, Portland’s market coordinator, says. With the exception of Carolyn Snell, a third-generation farmer in Buxton who sells vegetables at Snell Family Farm (they use integrated pest management, a farming technique designed to minimize but not eliminate pesticide use), Bruns says, “Most of our new farmers are organic, and they come from far away.”

Market vendors who drive three hours and hundreds of miles might seem like hypocrites (local food from that far away?). But farmers say they make the trip because they can’t afford to grow vegetables on land in Portland’s suburbs that’s been priced for housing development, and their livelihoods depend on brisk sales at the state’s liveliest urban market. “I don’t think we’d be able to do it any other way,” says Daniel Price, of Freedom Farm.

The average age of a Maine farmer is 56, a number that belies the high volume of college students and apprentices spending their summers outdoors working on farms. Enrollment in the Maine Organic Farming and Gardening Association’s Journeyperson Farm Training Program, a mentoring program for farm workers transitioning into farm owners, jumped from six in 2005 to 25 in 2008.

“Over the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in organic farming and farming in Maine in general,” says Andrew Marshall, MOFGA’s education program coordinator. “People come to Maine to start a farm—because the land is relatively cheap, and also because the infrastructure and the training available for farmers is pretty good.”

Two years ago, Fox June and Julia Trunzo worked at Freedom Farm. The following year, the two grew vegetables at Thirty-Acre Farm as a sort of graduate school in cabbage management before looking for a farm they can call their own. Who knows? Next year, they might join at least 25 other farmers on the waiting list for a spot at Portland’s farmers’ markets.

One new farmer who joined the market last year was Beth Schiller, of Dandelion Spring Farm in Washington. “When I first started, I was something of a novelty—in my early twenties, a single woman,” she says. “And now, I don’t think that's true. There are a lot more young people that are just out there going for it.”

The new, young farmers appear to have more of a commercial mindset and a visible community presence than the previous generation of homesteaders, whose emphasis tended toward self-sufficiency. And most embrace new technology. Chris Cavendish, for example, bought his Planet Jr. seeder online, and Simon Frost got a cabbage shredder on eBay. While some effort has been made to organize winter drop-offs with an email list and develop an online marketplace, almost all their sales are from the face-to-face transactions at farmers’ market and CSAs.

Around noon, Daniel Price packs up his truck. Before heading back to Freedom, he’s planning a quick trip to Portland’s Local 188 to sell some vegetables and pick up a late brunch. After all, there isn’t much being trucked back to his farm, except a big wad of green stuff: dollar bills.

Disclosure: The author worked for Daniel Price during the summers of 2007 and 2008.