Transcription of Penny Jordan for the show Earth Day #32
Dr. Lisa: Today on our earth day edition of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we have great good pleasure to be speaking with Penny Jordan who is a fourth generation farmer here in Maine who grew up in a farm she currently operates alongside her brother and sisters. This is Jordan’s farm and Cape Elizabeth?
Penny: In Cape Elizabeth, yeah.
Dr. Lisa: Penny you do so much more than just farming, although that’s in itself a lot. It’s interesting because you also have over 30 year experience in project management and business planning, you have a masters degree in social work focusing on community organizing and program design, I mean it’s just so many different directions you’ve gone in and yet you’re back to your roots.
Penny: Right, right. I came back to the farm in Cape Elizabeth in the year 1999 when Unum and Provident merged. I was able to go onto graduate school for my masters in social work with the intention of bringing youth to the farm. I had always wanted to do a nonprofit and really make it based on agriculture because you learnt so much from work ethic and just connection with your roots, no pun intended, as you work on the farm.
As I did that and completed that everything came together and I always say that my time at Unum was probably my best education for I call it my MBA in training. I took that and I started working with my brother and my father and decided that I didn’t want to leave the farm; I wanted to figure out how to take agriculture in our state and just bring it back to life. That’s been my mission from… since 1999.
Dr. Lisa: Tell us about your nonprofit.
Penny: The nonprofit never happened. It was, it had a name called Let Us Grow, and I did the whole program, design and everything as my graduate thesis and it really was a very good project but it never came to fruition because I became immersed in building the farm business, because I think many of you know that during the 70s and 80s agriculture in Maine took a nose dive as a result of the California market being able to move product to Boston a lot quicker. So you had to take and re-engineer your business and that’s where my MBA from Unum came into play. How you re-engineer your business and capture a market and create a brand and create visibility for your business. I think as we created visibility that just helped the business flourish.
With my graduate degree, I became, I would say, involved in a lot of different activities in agriculture because policy is also extremely important to me. Another thing that happened right at the same time that I came back at the farm was that we … my father wanted his farm to be a farm together and so we worked to sell development rights and we were the first farm in the southern Maine area to sell development rights which means we retain the ownership of the property, we sell the right to develop that property from a housing perspective. You can imagine in Cape Elizabeth that that was a huge, huge step because when people see land and they see houses, we see land we see food.
We transferred the business from my father generation to my sisters, my brother and myself. I think with that experience and that visibility and my understanding of nonprofit organizations it helped me gain a position and a consulting position with Land for Good out of Keane, New Hampshire which has three important programs. But I think the one that I really want to stress here today because it is earth day, is everybody who owns property really has an opportunity to share that property and produce food. At Land for Good we call them non-farming land owners. I would just ask that people step back and look at the asset that they have, look out at their beautiful property and say what is it that we can do with this besides have a beautiful green lawn, because we all need to be thinking more about producing food.
Genevieve: That’s an interesting point that you bring up that in the past people have looked at open land and seen houses but you look at them and see food. One thing that you’ve talked to me quite a bit is that any soil can grow food given the proper enrichment, so even if you’re in the suburbs you can have bees and you can have fruit trees and you can … How does someone go about learning how to enrich their soil to grow the food?
Penny: Well, I always go to my wonderful University of Maine cooperative extension and look at those resources that are right here in our neighborhood. You can also go to NRCS, at the USDA whether be in southern Maine it’s in Scarborough those are our resources.
Dr. Lisa: And NRCS is?
Penny: Natural Resources Conservation Services. You can talk with them about what you can do with your land. You can have your soils tested, and you send off to the University of Maine. There is a lot resources right here on the state and ever if you have a question, if you’ve got a farmer in your neighborhood you just go down the street and stop wave them down and say I’ve got a question. I don’t think you’ll meet many farmers who wouldn’t stop and talk to you about how you can go about having a garden or what you can do with your property.
A farm friendly is an important step for all towns to be taking. That’s phrase is out of UNH, they created that whole list of what makes … check list of how you make your town farm friendly.
Dr. Lisa: That’s how you make your town farm friendly and you’ve talked a little bit about how you make your I don’t know …
Penny: You can create your own little backyard farm.
Dr. Lisa: What are things that people can do to bring their farms into their… or foods from their local farms into their households. Where can people access this food?
Penny: I would say that the best thing that you can do when you think about how can I accomplish two things; one is having healthy food in my home, two is ensuring you have vibrant farms. If you have the time and the inclination which there is only a percentage of the population that will do this and I recognize that because everybody is busy. First choice is to purchase directly from the farm.
Genevieve: We have things in Maine called CSA.
Penny: Community Supported Agriculture. You’ll see that many farms offer this. It’s a key part of the strategy right now for creating a strong business because you get upfront startup dollars and you’re really buying into farm season. I know MOFGA has on their website a list of all the CSAs and it’s not just for organic farms, it’s for all CSAs.
Genevieve: Let’s just explain that you buy in and then every week you got a box of produce, or meat or dairy or whatever it is you’ve signed up.
Penny: There’s several different models, the model that I know that had been and I don’t know if Stacy and John have changed, but I know in the past at Broad Town farm they did the box model and then they migrated to a little self select. I know that Laughing Stock farm up in Freeport they do a box accompanied by add ins and a little select. Ours is a full self-select model so you come and shop at the farm stand and select whatever you want. You’ve really bought in and paid money upfront and you can either buy from our farm stand or we have travelling farm stand that goes to business sites which is a renovated school bus; the Partridge family bus.
Dr. Lisa: Hey, that’s very creative. You also go to the farmers markets?
Penny: We do not go to farmers market, we have an onsite farm stand, we have a travelling farm stand and we have online which is called Cape Farms Market. We have three different ways which you can purchase retail which is purchase directly from the farmers. With our online system Cape Farms market, we probably carry products that, the whole premise around that was to have a 12 month proposition from a business perspective to sell our products 12 months out of the year and to create visibility in Southern Maine for the breadth and depth of the products that are available 12 months out of a year for Maine farms and Maine fishermen.
We have probably 30 farms that are online market so you can order from vegetables to meats to grains to dairy, to whether… we started offering goat this last time around and so basically it’s if I achieve my goal, everybody will know … Everybody who shops on our online market will be able to serve 100% Maine produced food 12 month out of the year. That’s my goal.
Genevieve: You have a lot of things on the horizon, and you are one of the best spokespeople for farming in Maine so I know there is something exciting happening very soon.
Penny: Yeah. This is very exciting. The New England Farmers Union which I’m a member of is having a farmer fly in, they do farmer fly ins twice a year to Washington D.C. We’re leaving on 16th of April, and there were five farmers selected from New England and I got to be one of them which I said “I don’t know why, but I know I have a lot of opinions.” We’re going to fly in and we are going to meet with the committee, With Shelly and Company, and we’ll be meeting with the appropriations.
Basically the whole idea is that we bring farmers into Washington D.C to talk about the importance of the farm bill and that we do need to pass the farm bill. A key part of that farm bill Shelly Pingree has crafted really has to do with greater access to local foods. You’ll find that some farmers are talking about that yard, talks about the food in the, I would say more of the market part of it, but we also need to address production. My premise is that if you create the demand and you create the pull and you move the product in, the infrastructure is going to have to be created to support it. I think this farm bill is exciting because it’s going to force a truing up of our infrastructure in Maine.
Genevieve: The tail will wag the dog.
Penny: You got it, you got it. The only way we are going to build our infrastructure is from the ground up and we are going to build it up ourselves and so what I say is if you get money into the hands of the farmers they are true entrepreneurs and they are going to create the infrastructure to support their products and then in five years you will see Maine foods as the premier foods in the Boston market again. We are going to take it back from California.
Dr. Lisa: We have a lot of exciting things going on and I want to be able to direct people to your website so that they can find out more about the online ordering and the other things that you’re doing, so tell us where they can reach you.
Penny: They can find us at jordansfarm.com its Jordans with an S’ and Farm without an S, so jordansfarm.com , and there should be information about our CSA, about online market. We try to keep our front page pretty current, so that people can have quick access to what’s going on and of course Jordan’s Farm on Facebook, Jordan’s farm on Twitter.
Pretty soon Jordan’s farm is going to have a QR code so you’ll be able to scan us when you‘re in a restaurant. We keep trying to stay progressive. You can always drive out to Wells Road in Cape Elizabeth and take a look at the most beautiful view in Cape Elizabeth which will be there forever.
Dr. Lisa: It is beautiful, I have been out there. I’ve bought stuff from your farm stands so I can attest to that. People can also read about you in the Maine Magazine issue which was … I can’t remember when that was.
Penny: I think it was last August or September or something like that.
Dr. Lisa: We will link to it online through the Dr. Lisa website.
Penny: That was a good article, she did a good job on that.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah, I agree, absolutely. Thanks so much for coming in today Penny.
Penny: Thank you.
Genevieve: Thank you very much for knowing that growing food is important for our state. Thanks.