Transcription of Nate Drummond and Gabrielle Gosselin for the show Natural Foods from Local Farms #277
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician, who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at LoveMaineRadio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Gabrielle G.: Coming from the farmers’ market background, that was always the primary interest for us. The markets that we do in Brunswick are really quite strong and just getting stronger.
Tina Wilcoxson: Growing up in a farm community where most people were farming, especially around harvest time, it was just the whole town was in it together. You don’t really get that chance a lot, I don’t think, when the whole town is really pulling together for something. Oftentimes, unfortunately, you see that happen, the whole town pulling together, and it’s around a tragedy. This was the whole town pulling together around something good.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio show number 277, natural foods from local farms, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 8, 2017. Mainers care about where their food comes from. We are known for supporting local farmers and the businesses that sell our farmers’ produce and goods. Today we speak with Nate Drummond and Gabrielle Gosselin of Six River Farm in Bowdoinham and with Tina Wilcoxson, who sells Six River Farm organic vegetables at Royal River Natural Foods, the store she owns in Yarmouth. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa Belisle: Today I have with me Nate Drummond and Gabrielle Gosselin, who are the owners of Six River Farm, a diverse organic vegetable farm, located on the shores of Merrymeeting Bay in Bowdoinham. Thanks for coming in today.
Gabrielle Gosselin: Thanks for having us.
Nate Drummond: Thanks for having us.
Lisa Belisle: This has been an interesting adventure for you, having this farm. I’m sure that you have learned a lot since you began.
Gabrielle Gosselin: Definitely.
Lisa Belisle: Tell me how this all started.
Nate Drummond: Well, I guess, gosh, way back when we were graduating from college we were surrounded by lots of friends who are starting to get into food and foodie-like people. I guess a couple years after college, or maybe a year after college, we actually moved down to New York City and were living in Brooklyn and just trying to find work to make it worthwhile to be there. After a period of time Gabrielle decided that she really didn’t want to be in her office job and found a job at the farmers’ markets in New York City for a couple farms that were in Upstate New York and would come down to the city. That became her full-time job.
Gabrielle G.: Yeah. When I was trying to figure out what we were doing and what I wanted to do in New York City, a friend asked me what made me happy about being in the city. I laughed and said “Oh, I really like going to the markets.” She said “Why don’t you just ask them for a job? Just go up, and whatever stand you like.” I hadn’t thought about that. I went and did that and worked for two farms that were fantastic farms. I learned a lot from the growers that came down and got more and more excited about the tangible, physical work of selling, and interacting with customers, and learning about food and food production, as well as food consumption. Sometimes on Saturdays I would get Nate to work with me if they needed an extra hand.
I think we both realized that living in New York was a temporary situation. It wasn’t something we wanted long-term. We both became more interested in doing physical, tangible work, and so we decided to go apprentice on a farm. We went to apprentice on Pleasant Valley Farm in Argyle, New York, and it was the farm that seemed the closest to the one we envisioned for ourselves in the future. They were able to support their family year round, and sold primarily at farmers’ markets, and did a diverse vegetable operation. We learned from them, and they were incredible teachers, and then we decided to just jump in and start on our own, and learn a lot as we went from doing.
Nate Drummond: Yeah. That was back in 2007, so pretty much 10 years ago now. I grew up in Maine. Gabrielle grew up in Western Massachusetts in Amherst, so we wanted to be back in New England. We were just looking at trying to figure out farmland that was available, and we found a really nice parcel in Bowdoinham, so that’s where we ended up. When we started in 2007 we just grew two and a half acres of vegetables. It was just the two of us. We wanted to do farmers’ markets. That’s obviously what we knew well. I think Gabrielle in particular knew the marketing side of it very well from her time in New York City and whatnot. We were learning fast on the ground as far as all the other components of producing vegetables and the business side of it.
It’s been pretty much a 10 year adventure since then, and we still actually farm that original piece of land along with some other fields that we lease and also own. Six years ago we bought a house that’s adjacent that also has some farmland in Bowdoinham. Two years ago we had a daughter, Alice, who adds another great component to our farm adventure. Yeah, at this point we grow probably 15 acres of vegetables. We also have a decent number of greenhouses, so we operate all year round now. We do a winter farmers’ market in Brunswick along with the farmers’ markets during the spring, summer, and fall that are outside and combine that with some restaurant and natural food store sales, mostly in and around the Brunswick and Freeport area.
Yeah. From our starts of when it began it was just the two of us working, not really side by side usually, on opposite ends of the farm, but getting everything done together. Now we usually have a pretty good size crew in the summertime, and we keep some of them on throughout the whole winter as well.
Lisa Belisle: Did either one of you have a farming background in your families?
Gabrielle Gosselin: No, not at all actually. Maybe you had a little bit more experience with farming and gardening from growing up with your parents, but in my family there’s no interest in gardening, no interest in food in fact. Neither of my parents like to cook. We’ve had a lot of support since going down this route, but it’s definitely not what I grew up with.
Nate Drummond: No, I grew up with parents who love to garden and who are actually…. My parents are both university professors, entomologists at the University of Maine. They study insects, so we joke that they’re our on-call insect pest consultants, and so they’ve been very supportive in this. No, I think we’re fairly emblematic of maybe a lot of beginning farmers in that we had a liberal arts education, came at farming from more the food end of things, and so that has maybe been a great help in the sense of we’ve always been very interested in the vegetables that we’re cooking, that we cook what we grow and enjoy them.
We’ve always been interested in experimenting with different vegetables and probably very adept at marketing, but there was a very steep learning curve in learning to actually do the growing. Certainly apprenticing at a farm helped, and we’ve been surrounded by other very good farmers as we’ve gone along, who have helped as well. Yeah, there’s been a lot of education by doing over the years. That’s the nice thing about farming. Every year you have a clean slate almost. You get to try things and learn from your experience. Then you go into the wintertime, and the fields are frozen and bare, and you get to think about what went right, and what went wrong, and how to try it again the next year a little bit differently. Yeah, it actually provides a very good trial by doing sort of education.
Gabrielle Gosselin: I think in many ways we were really lucky actually not to be trying to create our farm on a pre-existing farm, like if one of our families already had a farm that we were taking over, because it’s given us a lot more flexibility to create exactly what we want and to change things exactly how we would want them to. There wasn’t existing infrastructure or certain equipment that was scaled to a degree that maybe we weren’t interested in.
We were lucky enough to, and we continue to be lucky enough to, lease a barn and some cooler space, but we’ve really been able to create the farm that we want and grow it at the increments that we’re interested in and just shaping it each year, like Nate was saying, choosing in the winter, “Oh, what worked well?” but also, “What are we interested in, and how are our interests changing?” Maybe now we’re at a certain place where we can try some crops that perhaps aren’t quite as profitable, but are fun, and we want to see what they do, and that’s okay because we have that flexibility at this point. I think that’s a pretty neat spot to be in.
Lisa Belisle: Give me some examples of crops that you are interested in, that you want to play with and see where they go.
Gabrielle Gosselin: One thing we’ve been talking about recently is adding some more fruit to our production as a whole. We grow strawberries, but other than that we haven’t done other berries or tree fruit. We may not be set up or with the skill base currently to manage them at the most efficient level, but we are talking about just growing some, and seeing how that goes, and also having our daughter…. She loves fruit of all kinds, and so to be able to add that component to our farm I think we had a certain amount of joy for all of us to be able to pick as a family, as well as with our crew, certainly, but just to enjoy those other flavors.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. It’s also fun. You get to indulge yourself in also some of the obscure offerings in the seed catalog, so it’s fun to have the flexibility to try a red napa cabbage, or some obscure chicory, or something like that. We are also lucky. We sell to a number of very wonderful restaurants, and sometimes they’re happy to indulge our indulgences. If we have something odd that maybe the regular farmers’ market clientele is not as interested in, sometimes one of the chefs will be interested in giving that a try. Although to be fair many of our farmers’ market customers are amazing in what they’re interested in trying, too. Honestly I think we are lucky to live in a part of Maine in the Midcoast region that has a very sophisticated food taste. It’s amazing sometimes how much bok choy, or radicchio, or fennel that will sell at the farmers’ market.
Lisa Belisle: Who are some of the stores, natural food stores and other stores, that you work with?
Gabrielle Gosselin: We sell to Royal River. We’ve been working with them since we began actually. We were able to get certified organic our first year because no one had been growing on our fields for many years prior. They are an amazing natural food store that we have been selling with our entire farming season. We also sell to a range of other stores, but we’ve begun selling to Hannaford in Brunswick as well.
Nate Drummond: Yeah. I guess we sell to the main small grocery stores. Hannaford’s not small, but we just do that one Brunswick store. We sell a lot to the Harraseeket Inn, which is in Freeport, and they do a lot of events, so they’re a very big customer and then a lot of those restaurants in Brunswick, El Camino Restaurant, Tao, Henry and Marty, Trattoria Athena. Those are all good customers of ours. There’s a couple small local distributors, Farm Fresh Connection and Unity Food Hub, that sometimes get our stuff a little bit further. Yeah. For the most part those are some of our bigger core customers.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of the things that these stores are likely to want, or restaurants are likely to want, from you?
Gabrielle Gosselin: I would say they want a wide range of things, which is great, and it really complements our farmers’ market production because our goal as a farm is to be a one-stop shop for pretty much anything you might want in the vegetable world for as long as possible throughout the year. I think that a lot of our wholesale customers appreciate the diversity that we have to offer, as well as the length of time that they are able to get each crop from us. I think we will focus on extending the season maybe a bit more than…. Well, there plenty of friends that are doing that, but I think they are excited to be able to get lettuce in December or January as well as in June and things like that.
Nate Drummond: Yeah. We offer a wide range. We do certainly a lot of salad crops and leafy greens, but we have root crops, and tomatoes, and everything. It’s a pretty diverse mix that we are able to offer people.
Lisa Belisle: Do you have a farm share setup with your farm?
Gabrielle Gosselin: We don’t at the moment. I think we’ve always felt a couple of things. One, coming from the farmers’ market background, that was always the primary interest for us. The markets that we do in Brunswick are really quite strong and just getting stronger. Also, I think we felt that if we were to do a farm share in conjunction with a farmers’ market, maybe one of those would lose out a little bit. We wanted to always prioritize the farmers’ market and didn’t feel great about maybe having a farm share that wasn’t quite as wonderful as the selection we were otherwise offering, although I think there are more creative ways we could consider doing that in the future, but we haven’t pursued it yet.
Nate Drummond: I think also there’s just so many good farms, diverse vegetable farms, in our part of the state. A lot of them do offer farm shares. Sometimes we try and think of marketing niches that are not being served or relationships that we have that we can develop further. I think with the shares we’ve looked around and seen that there’s some very good farms that already offer shares within Brunswick, or Freeport, or further afield, and so maybe there’s less of a need for us to try and compete in that niche as much as work more to grow more for either someone like Royal River, who we are already dealing with, or try and add a new crop that we can sell at the farmers’ market or something like that. We’ve been trying to take our existing markets and customers and try and just keep developing them.
Lisa Belisle: Gabrielle, you talked about… Well, actually, I think, Nate, you were the one that said that Gabrielle was not happy with her office job.
Gabrielle Gosselin: No.
Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in what were you doing. What was your education? You guys met at Brown, so obviously you have a very strong educational background, academic educational background. What were you trained to do, and what were you doing?
Gabrielle Gosselin: Well, I can’t say I was particularly trained to do something. I had a pretty obscure major as an undergrad. I was a South Asian Studies major focusing on Eastern religion and language, so Sanskrit wasn’t leading me specifically to a career. It was more of a personal interest, which now seems particularly random. In New York I was really just trying to feel out different opportunities that weren’t related to any of my studies. Actually, I only had an office job for a few weeks and realized that I really, for a great organization, but commuting to Midtown and sitting in a cubicle with a little window that faced directly to a brick wall of the adjacent building wasn’t feeling very fulfilling. It wasn’t about the work so much as just where I was, and sitting at a computer didn’t excite me. Now there is some computer work certainly associated with our job, but I like the physical outdoor aspect quite a bit.
Nate Drummond: Yeah, I think it was a similar, although slightly longer, progression for me. I came out of college being very interested in continuing in some sort of academic pathway and not quite knowing… I was a history major, but not quite knowing if that was going to be more like history or some sort of policy-based work. I was actually working at Columbia University when we were in New York City doing academic research. Yeah, I think it was similarly a process of realizing that, although the actual subjects were interesting, the actual complete package of what it meant to work in academics was not actually that appealing to me.
Some of that also had to do with just the setting, wanting to be outside and wanting to do more physical work. Also I think Gabrielle used the word “tangible” a couple times, and there is something that when you’re writing papers and doing research and having, that maybe a small number of other people may read, and informing what sometimes feels like a conversation that’s being held by just a few people at a very high level and not really going any further than that, that an interest in something that was tangible was very strong.
I think there had been a period right after college where we had actually both worked for an organic apple orchard up in Maine prior to moving to New York City. It was a very small taste of farm work. I stayed on and did some stone masonry work afterwards with the owner. It was just enough of a taste to make us think, “Gosh, that really felt good.” It was good to be physically tired at the end of the day. It felt good to know very concretely what you had accomplished sort of thing. I think for both of us that was something that was missing in our day-to-day lives working in the city.
That has been honestly a big part of what is rewarding about working on the farm is just that there is never any question about what you got done and what the meaning of that is, even if it’s just that there’s satisfaction in weeding a row of carrots, and having it be weedy when you start and clean when you finish, and then also knowing how important that is in the process, the whole process of getting those carrots from seed to harvest. Farming is a lot of very small rewards and a lot of very small frustrations as well, but a lot of small rewards. I think the cumulative effect is very significant on just a quality-of-life level.
Gabrielle Gosselin: I think, also, since we run our own farm there’s a great balance between…. We’ve been talking a lot about the physical work, and weeding carrots, and the tangible rewards of harvesting that carrot later in the season or something like that, but because it’s our own farm, there’s also so much that we are talking about, and learning about, and doing that is very stimulating, and intellectually stimulating, and challenging. Spending time planning the farm, and how we’re going to have a rotation, and where does this fit into our business model, and how are we looking to grow, and where is our profit margin, and all of these things is a nice balance for us, I guess is what I’m getting at, so that It’s not just the physical labor, but we are also continuously challenged intellectually as well.
Nate Drummond: Yeah. I think we like to think of it like organizing the farm is like trying to figure out a process of making the circles overlap. You have the big circle of the production side of things, of getting things to grow sufficiently well so that you have quality produce over a long period of time, and then the circle of getting things to sell, and then the circle of making it all be sustainable both ecologically, and lifestyle wise, and financially, and getting all of those to overlap and trying to keep things in that sweet spot in the middle. Yeah. There’s a lot of intellectual stimulation in just doing that, which is great and somewhat, I won’t say unexpected…. It’s not why we got into it sort of thing necessarily, but it has been probably a big part of what has made it satisfying and something that we are interested in continuing on with.
Lisa Belisle: We talk a lot with people on the show about different types of intelligence and different types of intelligence that are required to do whatever it is that someone chooses to do. It sounds like you’ve tapped into multiple different types of intelligence in order to run a small business, actually grow food, parent your child, market. It sounds like it’s not necessarily all… Maybe very little of it is stuff that you got from sitting in a classroom.
Gabrielle Gosselin: That’s a good question. I think that our experience as undergrads just helped us learn how to think about our decision making process, and that was probably the most beneficial thing. The way that we decide to make small choices as well as larger choices was very much informed in the style of learning that we had as undergrads, I think.
Nate Drummond: Yeah. It’s also opened up the reality that there are lots of ways to learn and that just learning in the classroom or a college-based education has lots of value, but there’s also lots of different ways to learn and learning hands-on, learning…. I think one of the wonderful things about farming in Maine is that there’s this incredibly supportive farming community, certainly assisted by great organizations like MOFGA and Maine Farmland Trust and the university extension system, but at the core there’s a lot of farmers who are very passionate about sharing what they know and being very open and certainly older, more established farmers being very invested in younger farmers getting going and getting established themselves.
We’ve had the great benefit of just not only being able to learn through our own experience, but really being able to learn from visiting other farms or going to farm conferences and hearing other farmers talk about what they do. We are actually very lucky to have landed where we did in Bowdoinham. Actually there’s a wonderful swath of very good alluvial farm soil that we sit on. That’s a great help to our farm, but it also supports a number of other farms.
At the moment there’s, I think, seven different all vegetable or cut flower farms that are all clustered right in our neighborhood, and so we get to essentially watch what our neighbors do and learn from them. It’s a little cluster or almost incubator. That is incredibly important. I think you don’t realize until you’re doing that how it’s amazing just to be able to… The daily ability to bounce small creative ideas off someone else who is having a similar experience to you and compare notes, so to speak, is a very powerful way to learn. That has also been very important for us.
Gabrielle Gosselin: Yeah. I also want to add in the height of our season now we hire up to 16 people, and everyone is coming from a wide range of prior work or life experiences, and we have been incredibly lucky to also learn from our employees. They have so much to offer not just in terms of energy and enthusiasm for the work that they’re doing on our farm, but also maybe suggesting, “Hey, have you tried this,” a way that perhaps Nate and I have never even considered. Small or big changes that are suggested have actually been incredibly valuable for our farm. We have some employees who have worked with us for a number of years, a fellow, Andy, who has worked with us for eight years. He manages the winter crew, which changes our role in the winter and means we can be home more and have more family time as well. He’s incredibly valuable, but he’s very invested in the farm and always thinking about ways that we can do better. I think that has been a huge asset for us.
Nate Drummond: Yeah. It’s definitely true. It’s like the more brains and eyes that you have engaged in the farm, the more the collective decision-making is better, and the better the outcome. That has been a big… Yeah, many of our employees have their own farm experience working on other farms and whatnot, so we can tap into them to figure out what other people are doing and whatnot.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your coming in to talk with me today about this. This is very interesting for me, and we will make the information about Six River Farm available to our listeners on our show notes page. I appreciate all the time that you have taken to come in and talk to us, and to learn about farming, and to send vegetables out in the world. As someone who goes to Royal River Natural Foods on a regular basis, I have eaten your produce before. You do a very good job. It’s quite delicious. I’ve been speaking with Nate Drummond and Gabrielle Gosselin, who are the owners of Six River Farm, a diverse organic vegetable farm located on the shores of Merrymeeting Bay in Bowdoinham. Thanks for coming in.
Gabrielle Gosselin: Thank you.
Nate Drummond: Thank you, Lisa.
Gabrielle G.: Yeah. Appreciate it.