Thanks giving days

Yesterday, peering into my canvas tote after shopping at one of the island’s two weekly farmers’ markets, I couldn’t resist getting out my camera and making of its contents, if only digitally, a type of still life.

It’s that time of year – when our gardens, markets and baskets overflow with abundance. With corn and tomatoes that back in a cold, wet June, we despaired never having. With fingerlings and Yukon Golds, squash and slender green beans meant, it seems like, to be eaten raw. If only for a short time, our fruit cup runneth over, too – with blushing juice-spurting Five Star Nursery peaches and Hackmatack Farm’s gem-like silvery-glossed blueberries that drive home the argument once again: in Maine there are blueberries and in the rest of the country the impostors. And yes, it’s again the time of year when a friend’s husband, sitting down to the dinner table, asks, “So where did you try hiding the zucchini this time?”

November may be the month of Thanksgiving but particularly at summer’s end, each day is one of thanks giving. And, earlier this month, as though aiming to oblige with deliberate celebration but by way of serendipity, it was as if the island was hosting “Food Week.”

“Meet Your Farmer” kicked things off at Stonington Opera House. Commissioned by Maine Farmland Trust, an organization working to preserve farmland in Maine through land purchase and agriculture easements, this documentary film features eight short profiles of farmers including a mid-coast apple grower, a potato grower in Aroostook County, a seventh generation dairy farmer in western Maine and Paul Birdsall of nearby Horsepower Farm whose aptly named 300-acre spread of field and forest does more than hint at what in lieu of tractor does much of the grunt work.

In spite of the challenges and frequent on-the-brink seasons that often beset each of these individuals and many more like them, it was obvious, to this film viewer anyway, that here are folks certain that this is what they want to do, how they want to live and raise a family. As stewards of some of our most cherished landscapes, they possess a reverence for the land and a deep belief they are contributing to the future in a meaningful way. And as the film makes clear, knowledge and skill aren’t enough. It takes conviction, humility and grit. Yes, the film’s footage can at times suggest a sort of pastoral romanticism – a classic white clapboard farmhouse beneath an arbor of sheltering trees, tidy dew-beaded rows of carrots looking beneath a rising sun as though they’ve planted themselves – but who knew there could be so much muck getting into a dairy barn? Those of us who love seeing belted Galloways graze in a plush green field may never picture “belties” as steak on a plate. Nor are we likely to envision their bodies and faces encrusted with ice and snow after back to back blizzards or someone’s requisite long, subzero traipse out to replenish their hayrack.

Today, Maine is home to only a fraction of what was farmland 100 years ago. But there are more farms today than 20 years ago. The number’s up 50% since 1992, and in a reversal of previous trends, an increasingly younger population is running them. Possibly college educated and trained to do other things but drawn to a healthier lifestyle and with a concern for environment, these young families are pursuing a different track. Increasingly, they’re helping define local communities and injecting bold and creative ideas into what, here, with harsh, dark winters, a short growing season, and challenging acidic soil conditions aren’t particularly hospitable factors. After decades of losing local agriculture – agriculture – its customs and wisdom, is it possible we’re witnessing an agrarian renaissance?

Some people think so. Like Mark Bittman, prolific author, cooking show host, and long-time New York Times columnist. In a talk and panel discussion, another of our food-focused events the same week and sponsored by the island’s own Island Culinary and Ecological Center (ICEC), Bittman claimed he’s impressed by what’s happening here in terms of local, sustainable farming. Not that such efforts alone, in Maine or anywhere else, are going to fix our broken “non-system” food system that favors big agri-business and penalizes small sustainability. Clearly it’s tilted. Local farmers, after all, don’t fill political campaign war chests but deep-pocketed agri-business lobbyists and the likes of Cargill do. According to another panelist, Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, a member of the House Agricultural Committee and an organic farmer herself, it’s impossible to get her fellow committee members in Washington to even consider regulating genetically modified food. Though how surprising is this, in a climate where the FDA is facing substantial cuts even in the wake of huge recalls? Like the 36 million pounds of contaminated ground turkey for which, in spite of having made many people sick and contributing to a death, Cargill has yet, best I can tell, been hit with a fine while a Maine farmer, violating some raw milk ordinances, could face jail-time.

Few among us here knows all this better than another panelist, peninsula organic farmer and local food activist, Heather Retberg of Quill’s End Farm who along with husband Philip run a 100 acre pasture-based farm with pigs, hens, sheep, dairy and beef cattle and have started a buying club of which its 60 members are a number of fellow islanders. Truly representative of the young people renaissance in Maine farming, she’s one of those responsible for many of the nutritious things a lot of us without space, time or talent to keep large gardens are able to haul home in our canvas bags and baskets. Working hard to change local ordinances, she’s helping insure others can, too. And it's likely Heather is among the younger Maine farmers who’ll readily admit it’s hard to make a good living in farming although in doing it you have a good life.

Only large scale farms, much larger than even the biggest in Maine and more corporation than family business, can turn profits thanks in large part to generous subsidies. Sure, the claim is often made that locally and sustainably grown food is too expensive for many pocketbooks, but the counter argument is too seldom made – that the cost of non-local food routinely purchased in grocery chains does not truly reflect the cost of its production. Remove tax breaks and subsidies and cheap immigrant labor, factor in environmental costs (undrinkable water due to phosphate run-off, for example) and health care costs (food contamination and anti-biotics overuse just to name two) and price comparisons would be more representative. There’d be a more level playing field between farmstand and big box market.

This time of year, I’m apt to hear some of my island friends grousing about August’s long lines at our Friday morning farmers’ market. Sometimes, because of them, they stay away. Yes, but who is rising at 3:30 a.m. to pick and rinse and pack? In spite of whatever kind of weather is thrown this way? I figure my half of the bargain is to show up.  

Plus, I like thinking that when I fill my canvas bag, I’m not only promising myself good meals in the days ahead, I'm helping support a farmer, a family, someone I’ve come to know. Hauling my bag home, I’m in my own way participating. I’m a small cog in the wheel, in the circle that connects community and its social fabric to the land and its cycles. It’s a way by which I have a relationship to this good land and to the good people who with respect and hard work help sustain us all. And none of this, I have to confess, I particularly feel when unloading my cart at Hannaford’s -- where, by the way, check-out lines in August are pretty long, too.