Do you have any idea where your food in front of you came from on the planet? When you sit down to tuck in the neck napkin.
Reach for a fork, knife and spoon in the let’s eat ritual of breakfast, lunch, dinner trio of meals. Maine organic food is healthier, locally grown. Offers the comfort of “close to home” produced to proudly place on your family’s kitchen or dining room table. The added bonus of knowing your friendly local Maine farmer that needs the support got it.
You reached for his unique brand and silently said thank you with every trade. Because no farmer, no food is the sobering reality of what happens if his/her operation goes belly up. Can not survive and prosper. To continue the sacred organic farming in Maine partnership between grower and consumer.
But farming organically in Maine is a harder discipline.
Farming of any kind means the dealing with the unpredictable Maine weather. Finding, securing a steady market to peddle the product. Empty the fall harvest storage bins. Or field run demand to pick it, ship it and keep the dollars coming.
Moving the Maine organic crop, critters, whatever the product for high enough value to meet, hopefully exceed operating expenses. The American farmer is getting older, showing more gray in the receding hair line.
I grew up on a Maine farm and there is no life experience like it.
Organic farming in Maine, any where always rides on a business chassis. All those dollars plowed in the tilled, rock picked soil in spring, tended with a cultivator and hoed over summer. Harvested in a Maine fall festival of red, orange, yellow, neat arrays of green hues. Or whenever the organic Maine product season is in its prime time zenith.To be ready to package, go, show.
But unlike conventional farming, organic operations can not roll out the barrels of modern age pesticides, today’s latest and greatest high powered herbicides.
The organic fields in Maine are not plied with a spray coupe’s high tech applicator meter-it-out just right amount computers. For highest efficiency of where to put it from the nozzles of the far reaching row booms bouncing on each side. As its high clearance wheels industriously rumble up and down the field rows before sunset happens. Sometimes after it does exit into the darkness of night to stay up to date with the routine.
Squirting out metered amounts of toxic but highly effective chemical compounds. To combat insects, disease, blight, any thing that inhibits growth to produce the largest yield possible.
Organic food in Maine farmers have the handicap of smaller yields, trying to keep ahead of weeds using old fashion means and methods.
Higher but slower hand done operating costs have to tallied in. With dairy cows, meat, poultry farm producers too, the use of growth hormones happens in most commercial agriculture factory farm settings.
In Maine organic agriculture operations which tend to be smaller, micro farming enterprises, like in sporting circles. It’s taboo. No hormones, steroids, anything that doctors the foodstuffs is frowned upon as black hat farming. Addressed in the certification ground rules of fair play do’s and don’ts in the black and white regulations.
Genetically modified, altered is another world wide movement in modern farming. For creating more disease resistant seed strains that are patented. That yield larger crops, are less susceptible to break down in storage bins, during the growing season. Which impacts the end result profit and loss. Of what you have to sell or not to turn a profit from the yield, bounty of the harvest. To farm again.
There is a standing age old farming in Maine joke that circulates. The wisdom passed down that you had a good year if you broke even. You get to farm again, one more time at least.
Organic farming utilizes natural fertilizers like manure, plowed under millet, greenery ground cover or fish waste, seaweed, etc.
That naturally enriches, fortifies the soil base in the fields, pastures for the organic farming operation.
Nature’s Circle Farm in New Limerick Maine is one very successful local organic producer of a variety of healthy, wholesome produce items.
Our local Houlton Farms Dairy milk suppliers do not use the common BST growth hormone either. Wood Prairie Farm In Bridgewater is another certified organic producer in Aroostook County.
Learn more about this Maine organic farming and gardeners association from MOFGA link.
If you are alarmed at our escalating cancer rate in this country, you can not help but wonder, worry a lot. If what you eat is a big part of the national killer that affects in so many forms every family bar none.
Your body is a temple, take care of it if you want it to serve you best and not break down.
To live life to the fullest means demand, shop, bring home from the store or with a wheelbarrow visit to your own backyard. Where organic, pesticide and herbicide free tried and tested old time favorite species keep you happy, healthy, well fed and content.
Knowing you are munching and swallowing only the best quality organic produce, product of any kind from Maine. Heirloom seeds or GMO genetically altered, engineered and hybrid?
Do your homework, read up, ask questions and know what you are eating, how it was grown and from where.
There is peace, contentment in knowing what happens along the way from farm seed planting, crop tending, harvest practices.
With the food that you eat. Place with pride on your carefully prepared with love family table. But are usually out of the loop or just don’t care.
In knowing the actual procedures used to get the foodstuffs into, out of the ground. Transported to the big hub market populaton centers. For distribution to homes, restaurants, schools, institutions of all kinds. The many other venues all across America that find the addiction of food pretty much at least a three times a day habit, needing a nutritious fix.
I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com