Farm ‘experiment’ tests subsistence
Bangor Daily News - 8/27/2009. By Diana Bowley – Dexter, Maine: Fred Sherburne, 57, and his nephew Shawn Sherburne, 35, watched as honeybees flitted over the sea of golden yellow sunflowers that surrounded them, a crop both men hope will help their struggling multigeneration dairy farm survive. The elder Sherburne, who operates Top of Maine Farms off the Ripley Road, planted about 18 acres in sunflowers this year – and much more of his approximately 400 acres in oats, wheat and corn – in an attempt to diversify and to help offset the loss from dropping organic milk prices. |
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Maine farmers deal with truckload of stress
Portland Press Herald - 8/26/2009.By Beth Quimby – First the rains shut down the greenhouse business and wiped out multiple plantings of cucumbers and corn at the Tibbetts Family Farm in Lyman. Then John Tibbetts had to spend a bundle on fertilizer because it kept washing away. And even though Tibbetts' fields were spared the late blight that ruined the potato and tomato crops at other farms, his tomatoes didn't escape the early blight. |
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The fairest of the fare
Portland Press Herald - 8/26/2009. By Meredith Goad – Nancy Harmon Jenkins jokes that her goal in life is "to get away from foodie-ness." Yet this well-known Maine food writer and cookbook author is the founder of Maine Fare, an annual event that draws foodies to the midcoast like Julia Child to butter. The foodie-ness that Jenkins disdains is the kind found in the slick food magazines that insist we must be well-versed in exotic ingredients and have the technique of Thomas Keller to be happy in the kitchen, and the foodie-ness that says you have to drop a C-note or more on a single dinner in order to appreciate Maine's restaurant scene. |
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Conference takes on economics of organic food
Portland Press Herald - 8/26/2009. By Avery Yale Kamila - Only rich people can afford to eat locally grown, organic food. Have you heard that one before? I have, and it's sure to come up during the "Can Maine Feed Itself?" keynote discussion taking place at next month's Maine Fare festival in the midcoast. The panel brings together a number of movers and shakers from Maine's food scene for a conversation centered on how the state can become more self-reliant when stocking our grocery stores and filling our dinner plates. According to well-known organic Maine farmer and author Eliot Coleman, who farms year-round in unheated greenhouses and will participate in the panel, the No. 1 barrier preventing more Mainers from eating food grown and raised locally is the competition from cheap eats trucked in from California. |
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