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Rusted Rooster

The Rusted Rooster Farm family, left to right (with ages as of Oct. 2017): Sean, Chloe (3), Jackson (5), Sandra, Lacey (17 months) and Shannon (6). Photo by Lily Piel Mowing a cover crop of peas and oats for cattle feed with an 826 International. Photo by Sean O’Donnell Sean at work in his John

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Grow Your Own Schisandra

Eastern Prince schisandra berries shown by Aaron Parker of Falmouth in the Common Ground Country Fair Exhibition Hall. English photo By Roberta Bailey A few years ago, a friend was helping my husband and me erect a high tunnel on our farm. After a lunch break, he pulled out a little tincture bottle and said, “This is

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Trapping Orchard Pests

Pheromone trap for codling moth. Photo by Slaunger at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cydia_pomonella_trap_hanging_in_tree_2012-06.jpg used via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. A red ball trap made from a store-bought apple, used to trap apple maggot flies. English photo A soda bottle holding cider and molasses traps codling moths. English photo By C.J. Walke In my March-May 2016

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Spring Growth

David Rocque. English photo MOFGA’s 2016 Spring Growth Conference addressed soils, with experts from the state of Maine, from two state universities and from three MOFGA-certified organic farms. David Rocque, Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry soil scientist, defined “soils,” talked about soil-forming factors – especially parent materials – and about identifying soil types

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LIF

Nick Zandstra By Nick Zandstra One of the underlying premises of MOFGA, I think, is relationships: apprentices with mentors, interest groups with politicians, people with their food, people with the state of Maine. Relationships of all sorts that bring people together, that form connections, that create community. When MOFGA purchased its site in 1996, the

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Enterprise Budgets

By Heather Omand Four MOFGA-certified organic Maine farms – three machinery-powered and one horse-powered – participated in 2015 in a carrot enterprise budget project. Results are presented here, with the horse-powered farm enterprise budget separate due to substantial differences in costs versus the machinery-powered farms. Some farms tracked certain pieces of information more successfully than

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If You Can Keep It You Can Eat It

Vegetables ready for storage – some fermented, some as harvested. We store carrots, beets, rutabagas and celeriac in wooden boxes with damp spruce wood shavings. The uniform boxes stack and keep out rodents. The boxes also were sized to hold Mason jars. How we store our year-round supply of produce By Anneli Carter-Sundqvist Photos by

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Lowland Integrated Rice Production in Maine

Rice and azolla growing at Wild Folks Farm in Benton. Ben Rooney photo Rooney harvests rice with a scythe. Corallina Breuer photo By Ben Rooney Wild Folks Farm is entering its fourth season of lowland integrated rice production in Benton, Maine. Lowland refers to paddies. We have nine, with a gravity-fed water system. The paddies comprise about

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The Once and Future Cow

Toki Oshima drawing By Joann S. Grohman Maine has the highest rate of new farmers in the 48 states; we’ve gained 1,000 just in the past 10 years. Many of these new farmers will, I hope, consider keeping one or several cows, as nearly everyone did until less than 100 years ago. Even in towns,

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Value Added Dairy

Caitlin Frame and Andy Smith of The Milkhouse in Monmouth, Maine, make yogurt and ship milk. Photo courtesy of The Milkhouse At MOFGA’s November 2015 Farmer to Farmer Conference, Jack and Anne Lazor of Butterworks Farm in Westfield, Vermont, and Caitlin Frame and Andy Smith of The Milkhouse in Monmouth, Maine, talked about value-added dairy.

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