Article & photos by Arion ThiboumeryContempt for hierarchical power and hope for self-sufficiency first brought people to the open prairie. Today those inherited sentiments have some residents renouncing the national food production and distribution system, charging that it is inequitable, delivers largely ho-hum products, decreases food safety, and disconnects farmers from the people eating their
Sharon Tisher has stepped down from MOFGA’s board of directors but remains involved in the organization’s public policy committee. She is also president of the board of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. English photo. After a dozen years on the MOFGA board of directors, Sharon Tisher has stepped down. She’ll remain involved in our
Long-time MOFGA member Paul Birdsall has helped train over 100 MOFGA apprentices in the art of farming with draft horses. Photo courtesy of the Small Farmer’s Journal. Teaming Up with the Next Generations of Farmers By Marada Cook © 2005. For information about reproducing this article, please contact the author. Don Nickerson swapped draft horse
From the MOFGA Spring Growth 2005 Conference: Local and Organic in a Global Food Economy: What is Our Role – As Farmers, Consumers and Citizens? Fred Kirschenmann spoke at the Spring Growth Conference about the end of the oil economy and the kinds of farms that will be able to feed us in the aftermath.
Vern Grubinger. English photo. By Jean English © 2005. For information about reproducing this article, please contact the author. Vern Grubinger’s epiphany was the topic of his keynote speech at MOFGA and Cooperative Extension’s Farmer to Farmer Conference in Bar Harbor last November [2004]. He was the vegetable and berry specialist with University of Vermont
Amy Sprague, Tom Harms and their daughter, Delia, amidst a lush crop of broccoli at Wolf Pine Farm in Alfred, Maine. As a CSA farm with apprentices, Wolf Pine not only produces food but educates many people, as well. Christine Hull photo. by Christine Hull © 2005. For information about reproducing this article, please contact
Sam Hayward. Photo by Martha T. Harris, courtesy of Fore Street Restaurant. By Marada Cook The subject of veal came up at a MOFGA board meeting, and a year later two Maine farmers had found a market for young milk-fed calves, thanks to Sam Hayward. An obscure root tuber called skirret caught his eye in
By Mitch Lansky Some plants, such as tomatoes, peppers, melons or squash, are frost sensitive. Well, I’m sensitive to frost, too. I live in a frost pocket in Wytopitlock, Maine. We have a growing season that averages fewer than 100 days a year, and we can have frosts at any month of the year. Indeed,
Master framer Michael Beaudry advises the drilling of a peg hole that will lock a brace into the frame. John Phelan photos. Workshop participants raise a timber frame at MOFGA’s Unity, Maine, site on July 24, 2005. The completed frame. The new blacksmith shop with its green steel roof in use for Common Ground Country
by Alyssa Benjamin I must be stuck in a re-run of Little House on the Prairie. Swirling skirts, bearded men, organic women. I sat paralyzed in an itchy, 1970s tweed chair positioned in the corner of a small, rustic dance hall in rural Maine. Once again, this is what my ebullient Aunt Nancy had deemed
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