You did the thing that lots of yuppies like me say they “should” do. Ditch the desk job, start a farm. I’ve known you for a while and have been following along, completely fascinated. What’s an ideal day of farm work like in the hot Maine summer? And what’s it like in the brutal winter?
While I did ditch what could be considered an office job, I do still have a day job. We should get that out of the way first. I am just very fortunate it is in Baxter State Park, home of Mt. Katahdin and over 200,000 acres of wilderness. My wife Liz takes care of the farm full time.
In terms of farm life, my ideal hot summer day task is the process of cutting, bailing and putting up hay for the animals. The whole thing takes more than I day, but I am going to group it all together. We mow the fields using our draft horse team (Leroy and Jules). They pull the mower, which is powered by the action of the wheels rolling on the ground. I sit on the mower, fairly close to the ground. There’s no noise from a motor running, only the sound of the horses tack, their feet on the ground and the blades of the sickle bar. Our fields sit on a high point, and have perfect views to the West of Katahdin. If there is a breeze, which there often is, it keeps the biting insects at bay and the temperature down a bit. A day or two later, once the hay is dry, we will rake it into rows with a horse driven rake which is followed by the baler. Our baler can be pulled by either a tractor or the horses. The real fun comes when it’s time to collect the bales because that becomes communal work.
My wife Liz, and daughter Ellie (8-years old), our friend Menno and his family, which may include some of his daughters and his adult brother, will all pitch in to help. The hay wagon is pulled by the team. For long stretches we can walk beside the wagon, tossing bales up for someone else to stack. We can start and stop the horses to move them down the field by using verbal commands. We use a kiss sound for go, and whoa for stop. If steering is needed, Ellie will often grab the reins and drive. It’s hard work, hot, sweaty and itchy, but we can talk and laugh as we go. We’ve picked up and put away 800 bales in a day, but that was way too much. An ideal day of gathering hay would be around 300 bales depending on the help. Finally, any hot summer day on the farm needs to end with an outdoor shower.
An ideal winter work day would be cutting wood out back in the woodlot with the horse team. We heat the farmhouse, an inlaw addition, the commercial farm kitchen, and all of our hot water (year round) with wood from our land. I’ve cut my own firewood for the last 10 years, and until a year ago used my tractor to skid the logs. The horse team is a much better option. I can get them into areas much tighter than I can the tractor, moving them over and between stumps and through uneven terrain. Their overall impact on the land is substantially less too. This means less soil compaction, and less damage to younger trees and seedlings that will grow to one day be our future heat. I can drop a whole large tree, and use the horses to skid it into an open area. I can limb the tree with it still hitched to the horses, and move them along a little with verbal commands if need be.
Once it’s limbed, we drag the log to the landing and cut it to length as needed. Eventually, I will stack the logs with the tractor. Other than the chainsaw, it’s quiet work. I can hear the birds and the wind in the trees. I don’t need to listen to the tractor all day, or climb on and off it. If I was cutting wood and running the tractor, my daughter would have no interest. If I am out back working with the team, she will often wander outback through the fields to the woodlot to hangout while I work. Sometimes she will even pack a snack and a thermos with a hot drink to share! And if it’s safe, I will let her work with the team too, or Liz will run the team while I cut and limb trees.
I’ve always loved farm work. Somedays if there is a fun task (like the ones mentioned above) going to bed the night before feels like Christmas. I am looking forward to it. It’s exciting. The horses make it that much more enjoyable. Working with them is like working with friends. There’s trust, there’s frustration and we might even argue. We certainly talk. I talk to the horses a lot. All of these days start with the barn chores, feeding all the animals, horses included. Once that’s done I will take one horse at a time out of its stall, brush them and get their tack on. There’s a certain nostalgia to the process of tacking them up. The sound of it, pushing a stiff collar over their hand, carrying the heavy tack across the barn with the chains dragging on concrete, tossing it over their back and getting it laying in place correctly snapping all the steel buckles as you go. I love the sound of snapping the buckles. The whole time you talk to them, building trust, letting them know where you are, scolding them if they get sassy. To end the day you reverse the process. You can be exhausted, dripping in sweat, or freezing cold unable to feel your hands, but you need to take care of the horses first. You take off their tack, brush them, feed and water them before you can head inside and take care of yourself. The whole thing bookends a good day of work perfectly.
My favorite about observing your rugged life from the comfort of my couch is the photographs you share. They’re pretty incredible. As someone with their hands very full, what are things that cause you to pause what you’re doing and snap a pic?
The easy answer here is Ellie. We are incredibly proud of her and how she embraces the farm life alongside us. On one hand, she is quite fortunate. The kid has snuggled more baby animals then anyone could ever count. Baby goats and piglets are commonplace for her, but she still loves them. If she is late coming down for dinner, she is surly in the barn doing something with the animals. We used to joke that baby goats would babysit her. We could just lock her in a stall with them for hours and she was content. Ok, maybe not hours, and always supervised…. right?
Between her and baby animals, there’s always a good photo-op. On the other hand, her maturity in understanding the cycles of the farm is remarkable. She understands that many of the animals become food, and from a young age she had a healthy respect for the process. Now, she’ll help butcher chickens, or watch while I process a goat or a pig. She also understands that animals we love might die on their own. We lost our beloved guardian dog Sam suddenly, had a goat mom pass away during labor, and had piglets still born. It’s an unfortunate reality. Ellie has embraced this, and the farm work too. She always wants to help. She will drag around bags of grain and hay bales that weigh more than her, drive the horse team, help in the wood shop, or even work a socket wrench. Again, lots of good photo-ops. I like to think she has a beautiful life here, and I love to try and capture it anyway I can.
Then there is the place itself. Most anyone would find our land beautiful. The rolling hills and the view are world class. There’s days when the sunset seems to last for three hours. Knowing the place intimately makes it even more beautiful. It’s our place. In the book Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, an elderly Hannah said “It is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.” This place is heaven on earth to me, and I am fortunate to be borrowing it for however long I am here. It sustains us. Almost all our food comes from it, as does our heat. Most of our electricity comes from above it. It is the epitome of freedom. I try to capture that and share it, but don’t think I ever end up doing it justice. I’ll keep trying though!
You have a long history with animals. I even have fuzzy memories of your pet snake from back when we were in high school. What animal is the absolute worst to take care of?
Ugh, you had to connect my snake phase with farming? Don’t do that, they are not related. I am far more practical now.
If I earned any goodwill from my answers above, I feel like I might lose it on this one. The worst animal to take care of is any that lives in the house. I don’t like house dogs, my own two included. I have no need or use for them. On the other hand, we have two farm dogs that live out with and protect the animals. They have a purpose and I love them. If I go into the pasture, Tuffi will greet me. She will wiggle around and wag her tail before flopping over at my feet. When I give her scratches and attention, she’ll grunt like a pig, it’s her happy sound. Both guardian dogs, Benny is the other, will dote on Ellie. They will find and follow her anytime she is in the pasture, and I have no doubt they see themselves as her protectors. The guardian dogs are instrumental to the farm’s ability to coexist with the ecosystem around us. We have good fences, but predators are a reality. The dogs keep all our animals safe, without us feeling like we need to trap or shoot anything that could harm our livestock. Their presence is usually enough to keep predators at a distance, but they have had to get tough a few times. I’ve found a dead young fox in the pasture, and just the other day found a dead and frozen mink just inside the goat barn and figured one of the two guardians killed it in the pasture and brought it back as a prize. Farm dogs good, house dogs bad.
In terms of farm animals, goats can have the worst personalities. They can be quite ornery, Especially the older does. They have a hierarchy.
You grew up in Maine but then found yourself in the “Live free or Die” state (New Hampshire) for a decade. What are some rarely talked about differences between the two states?
I don’t know if I have much to offer in terms of the two states. I find the less rural portions of both states to be homogenized. Once you get into Northern Maine, you’re much further from the huge east coast population hubs, which I think helps take you back in time a bit, but you can see evidence everywhere that it isn’t what it used to be. The loss of rural farms, and the economies that revolved around them, has setback the rural communities in a way that can’t be overcome unless society begins to recognize what has been lost. To anyone with interest in this topic, I highly recommend reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. Getting to know Northern Maine, which I inhabit the Southern border of, has been eye opening. I spent the first 20 years of my life in Southern Maine, and never knew the State that existed North of Bangor. Houlton, where we sell at the farmer’s market, is the Northern terminus of Interstate 95 and is a good size town, but even at 80 MPH it’s over an hour and a half North of Bangor, and that’s if you don’t hit a moose. North of Houlton are other even larger small towns, Presque Isle, Fort Kent and even Madawaska. I now understand why Northern Maine folk feel underrepresented. It’s another world up here.
I’ve heard that farmers can’t take vacations, ever! Is that true? Will you be attached to that land as long as there are things that need to be done?
Why would I want to leave here? I get a fair bit of paid time off from my day job , in addition to working a compressed work week (4, 10 hour days), and use the majority of my time off to do farm work. That being said, we do like to get away at times. We annually paddle the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a 4 to 5 day, 90-mile canoe trip, and also like to get somewhere remote in Baxter as often as we can.
There are a few things that go into getting away from the farm. First, we schedule around the farm. We have summer CSA pickups, harvesting, butchering dates and farmers markets to plan around. We are scheduling our spring Allagash trip around due dates of goat kids and piglets. We plan our breeding, so have a fairly good idea of the due dates, or at least as much as you can plan around nature. We also pride ourselves in setting up farm infrastructure that makes things easier, both for ourselves and for anyone that might be helping us watch the farm. We have solid fences, good watering systems and thought out processes. It’s not perfect or without chaos, but we do the best we can. Our secret weapon for getting away though is our relationship with the Amish, particularly our dear friends the Miller family, Menno and Mary. Menno will make the two-mile trek morning and evening with his horse and buggy to do our farm chores while we are away. One of our horses, Chip, used to be one of his road horses, so he will often bring Chip to his barn while we are away and put him to work coming back and forth. If we have a goat in milk, Menno will bring his oldest daughter Lydia who is ten. She will do the milking while Menno does the rest of the chores. We are fortunate to have such reliable help from someone who understands farming and animal husbandry so intimately. For the last few years we’ve gone away to a remote cabin in Baxter to ice fish in February and even then Menno will make the trip down to our places in any weather, often in the dark with only a kerosene lantern on his buggy for light, to do our chores. Don’t forget, he has his own farm chores to do too!
We see our relationship with the Millers as an example of community that is being lost in our society, largely due to the loss of small farms. Farming to the scale we do would be almost impossible without community. How would we put up 1500 bales of hay with only Liz, Ellie and I? How could we butcher over 100 chickens for the farmers market 4 times a year? Farmers rely on other farmers. We share equipment, horses, labor and more. One farmer may keep a supply of hardware that most farmers need, while another a stock pile of belts, pulleys and other parts for small engines. One of our big contributions is transportation. We get our grain from a different Amish community 35 miles to the North, so we always check with the Millers before we go and pick up their grain too. Animal bedding we get from a sawmill 60 miles to the south using our dump trailer. The Millers then get their shavings from us. If there were more local farms, these resources wouldn’t be so far away, every community would have them. Some other examples of our partnership: Mary is making me a new wool shirt. Today we are bringing our horse team and bobsled to Menno’s woodlot to help haul out logs. Last week Menno smoked two sides of bacon for us, and we borrowed his hand cranked meat slicer to slice it before packaging for the freezer. When they butcher their animals they borrow our sausage stuffer. In the spring Menno will use his sawmill to mill our logs for us that will eventually become our sugar house. Unless there is a direct cost to the other, money rarely changes hands between us.
Where he grew up
Gorham, Maine
Profession/Passion
Maintenance and Transportation Supervisor in Baxter State Park
Drink of choice
A quart jar of raw goat milk
Third space
His wood shop
