Transcription of Bill Lunt for the show Earth Day #32
Dr. Lisa: Today on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we have with us two representatives from the Tidewater Conservation Foundation. This is David Banks and Bill Lunt and they represent very different aspects of how we create open space, how we bring farming into our community, how we do with what we’ve had in the past and bring it into the future. Thank you for joining us today.
David: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: I have Genevieve Morgan seating next to me.
Genevieve: It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Dr. Lisa: You were telling me a little bit before we came on the air Bill, about how you came to be involved in the Tidewater Conservation Foundation. But let me back up and first ask, what is the Tidewater Conservation Foundation?
Bill: The foundation was a piece of a development project which the town made a master plan for. The Conservation Foundation is the overseer of the conservation land. It’s a non-profit 501(c)(3) and our charge is to oversee how that conservation land is used and we have some perimeters that we have to work around and that is if there has to be anything that happens there has to be related to education, agriculture or the arts or a combination of all three. That’s how the foundation is operating down there.
Dr. Lisa: This is located in what town?
Bill: Falmouth. It’s between 295, route one Lunt road and Presumpscot river.
Dr. Lisa: Land road could that be named for your family by any chance?
Bill: It’s a possibility, yeah.
Dr. Lisa: David, you also live in Falmouth. Your primary job is as a realtor, correct?
David: That’s correct. I cover the greater Portland area, Falmouth is the town I brought my family up in and I live currently in the town of Falmouth.
Dr. Lisa: How do each of you relate to this project, to the Tidewater Conservation project?
Bill: I’m on the side of it that’s keeping the open space active and using it under the parameters that the town says it has to be used under. Dave is the fellow who brings in the proper people to make it financially happen.
Dr. Lisa: Those are both fairly important pieces in this day and age.
Bill: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: David what kind of challenges have you found, being really involved in a business and the financial aspects of all of this?
David: One of the most important part of this Lisa was to find people that want to buy homes surrounded by this community. It really turned to, back in 2005 when the development got approved, it become a real positive part of our marketing. The people wanted to be surrounded by this open space and the diversity of things that would be happening in this space. We were, at the very early part of this, concerned about how would people view this and it’s turned? The neighborhood is about 95% sold out and we’ve a total of 50 homes surrounding this property. It has been extremely positive.
Genevieve: Is that because people don’t want to live around farming? What was the hurdle?
David: I think one of the questions was that would you see a lot of different activities on the land instead of just seeing it not used at all? Worried about or concerned about the farming would attract more people on the summertime. It really hasn’t. It’s actually turned out very positive. It’s also opened up the wildlife in the community, in the open space and people enjoy seeing the different activity in the neighborhood.
Bill: To follow up on that a little bit, we started a very early partnership with the University of Maine Orono and the Cumberland County cooperative extension They are now, they have bought one of the units in the commercial part of the development. Their offices are now on Clear Water Drive in Falmouth. They have demonstration guidance going on out there and it’s all about the education. We are in the process right now, the foundation is in the process right now, of signing some longer-term leases with the cooperative extension through the University of Maine.
Also we’ve got a collaboration with the Center for African Heritage and Cultivating Communities in Portland. We’ve got three other entities that are involved in the education and farming side of it. I think that’s another reason that the people and the residents are more excited because they see that this is a really beneficial issue of keeping open space but not just leaving it laying there.
David: Yeah. It’s very unique for the greater Portland area to have this opportunity.
Dr. Lisa: Why the African education piece? That seems, not that it’s not going to … tell me, how is it connected?
Bill: One of the real strong issues that the University of Maine, the cooperative extension is involved in is education for teaching business people, small businesses to teach people how to farm, how to actually run a farm. This is why the Center for African Heritage and Cultivating Communities came out is because they can now bring out people and they can have people from the university that work with them and they can learn how to do the farming, how to do a business plan for a farm. The idea is to use it as an incubation so that we can go from here and move out to another place somewhere else in Cumberland County or even farther away and start another farm.
Genevieve: It’s interesting in what, two generations we’ve become so separated from how to farm so it seems elemental to the human experience.
Bill: You bet. I personally have been involved in farming all my life. My dad had a greenhouse which was abutting this property as well beside my house so I grew up raising plants and working with the ground. This is another reason that I got so involved in it. I’ve been teaching people how to compost the old fashioned way before it became chic. Composting doesn’t necessarily have to be done in a barrel it can be done just by piling it up …
Dr. Lisa: I’m so glad to hear you say that because people have been making fun of me for years because I’ve had a compost pile with nothing around it and I have been fine with it. But that you can actually do it, that’s legitimate.
Bill: Absolutely, and I personally, on my own property I have two compost piles. I have one that I’m building and one that I just let there sit and cook. Then I have a third pile that’s been depleted because I’m taking out of it. I probably generate somewhere in the vicinity of 3 ½ to four yards of material every year on just my own residence. My dad created somewhere in the vicinity of 15 to 18 yards through the greenhouse. It can be done. It’s a little slower than the fancy way but it’s really easy, doesn’t take up a lot of room and it’s very, very pleasing when you think at the end of the day you’ve got some soil that is really good stuff.
David: I personally brought up three children and I have two acres of land, total. I raised my family on all the garden needs were done by us. My wife and I did all the preserving, canning and stuff in the fall and we used to set aside about 700 quarts every year. My family lived out of the garden.
My two boys still live in town and my two boys and their families have now decided they want to use my property to raise stuff. I’ve now quadruple the size of my garden so that my two families can go along with it. We are working together now so you can do it on a relatively small piece of land.
Bill: Chickens, definitely a big everybody wants chickens now and the towns have really provided opportunities for the families to have their own chickens and stuff. That’s definitely a new requirement by a number of families still within the Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, Greater Portland area.
Dr. Lisa: When people are looking to buy a house and you are looking to sell them a house, they are actually asking, ‘can I have chickens here?’
Bill: By all means.
Genevieve: Soon it will be a cow.
Dr. Lisa: We are just going to work our way up on that.
Bill: I know it’s great.
Dr. Lisa: There are going to be people listening who are going to want more information about the work that you are doing. What’s the best way to find out about the Tidewater Conservation Foundation and your project?
David: We are in the process right now of building a website so that we can be out there where people can get to us but right now the easiest way to get to the conservation foundation would be to go through the Cumberland County cooperative extension on Clearwater Drive in Falmouth. It’s a piece of the University of Maine.
Dr. Lisa: Well, we should give them credit, the University of Maine and the Cooperative extension has come out as a name many, many times. This seems to have been an old fashioned farm thing but now it’s like becoming chic again I guess.
Bill: We had a tremendous amount of help from a very dear friend of mine who passed away a year ago, Stanley Bennett, who was president of and Oakhurst Dairy. Stan got, he is the one that really started pushing me harder than, I was in there to keep the land open but Stanley came along and said, “You’ve got to keep it open, let’s make it work.” Stanley Bennett and the Bennett family from the Oakhurst have been extremely helpful as well.
Genevieve: David you said the neighborhood is 95% full, how do people reach you if they are interested in the last 5%?
David: Thank you very much. Contact me at RE/MAX by the bay in Portland and again it’s David Banks. If you look at the trend and what’s happened in the last six years even though the market was a little slow this has been the number one neighborhood selling in greater Portland and it’s because of the community it surrounds.
Dr. Lisa: We know that on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we are all about creating sustainable efforts for our health and wellness. It sounds like with the business and the land, it sounds like that’s exactly what you are doing so we give you a lot of kudos for that and thank you for being in here today.
David: Thank you for the opportunity.
Bill: Thank you very much.