Transcription of Ted Quaday for the show Maine Farms & Food #149
Dr. Lisa Belisle This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast. Show #149 Maine Farms and Food airing for the first time on Sunday, July 20, 2014. Greek physician Hippocrates once said ‘let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food.’ It has become increasingly clear that there is no more important way to approach health. Doctors need to care about food. We need to care about where it comes from and how our patients are getting it. Today we speak with John Piotti of the Maine Farmland Trust and Ted Quaday of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardening Association about these very issues. Thank you for joining us.
Listeners of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast know that we place a premium on environmental concerns and environmental efforts. Having lived in Maine for most of my life I know that I along with my family depend quite a lot on Maine’s farmland and the food that is produced by Maine’s farmland and also by Maine farmers and gardeners. Today, I am very pleased to have with us John Piotti and Ted Quaday. John Piotti is the president and CEO of the Maine Farmland Trust an award-winning and statewide nonprofit that protects farmland, support farmers and advance farming.
Ted Quaday is the executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardening Association. The organization works with farmers and gardeners in rural communities to increase the growth of organic crops but also to recycle natural resources and increase local food production. Thanks so much for coming in and being with us today.
John Piotti: Thank you.
Ted Quaday: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa Belisle I really like the fact that when we asked each of you to come in separately, you said, “Well we work together anyway and we’d like to come in together.” That speaks to something that I think is very important in Maine, that collaborative notion. This has been important for each of your organizations, I think. John why don’t you tell me a little bit about the Maine Farmland Trust first and then we’ll talk about the collaboration that you’re doing with the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
John Piotti: Sure. Well Maine Farmland Trust is a statewide membership organization, like MOFGA. We’ve been around a lot shorter period of time, about fifteen years. Our roots actually many of the people who founded the organization including myself were MOFGA members and one of them was Russell Libby, the executive director of MOFGA so there’s been connections from the beginning. I think both organizations focus on the future of farming and care dearly about it, but focus a little differently.
Our principle focus is on the land side of things. We worry about protecting farmland so it’s going to be here for the next generation and we worry a lot about land access, making sure that land is affordable and available to both the next generation of farmer but also existing farmers, existing farmers who may wish to expand or existing farmers who may currently lease property and that property is at risk. They risk losing it which happens all the time.
Those are our principle focuses. We’re in the middle of an effort to work with a 1,000 farm families and protect a 100,000 acres of land. It’s a 6 year effort. We’re about half through and we’re almost halfway of our goal, close to 40,000 acres and about 400 farm families at this point.
Dr. Lisa Belisle How does this intersect with the work that you’re doing Ted?
Ted Quaday: MOFGA has been at work in Maine for 43 years at this point. It really I think is the foundational movement within this state around good food and family farms and organic food production, so given that idea that it’s foundational so much has risen out of the work that MOFGA has done particularly around training family farmers, training organic farmers to really be successful on their land, giving them the tools that they need to go out and produce the food that people are indicating they really want which I call a good food movement basically. It’s at many, many different levels producing food that people feel comfortable consuming so they don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re ingesting let’s say synthetic pesticides or other elements in the food.
What we’re doing is we are working with groups all over the state not only the Maine Farmland Trust but other organizations that are dedicated to moving new money into the farm economy, investing in new businesses, new distribution ideas, new processing ideas. It’s just a really … It’s for me coming in to Maine 7 months here I see there’s an incredible web of interest in the issue and the activities around good food and that there are many, many groups that work together to get that done and it really will take all of us to create what I think is a new paradigm for the food system which is all about good food.
Dr. Lisa Belisle When MOFGA came in to being it ended up having to be a little bit more I think forceful in putting it’s beliefs across because at that time not everybody was understanding that organic food was important and not everybody was understanding that the quality of food actually did have an impact on the health and well being not only of people but of animals and the environment.
Ted Quaday: I think that the original founders of the organization were really focused more on homesteading, coming in and carving out a piece of land, creating food that they would consume themselves or maybe trade within the community that was being created. I think that’s what that was about at the time. Over time, the organization has grown not only in the way it perceives the food web if you want to call it that but the importance of engaging at many, many different levels in creating a food system that is more healthful for all, the environment, people, the animals, the whole idea around the good food movement.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Maine has been a bit of a hot spot for this back to the land I guess movement and this was a Helen and Scott Nearing and Living the Good Life and I believe this was up in the mid coast area. Did this have something to do with the work that MOFGA began?
Ted Quaday: I think that’s true. I think that the folks that came back during that error which was in the 1970s and a little before that were really dedicated to, they were rejecting the consumer society that maybe John and I grew up in. They were saying look this is a society that we want to create a new system, but they weren’t thinking in terms of grand social change. Today, I think movement has evolved to the point where we can say this is a movement about good food in many, many different forms and that MOFGA in Maine has been a leader and not only in Maine but around the country.
I first engaged with MOFGA when I was working with Farm Aid which is another group that’s advocating for family farmers. My impression at the initial outset which was in 1998 was that this is a group that really has it’s finger on the pulse of what’s going on nationally as well. They were creating a movement in the state but it was resonating around the country. Maine has been a leader throughout that entire period, the last 15, 20 years, 30 years almost in that good food movement.
Dr. Lisa Belisle When I think about farms, John, I think about the farms that for example my children’s father they’re grandfather is a potato farmer up in Aroostook County. The publisher of Maine Magazine, his grandfather had a family farm, I think it was in New Brunswick, so technically not in Maine, but I don’t necessarily think of organic farms. A lot of these farms though were working without the use of pesticides far before pesticides even became broadly used. You’ve seen some really interesting things happen with farmers economically over the last 50, 75 years I think.
Talk to me about some of the changes that Maine is undergoing.
John Piotti: Sure. There’s been tremendous change and there’s also tremendous opportunity for the future. The best summary that I know of where farming in Maine stands now is something I stole from Stu Smith who was the Commissioner of Agriculture about 25 years ago and he’s described what’s occurred in Maine farming the last 15 or 20 years a bifurcation, two tracks if you will. In 1 track is exactly what you described, what a lot of people classically think of as a farm, the potato farm, the dairy farm. It’s clear on the landscape what it is. You see the cows roaming around. There’s a silo. There’s tractors.
The other track has gone by different names over the last 15, 20 years but the term that’s usually applied now is local agriculture and they may actually be growing the same products. The distinction is how they market. These are farms that are marketing direct, either through a farmer’s market or a CSA or through a farm stand and they’ve cut out the middle man. In some ways, that’s the biggest change in farming in Maine is commodity agriculture and I’ll put that first category, I’ll apply that label to it. They are growing those products and selling them to a processor or to a wholesaler and they’re selling their products as commodities.
Commodity agriculture has not worked well for the farmer. The middle men have gotten the money and if you look at it historically, they’ve gotten a larger and larger chunk of the money and the farmers get squeezed out. What we’ve seen in the last 15, 20 years through the efforts of MOFGA and other entities that have really created the opportunity for farmers to sell direct. That’s where we’ve seen great growth. Having said that, you can’t look at a trend line and assume this is also the future. None of us have a crystal ball, but I think most of us who look at agriculture have been at it for 20 years like I have in this state think that future will involve agriculture on multiple scales working in many ways and that’s good because these 2 tracks are mutually reinforcing.
You take the small organic goat farmer who is maybe making a great Chevre and selling at the farmer’s market, per economics only work because we also have a dairy industry in this state that allows her to buy grain in bulk so it’s not a us versus them kind of thing. We’re all in it together, but there’s huge opportunity in the future. Maine has although in my work I worry about good farmland that’s potentially lost to development. It’s a major concern but there’s also vast stretches of the state, millions of acres that were farmed a 130 years ago that are not farmed today and have not been developed and could be returned to agricultural use, huge opportunity in the state.
Dr. Lisa Belisle I believe we’re seeing this more and more. We’re seeing young people who are coming back into the state and with the specific desire to be farmers.
Ted Quaday: I think that’s true and one of the interesting things about the evolution of the family farm and the farm movement generally at this point is that I think a lot of these young people who are coming back and there are more and more. Maine actually is one of the leading states in the country in terms of bringing young people back to the farm and in part because of MOFGA’s work I think in terms of training them and getting them ready.
One of the things that they’re coming into it with is the idea that this is a business and we need business training to make it work but we also have entrepreneurial ideas about how we’re going to sell our food. A lot of them think in terms of value added right on the farm. Cheese is one element of that value added process and there are just dozens and dozens and dozens of others where people are saying I could make a [gem 00:14:00] here. I could create a label. I could market that at the local farmer’s market or maybe 5 or 6 different markets.
That kind of thinking is only … The opportunity is created by the existence of the market so the farmer’s markets are growing. The CSA concept where you subscribe is growing. That creates the opportunity to be entrepreneurial. It’s really taking off in the state. It’s drawing people back.
John Piotti: If I could just follow up on that. Ted is absolutely right. We’ve seen a huge increase in beginning farmers. In fact if you look at young farmers, farmers under age 34 in the last agricultural census that just came out the number of farmers in that category in Maine grew by nearly 40 percent. That’s phenomenal. The national average was 1.5 percent.
This is an example of where MOFGA and Maine Farmland Trust work together. MOFGA has done a fantastic job of inspiring and training young people to be farmers, but those farmers then need to find land and that’s where we come in, holding hands with people to maybe help them go through the financing process or help them find land. We have a program called farm link that helps make these connections, but also by protecting land we make that land more affordable for the next generation. Once land is protected with a conservation easement that property will sell at its value for farm use rather than its value for development and that’s critical for a lot of entering farmers.
Ted Quaday: It’s really is crucial. The availability of land is one of a number of issues that young family farmers face, availability of credit is another key issue. Opportunities to increase market size and so on are other challenges but you know John is right. Yesterday in fact we invited John to come over to our staff meeting to talk about the farmland trust, its work and various ways in which farmers can transfer land so that it becomes protected.
The staff was very appreciative and we’ve talked a lot about how we can increase our connection even though there’s a strong connection between these two groups already. We’ve talked about other ways that we can increase that link.
John Piotti: Well you just mentioned credit and I think it’s a fascinating project. It’s in early stages but Maine Farmland Trust and MOFGA are also partnering on looking at the establishment of an agricultural credit union and financing is often a big problem with farmers. When you get a mortgage on your house, you can right now get a fairly nice rate but you get that rate because that mortgage can be sold on the secondary market and federal guarantees are involved and you can get 3.7 percent or what.
If that was a farm property, you would not be able to get a rate of less than probably 6 percent so financing that’s just 1 example but financing generally is a real barrier and if we can create a new tool to assist people in the agricultural industries be it for land purchasing or equipment or operational capital that is one critical piece of what we need to see agriculture blossom as it could.
Ted Quaday: I think it’s particularly acute for organic farmers because the powers that be still view the organic system as a somewhat experimental and risky. It’s a higher risk entity than a conventional farm to them. To us, it’s a little bit frustrating to have to deal with that so creating new vehicles for bringing cash into the system to allow the expansion is crucial.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle When I think about organic food and I think about the farmland that you’re describing John, I wonder if sometimes there might be an issue if conventional farmland that’s been out there in use for generations that an organic farmer might want to come in and start to use. There must be some rehabilitation of the land that needs to take place for that to happen.
Ted Quaday: Yeah, I’ll just talk a little bit about the certification process. There’s a requirement for anyone who wants to farm organically that that land is treated as an organic entity for three years before it can be certified as organic. It’s a transitional period. Right now our organization is working with 30 farmers in this state today that are interested in transitioning. They’re at one stage or the other of that process but there are requirements that the USDA is the certifying with the body that creates the rules and then go out and verify that those rules are being followed through our certification services program.
John Piotti: For farmers who wish to transition to organic, that issue of timing can be a real factor because you can’t afford to be paying a mortgage on a property that you can’t use. Maine Farmland Trust deals with farmers of all types. We deal with conventional farmers, organic farmers but a lot of the young people who we’re helping to get on farms happen to be organic farmers and sometimes what we will do is if we acquire a property for the purpose of protecting it and then reselling it at a more affordable rate, we might lease it to them at a very affordable rate or hold on to it for a while, while some of this transition period can occur.
Also there’s a lot of land in Maine that has even though it was not being farmed organically per se it often had been left fallow or there was nothing being applied to it so you can transition it to organic sooner than you think, but there’s other properties that are really tough. We were protecting an orchard property in central Maine a few years ago. We thought we had a young couple who wanted to buy it but there have been so many chemicals often put on orchards that there were still residuals in the soil. They probably ultimately could have passed some tests for organic certification, but they just didn’t want to farm there.
There are downsides too but by in large I think these are transitions for people who want to make them work. There are entities between MOFGA and Maine Farmland Trust both with training and the access side and we can usually make it happen.
Dr. Lisa Belisle We had Cecily Pingree on the show I think a couple of years ago now and she was talking about Betting the Farm which was about Maine’s own organic milk and some of the struggles that the organic milk farmers were going through and I think several of them were conventional farmers that had transitioned into organic. There’s a very real business aspect to creating a product that then goes to a nationally organized chain and has to be, really has to meet the quality test up against say Oakhurst let’s just say and that there was some issues. There was some struggles with that. How do people who want to be entrepreneurial sort of hang on through the struggles and make it financially?
Ted Quaday: You know it’s really tough. We have farmers who are members of MOFGA who are closely involved with this MOO milk label, is the new label in Maine that’s just been created in the last few years. It’s twelve dairy farms at this point I think and growing, hopefully growing. It’s just a huge challenge. It’s still a huge challenge for those folks and hanging on economically is the biggest piece of it I’m sure. It’s weathering that storm and those are risk takers. They have to have credit available. They have to be willing to take the risk to operate in that capacity.
It’s not easy and it does beg for a response at the state level in terms of policy development around the issues where we can support these entrepreneurs who are off doing things that are somewhat different than the more conventional producers but are producing a product that I have to say I think it’s a higher quality product. I think it’s more healthful for people. I think it’s more healthful for the environment, et cetera, et cetera. That’s an investment the state ought to be making at the policy level.
I think that we keep our eye on it. We work on it. John is the Maine Farmland Trust I’m sure tracks that stuff pretty closely as a former legislature and a leader within the legislature, he keeps his eye on that stuff as well, so there’s huge opportunities there as well in terms of policy change.
John Piotti: Ted’s absolutely right that there are a lot of people in farming who are very entrepreneurial. In fact I would say farmers are some of the most entrepreneurial people I know. If they’re in business, they’ve had to be very creative, good at problem solving, ability to sort manage a whole range of tasks and mostly when we see young people getting into the business they are viewing it as a business. They’re doing it in part because they want to be connected to community and they care about the future of this planet, but they’re also taking it from the perspective of this is a business and we have to make the numbers work so we’re seeing a lot of very creative entrepreneurial people enter the field.
The way they connect to agriculture varies depending on what track they’re taking. It’s very entrepreneurial just to start a small farm. It’s very entrepreneurial to develop some lines of direct marketing but if you want to go to that sort of next step, if you want to scale up a little bit, if you want to be part of that milk producer, if you want to aggregate your product with other farms, if you want to do value added processing of some of your product, not just grow apples but make apple pie and make preserves and the like that can be really a challenge and I think that’s really the next wave.
If you look at the last 15, 20 years as I said earlier, you can summarize it in that we kept farming alive in this state and allowed it to grow by people being creative and finding direct markets, but the truth is that the vast majority of Mainers it’s great that CSA has become popular and farmer’s market have become popular and they will continue to grow and that’s wonderful, but the vast majority of Mainer’s are not going to get most of their food by being a member of CSA or going to a farmer’s market. They’re going to shop at a supermarket. They’re going to get their food through an institution, hospital, school, nursing home, whatever.
There’s a real need for those farmers who wish to scale up a little bit and the goal here needs to be to maintain the best benefits of local and I don’t just mean freshness and quality. I mean that most of the benefit accrues back to the farmer. How do we do that is we scale up a little bit. Moo Milk is a great example of that. MOO Milk is an entity that is in essence owned by those dozen farmers who participate in it. It gives them a way of accessing the wholesale market but still retain some of the benefits themselves. I think that’s the next wave.
It’s rebuilding the locally oriented food infrastructure that we used to have in this state 75 years ago. Every town had a corn shop. There were small creameries and slaughter houses everywhere, we’ve lost that. The entrepreneurial needs to rebuild that are tougher than just starting a single farm or going to a farmers market. I think Ted’s absolutely right if the state is serious about this this is a very appropriate place to infuse some dollars and technical assistance to help spur the kind of economic opportunities that are possible.
Dr. Lisa Belisle I know you mentioned a few times about Maine having this infrastructure in place and I know that around Civil War time we were a bread basked of the northeast. We were rivaling I guess New Jersey. Somehow that fell away I guess but it seems the fact that we’ve had it before means we should be able to do it again. Part of this I think comes back to how we educate the next generation or the current generation. I’m not sure that there is a lot being done in schools right now with agriculture.
Ted Quaday: I think there is a blossoming movement at the national level. I know there are programs in the state farm to school programs that are operated by nonprofit organizations and funded through various grant type programs where there are opportunities to engage kids in organic gardening and engage them with a school garden, help bring learning opportunities from the garden into the classroom and vice versa. Those programs exist and they’re growing. They’re growing across the country.
In Maine, I know there are some, some of those opportunities exist already, so I just see that continuing to grow. Even in Portland, you know the mayor has committed to bringing 50 percent of the food that goes into the school lunch program sourcing it from Maine. That alone will create awareness among young people about what their food is, where it comes from, who’s growing it? How it’s being grown et cetera? That’s all good stuff.
I think that that whole movement is on a trajectory that even goes beyond the organic movement which continuing to grow. I mean I just think the people are really interested in not only helping kids understand where their food is coming from, how it’ being grown et cetera but bringing that high quality food into the schools and into other institutions.
John Piotti: I agree with Ted completely that there’s a lot happening in Maine in this area. Portland is a great example. The local school district that I’m part of, I live in Unity. I live there. Ted works there and [RSU3 00:30:31] has been a state leader in that area. Portland, recently surpassed us but up to a couple of years ago we were sourcing about 30 percent of our food locally. There are things that are happening on the education side. Ag in the classroom which was really at a point of being so small it was irrelevant has really shot forward in the last couple of years.
A lot of the money that goes into those Ag license plates, those colorful Ag license plates helps fund that. There are things happening. School gardens have become very popular. There’s more and more occurring on that level but I agree with you completely Lisa education is so critical here and there’s a need for so much more. Both MOFGA and Maine Farmland Trust we spent a lot of our energy just sort of getting the word out and it’s easier today than 20 years ago when I started doing this, 20 years ago you’d talk about there’s great opportunity in farming and people would look at you like you were crazy.
Today you don’t have to go over that hurdle but there are other things. You have to help people understand how their buying power at the store really makes a difference and help them understand some of the choices they have for what kind of products they buy. There’s always a huge need for education. It’s just the level and maybe the sophistication of it has to change over time as public awareness changes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle I agree with you that a lot more is being done with the whole farm to school network and with bringing education about food and local food specifically into schools. I guess what I was referring to is that the sort of the higher level of education that is required for one to go into farming, so you know I have a liberal arts degree from Bowdoin and I’m sure I’m not the only person from Bowdoin who has thought oh, it would be kind of nice to go and run a farm someday but there is really not much in my liberal arts background that would enable me to do that.
John Piotti: It’s interesting that you mentioned that though because a lot of the young farmers we’re seeing and I’m sure Ted will concur with this are folks from liberal arts background, maybe they get an apprenticeship through MOFGA, many schools including Bowdoin now has a school garden and there are opportunities that didn’t exist, but there are also a more intensive opportunities that now exist. Kennebec Valley Community College for instance just started a 2 year Bachelor’s Degree in Agricultural Sciences. MOFGA and MFT were both very involved in helping develop that curriculum.
Andrew Marshall from MOFGA I believe is one of the instructors over there. Unity College that is in my backyard and I used to be a trustee for they also now have a program in that area College of the Atlantic. It’s growing. There are more opportunities than there used to be and it’s been really, the KVCC 1, the Kennebec Valley Community College really pleases me because that was the first time that sort of a state institution that you could argue at times those kind of institutions can be a little bit more bureaucratic and maybe a little slower to respond and they were right on this. I really think that’s going to make a great difference.
Ted Quaday: I think that’s right and I think we need to grow the educational opportunities around learning how to farm and certainly from my point of view the organic perspective, MOFGA itself views itself as a trainer for the next generation of farmers in Maine and we do it through we have an apprenticeship program where there are more than 200 people every year come through that program. They get an opportunity to work on farms. They learn about farming. They talk with farmers and they sort of begin to acquire the real interest in it.
Then we move from the apprenticeship program into our journey person program. We bring 30 new young farmers into the system every year and we train them over a 2 year period. We link them up with other organic farmers in the region so that they can have somebody to fall back to, to get advice to talk through issues with. We really … We feel give them the tools that they’re going to need through other training programs like work that we do with Maine Farmland Trust on land acquisition and business development and all those other things. We give them the tools they’re going to need to be successful through this program of training them.
Dr. Lisa Belisle I do think that Maine given that we the University of Maine is a land grant institution and we have the strong forestry background and so I think the resources management is something that Maine has always been very good at so I think just kind of maybe digging back in and going back to our roots a little bit will enable us to move forward.
John Piotti: Right.
Ted Quaday: I think that that has the potential to happen and I think it’s going to happen because of the financial opportunity that’s being created in the farm community and through the demand that consumers are bringing to the table literally. I mean they are saying this is the kind of food we want. This is the kind of training our farmers are going to need to bring us that kind of food. It’s a moving object for sure. It’s a moving target I guess you could call it but there are many, many different pieces of it that are continuing to build. Nothing I see falling away on any of this. The interest is just skyrocketing.
Dr. Lisa Belisle As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle Something that I think we’re noticing more and more is that the more intellectual we all become and the more connected we become in sort of a wireless way, the more thoughts, the more [I don’t know 00:37:32] brain power we’re putting towards that aspect of being human the more we want to get our hands back into the soil. The more we want, I don’t know, have chickens running around our yard and people are not they have their honeycombs in the backyard. I think that it’s an interesting … We’re at an interesting place because I think this generation that we are part of and then the ones behind us they kind of want it all and they think it’s possible to have it all.
John Piotti: I think you’re right and I don’t think that’s necessarily bad and I don’t think that’s necessarily bad and it’s also not unprecedented. You think of something like the arts and crafts movement of the earlier twentieth century, very similar. It was a period when everything was being produced at an industrial scale so there was sort of this feeling that we’re going to treasure things that are handcrafted and have an artisan origin. I think there’s certain things innate in being a human that you need. It’s good for your soul and if you’re not getting it in other parts of society I think you will find an alternative way to get there and I think that’s part of what we’re seeing.
Ted Quaday: It may seem obvious that I would like [to or want to be a 00:38:39] gardener right. I’m definitely a gardener and I was out in the garden just Sunday planting beans, you know planting the beans and planting a little cilantro so I could cut fresh cilantro and bring it into the house and make a little hot sauce of some kind or the other. Yes I think that’s definitely a part of my existence not only because I’m an advocate on behalf of organic farms.
I’ve been gardening almost my entire life in one way or the other. I was always finding a place to get a seed in the ground and maybe it is just a natural human desire to watch things grow or plant and create.
John Piotti: We all want to live in a garden.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Now the 2 of you also have very interesting backgrounds in that you, I don’t believe either 1 of you are from Maine originally, is that correct?
Male: That’s correct.
Male: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Both of you are pretty well educated.
Male: We hope so.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Yes, but there was something about the positions that you currently hold that call to you somehow this idea of organic farmers and gardeners.
Ted Quaday: Well yeah, to me this job, this work that I’m doing with the Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is the culmination of everything that I’ve done in my professional life at one level or the other. Everything I’ve done lead me here and I really believe that and I think it’s just the perfect place for me right now because there’s so much energy in Maine and there’s so much leadership being exerted and exemplified all over the state that it’s just really a very strong place to be.
Dr. Lisa Belisle You have a background in journalism and also research. Is that right?
Male: Well yeah, I’ve done a little bit the journalism piece and some political activity and research as well.
Dr. Lisa Belisle You understand that this outreach is just as important as any of the educational activities that are being done within MOFGA. For example, the common ground fair. I mean this has always been a great sort of face to the community.
Ted Quaday: Right the common ground fair is the emissary for the whole movement in my view. I mean it really exemplifies what we’re talking about when we’re talking about a whole systems approach to what we think this society could look like. It has the food element. It has the craft element, the hand crafted element. It has the commitment to the environment. It has the commitment to community. It has the music. It’s just really the whole thing right there. It’s the common ground fair and it makes perfect sense. It really is that common ground that we’re as a society today and there’s an element within that society that’s looking to that kind of an expression of what it is that we desire.
John Piotti: In my case, my family has deep roots in Maine but I grew up on, of all places, Nantucket Island which was a very different world in the 60s and 70s than what it became. I’ll try to keep this short but what happened for me is I remember a reflective summer between college and graduate school when I realized that I probably could never go home. At that same window when I was in college, real estate prices had gone up 10 fold in a period of a couple of years. My home had become commoditized if you will and I realized that why is it that rural places seem to go one route or another. They either wither on the vine or they become hip and chic and popular but either way there are no real opportunities for the locals.
That became my focus and I started thinking about what I could do to help keep rural places vital and as soon as I could I moved up to Maine where most of my family was and started diving into that kind of work 27 years ago. It took a while before that shifted to agriculture. I ended up co-chairing the comprehensive planning committee in my community of Unity with a dairy farmer. After he had sort of sized me up, as dairy farmers will do, he challenged me. He said, “John you keep saying you care about rural places but you know absolutely nothing about farming.” He was right.
Like everyone else 25 years ago I felt farming was the past, not the future and he took me under his wing. He mentored me. I began to learn more and more and 1 of the things I learned that if we were serious about having sustainable rural communities it’s impossible to not have sustainable agriculture at the centerpiece and so for 20 years of my life that’s been my focus.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Each of your organization does things that I think don’t immediately, one wouldn’t immediately think of as being related to the work that you do. For example, I knew that the Maine Farmland Trust does a lot of work with art.
John Piotti: Mm-hmm we do.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Tell us a little bit about that and why that has become important.
John Piotti: Well we run a gallery and we also have done a number of other things to help get the word out. You mentioned Cecily Pingree and Betting the Farm. The idea for Betting the Farm came from when she was visiting 1 of the farmers showcased in that film for us because 2 years before she had done a series of films called Meet Your Farmer for Maine Farmland Trust. We’ve always wanted … We’ve always felt that a great part of the challenge was just getting people to have a better understanding about agriculture. We are generally 2 or 3 generations removed from the farm and a lot of other things can take care of themselves if people just learn more.
The gallery was interesting. When I took over at Maine Farmland Trust, I was a founder of the organization. I didn’t work there. I was just on the board. I came on as their executive director 8 years ago. We had no photographs of all the farms we had worked with, so I hired a good photographer. They were great photographs. We had what was then a fairly empty storefront location because we had 3 employees not the 25 we have now so we hung them up. People thought we had a gallery and we said, “Yes we have a gallery,” but the deeper story there is that art can be an incredibly powerful way of helping engage more people and talk about what we really need in agriculture.
Ten years ago when we found the gallery you could easily argue less true today than then, but at that point in time you could easily argue that part of the problem was that people had misconceptions about farming. Part of it the art that depicted farming didn’t help. It was either overly nostalgic or depicted the farmer as you know this sort of country bumpkin but art is a way of bringing some of the vibrancy of farming before people, bringing some of the politics of farming and the politics of choices you make for the food you buy.
Now over 8 years, we’ve had maybe 40, 50 different shows and they have engaged people and opened people’s eyes. This is not just a Maine Farmland Trust phenomenon, there’s something now called ag art. There’s actually a term for it. If you want to sort of look at this bigger picture, if you look at the future we’re not going to create the kind of food system we need unless people begin to think differently. Ultimately through all of our history as humans you’ve needed art in order to connect with people’s hearts and open their minds to thinking differently.
Ted Quaday: I think that’s absolutely true. I agree would agree with what John is saying. When I think of what MOFGA’s expression of that is, part of it is the hand-crafted items and the pottery and that sort of thing, but also each year there’s a competition for a fair poster and the fair posters are famous all over the state and beyond in terms of what they depict and how they link the people with the activity that’s going on. To me that’s what art is about. It’s reinterpreting and telling a story and so on and so it’s just you can’t pull it away from whatever the cultural activity is and food is.
If nothing else it is so strongly cultural and so directed by how grew up in it that you know to me it’s think of it as a really fine dinner as in a [inaudible 00:47:11] sort of piece of artwork. It’s there for 20 or 30 minutes and it’s gone. You’ve eaten it and you know it’s a beautiful thing. You go to Vinland where David Levi is the chef and he’s creating these little masterpieces every night. That’s the way I start to think about art. It’s just so embedded in our culture that you wouldn’t have the same kind of thing going on without it.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle Ted you had a bit of a tough act to follow with Russell Libby. I mean he was just, when you thought of MOFGA you thought of Russell Libby. He was such a part of the fabric of your organization. What’s that been like for you?
Ted Quaday: Well it’s totally true. The beauty of it is that I met Russell. Russell was 1 of the first people I got acquainted with at a group that no longer exists in Washington. He was down working with a group of activists on food-related issues called the The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture and he was a key member there. I had just come on board with Farm Aid and food was an issue for me but it wasn’t what it is today for me. I started talking with Russell and I realized that his influence within that organization was phenomenal.
I mean he would stand up and talk. Everyone would stop what they were doing and listen to what he had to say so I’ve respected Russell. I respected him throughout the time that I knew him as a clear thinker and a positive force within the movement nationally. I was devastated along with a lot of other people when he passed away. I really I was across the country. I was doing my thing out on the west coast and I couldn’t believe it. I just really couldn’t.
At that point, it didn’t occur to me that maybe there was an opportunity in that, but as it turned out I ended up out here doing the work, trying to carry on the work that Russell was so dedicated to, which I’m dedicated to as well. I don’t see myself as trying to fill Russell’s shoes. That’s just not going to happen. It’s not possible. What I see is that we have the community in Maine that’s really dedicated to building a food movement that can be transformational in this society and I’m dedicated to that.
John Piotti: If I can just add to that. Russell was a really close friend of mine and a mentor and a founder of Maine Farmland Trust and a board member until he passed away and so many of us in Maine have relied on him for years and he has been such an amazing leader and yet I also want to comment that I feel Ted is really the perfect person [inaudible 00:51:18] no one can replace Russell, but he’s really the perfect person to carry on Russell’s work and to step in and lead that organization. MOFGA’s board did a great job in choosing you.
Ted Quaday: Well, thanks John. I appreciate that.
John Piotti: I feel that earnestly and I hear it from all different circles and 1 of the many qualities that Russell had, he had a brilliant mind and he was very capable but he also just had this real steady even hand and this attitude that if you focus on what’s right things are going to work. That’s 1 place, I don’t know you that well Ted. It’s only been 7 months but you seem to have that sort of same kind of patience and perspective and I think more than anything that’s what really critical.
Ted Quaday: I think that’s true, patience and thank you for the compliments. I really do appreciate that, but patience really is a part of it. The movement is so varied and so wide and so enthusiastic that you have to be able to take a bigger view, look more widely and say well where can be move this and how can we capture that energy and move that forward now and maybe we can wait on something else. There’s a lot of analysis that goes into it, a lot of thinking and a lot of talking with a lot of folks because to me that’s the way you really get the big picture moving.
Dr. Lisa Belisle People who are listening to this show I’m sure are thinking to themselves well perhaps I fall over here on the spectrum, perhaps I want to go back and be a farmer or maybe I’m just an accountant but I’d like to somehow eat local foods. What are some of the beginning steps that you can suggest to people that would enable them to not only contribute to the health of their own families but also to the health of the farmers and the economic viability of the state.
Ted Quaday: The first thing I always say is start a garden and make it organic. That’s the first piece. MOFGA does offer a training program. Every April we run 30 or 40 different workshops around the state where you can go and learn from a master gardener how to get that process going. You can shop at the farmer’s market or you can make an arrangement with the CSA program with a local farmer. Those are 2 key elements. You can get active with your own community. I always say vote with your fork. Let people know, not only at your grocery store you vote with your fork but you vote with your fork when you go to the ballot box and pick the candidates that you want to send to the legislature, to the city council, find people who are really dedicated to what you believe in and send them there so you can talk with them about how to make change.
John Piotti: I agree with everything Ted said. It starts with what you grow and what you eat but there are also sorts of other ways to have an impact and 1 of it is political and as someone who served in the legislature and chaired the ag committee at 1 point, it is really true that when citizens call you up it makes a difference and we still live in a state that is small enough where you can have access to your elected officials and it doesn’t take a lot of people to sway things 1 way or another.
I also want to comment on some other ways I think you can make a difference. It doesn’t all have to be state policy, so much occurs at the local level. One of the things that Maine Farmland Trust does is we provide services to municipalities who may be thinking about doing comprehensive planning and we want to be sure that they incorporate farming into it or maybe they have a current ordinance that has overly restrictive requirements for signage that don’t allow a farm to put up a farm stand or something like that.
Communities in Maine are dying for volunteers to get engaged. There are so many things you can do at the local level that really can have an impact. You know that decision on whether to extend that sewer line in town out by a farmer’s field will be made by people often who don’t think about the impact that might have on the farm and it raises their tax valuations. It basically forces that land to get developed because economically there’s no other option. Just having people at the table who are cognizant and thinking of these things and raising the questions can make a huge, huge difference. It’s not just something that is beyond you and that you have to be organized and part of a political effort to effect. In your daily actions of how you eat and how you interconnect with your community, what you say at a town meeting, what committee you’re on in town, you can have a huge impact.
Ted Quaday: One more shameless pitch, join MOFGA.
John Piotti: And Maine Farmland.
Ted Quaday: Mofga.org.
John Piotti: We’re both membership organizations and we rely on our members.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Well Ted you’ve just given the website so give that again.
Ted Quaday: It’s mofga.org.
Dr. Lisa Belisle Okay and how about you John?
John Piotti: It’s mainefarmlandtrust.org.
Dr. Lisa Belisle We are very privileged that we have had the 2 of you in the studio with us today. We have been speaking with John Piotti the president and CEO of the Maine Farmland Trust and Ted Quaday the executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. I know that my family and I have benefited greatly from the work that you are doing and I thank you so much for coming in today.
Male: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa Belisle You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast. Show number 149. Maine Farms and Food. Our guests have included John Piotti and Ted Quaday. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit D-O-C-T-O-R Lisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and as Bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our online producer is Kelly Clinton.
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