For all of her hard work and ingenuity, Dowling is clear-eyed about the challenges ahead. “No one makes money farming,” she says; after six years in business, she expects to be able to pay herself for the first time this year. “Luckily people love what I am doing and are helping,” she adds. To get by, Dowling is deeply involved in the local farms’ bartering economy. When we arrived, an arborist, one of her tenants at the farmhouse, had just dropped off a load of firewood in the dooryard, and later we stir some traded local honey into a cup of tea when we sit down with her during her only break in the day.

Dowling also manages to be active in farm policy and advocacy, but not by “hanging out in some office on Capitol Hill.” A bumper sticker on the back of her vehicle has a succinct statement about her view of the state of commercial farming, with a four- letter expletive addressed to Monsanto. The new president of the Maine Cheese Guild, Dowling says there are now 86 licensed creameries in Maine with 23 more in the pipeline. The guild members meet 10 times a year at different farms, plan workshops, and organize an annual festival to promote Maine cheese brands. Dowling acknowledges that all her work to scale up her two farms might not pay off; she is a mix of idealist and realist. She believes deeply in what she is doing to help create a more sustainable and environmentally sensible food economy, but she also knows that “sometimes the world doesn’t make sense.”

A few days later, I head across the river and through the woods to another Legal Food Hub farm project, White’s Farm is a free-range pig farm run by Stuart White and his partner, Yasmin Kuhn. I turn into the dooryard of the farm, where Kuhn greets me while White finishes feeding the pigs and putting the tractor in its shed. White, dressed in a red flannel shirt and felt hat with his hair spilling out, invites me into the barn. It’s warmed by a large barrel stove that White feeds with hardwood slabs from his sawmill, one of his side ventures.

White tells me that the farm has been in the family for around three centuries, or “since day one,” he says proudly. The trim farmhouse next door, where White’s mother lives, was built in 1833. Stuart White has worked on the farm since 1973, when he arrived to help his grandfather, who was then a dairy farmer. “I wanted to stay in the dairy business, but I needed $150,000 to upgrade, and wasn’t going to lose the farm just to milk cows,” White says. So he and his father switched to raising hay, then beef, then pigs, “but then we got out because meat was so cheap.” White went to work building houses, which transitioned into building furniture; he later settled into turning bowls on a lathe from tree burls.

In 2008, White said to himself, “People always have to eat,” so he went back to raising pigs and growing garden crops. “There was no money in gardens, so we decided to concentrate on pigs.” Summarizing the past 45 years of his life, White concludes, “If you are a farmer, you’re poor.”

I ask White, why pigs? “I like pigs,” he replies. “I like talking to pigs. I like learning from pigs. I like being around them. Pigs are so much easier than people. They don’t tell lies,” and then quickly adds, “but they will steal food.” Then, pointing to Kuhn, he says, “I used to holler and bellow when the pigs didn’t do what I wanted. But Yasmin taught me not to raise my voice. You trick them into thinking they are in charge.” White and Kuhn have recently collaborated on producing value-added meat products, including salami, pepperoni, and chorizo. “People started making salami 4,000 years ago,” White tells me, “so if you properly control the moisture, temperature, and pH, and add the right spices, there are no problems.”