Transcription of Love Maine Radio #330: Mitchell Lench and Jessie Dowling + Sam May
Introducer: You are listening to Love Maine Radio. Hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Topsham. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 330. Airing for the first time on Sunday, January 14, 2018. Today’s guests include Mitchell Lench, founder of Treetops Capital, which invests in sustainable agriculture and aquaculture businesses here in Maine. Jessie Dowling, the owner of Fuzzy Udder Creamery and President of the Maine Cheese Guild, and Sam May, Advisory Board Chair at the Maine Harvest Credit Project. Thank you for joining us.
Introducer: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its news expanded space including Ingunn Joergensen, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.
Lisa Belisle: Mitchell Lench is Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Treetops Capital, an impact investment and management company founded in 2008. He previously worked in finance in several institutions, including Bank of America and Credit Suisse. Thanks for coming in today.
Mitchell Lench: Thank you for having me.
Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about Treetops Capital. What is that and what are you doing in this job?
Mitchell Lench: Treetops Capital is an impact investment management firm. Impact investing, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is investing with deliberate impact, generally social and environmental impact, but also trying to achieve financial returns. There are certain areas that you can have both. You can have a market based solution to a problem as opposed to just using philanthropic dollars to achieve that call. Within the impact investing world we focused our first fund was in the microfinance area where it was focused in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We also have a fund in Romania focused on agribusiness so missing links into the value chain in terms of the agricultural market there. More recently in Maine we’ve been focusing on aquaculture investments.
Lisa Belisle: So how did you get interested in this type of work?
Mitchell Lench: My interest in it really started back in graduate school. I went to a program, it was an international public affairs program at Columbia that early on in my career, before even my career really started, the whole area of sustainable development was really starting to emerge. At that time it was kind of after the 70s and 80s there was a lot of money being thrown at issues and with famine relief that weren’t very effective. What I kind of learned in the graduate program is that in order for programs to be sustainable, development to be sustainable, generally there needs to be a market based element to that as well so you don’t crowd out local. Say, if it’s a famine issue, local farmers. Through that program it was kind of a good combination of learning about economic and political development but also getting some hard skills in business and finance.
Lisa Belisle: As you’re talking I’m remembering the 80s and I guess even into the 90s a little bit where we were trying to solve problems like failing farms or famine across the ocean, and Hands Across America. Big relief programs that we all wanted to join into. Even then there being some skepticism as to whether these things actually worked. Was this some awareness that you became … Is this something you became immediately aware of when you were watching this all unfold?
Mitchell Lench: Yeah, I mean, I think I learned more from some of the people who had been living through that for those years where they’ve realized there were a lot of unintended consequences to very, what were good intentions of famine, for instance, the famine relief issue. What really we focused on is how do you harness the market based issues and locally, how do you make sure that you’re working within either the local capital markets or working with local business people? At that point microfinance, which was hardly known to anyone, was the big buzzword and I learned about how you can empower people with small business loans and how that can really affect people’s lives much more than necessarily giving them a small donation.
Lisa Belisle: So give me an example of an unintended consequence.
Mitchell Lench: Unintended consequence in terms of, for instance, the famine issues were there was a lot of food flown in from the US and Western Europe into it was mainly in Africa at the time where the famine was occurring. What would happen is that the local farmers could not compete with all the free food coming in and then they went out of business and they couldn’t pay their bills and keep their farms going. Then you have a continuous circle of famine because you’ve kind of eliminated a lot of the farmers who were involved in that market.
Lisa Belisle: It’s actually really distressing to hear that that goes on. Especially given that most people who donate to a relief effort are hoping to do good, not hoping to perpetuate a problem.
Mitchell Lench: Right, and I think now in today’s world and development world, whether it’s the UN, or UNICEF, or World Bank, I think almost all the development institutions, and I’ve worked with a lot of them, they have this awareness and they’re very aware of how you don’t crowd out local markets when you’re trying to solve an issue. I think we’ve moved on far from back in the 70s and the 80s.
Lisa Belisle: Tell me how your organization has gone from focusing overseas to focusing on something that’s very close to home and aquaculture.
Mitchell Lench: When I moved up to Maine in 2011 and when I moved to Maine I was determined to do something more local and I had spent most of my career in developing markets and I find it interesting, and I think there’s huge needs that still occur, but also I had this urge to do something closer to home, not to mention I have a couple kids and I wanted to not be on the plane as much. When I came to Maine I started going to some of these aquaculture conferences that U of Maine were putting on and learning about different parts of that market. Aquaculture particularly got me … I became interested because one, Maine has a very good infrastructure for aquaculture. I think in terms of the US we may be the leading state in aquaculture. We have a lot of universities and research centers involved. Also, from helping the oceans and from a sustainability issue, I think aquaculture has to be part of the whole problem we’re having with overfishing and different degradation of our waters.
That’s how I kind of … I started learning just by going to some of these sessions being put on and then I started, I got involved in an investment in a yellowtail onshore farm called Acadia Harvest, which was a first yellowtail farm really in the US. Really interesting technology they were using. The fish were being bought by some very high end restaurants and distributors loved the fish. It was a way to have more local fish without overfishing in terms of the water.
Lisa Belisle: Yellowtail is a tuna?
Mitchell Lench: There is a yellowtail tuna and I actually don’t … I don’t know exactly, which part of the species of yellowtail in terms of the [inaudible 00:08:42], but it’s a high end fish that if you go to a sushi restaurant, yellowtail is quite common. That’s one of the, or I think, one of the opportunities is in the aquaculture market is on the higher end fishes that are generally flown in. 90% of the fish that we eat in America is not only brought in from other countries, but it’s flown in. If you can kind of eliminate flying in fish from say, Japan or other places and growing it locally it has a huge impact I believe.
Lisa Belisle: Aquaculture, so you’ve just described one type of fish. Does it also include things like oysters, mussels, seaweed, or is there some other broader definition?
Mitchell Lench: Yeah, I mean sometimes there’s other terminology in terms of mariculture and the rest, but it’s all under the aquaculture umbrella and Maine, I think, is most known for its shellfish aquaculture as well as seaweed, which is becoming a very big part of this industry in terms of aquaculture. I partnered with a fellow named Tollef Olson who had been one the pioneers in farming seaweed and we created a business called Ocean’s Balance. Our goal is to try to mainstream seaweed into American’s diets so it’s not this exotic ingredient, but it’s more of something you would eat in your everyday soup or stew. It has so many positive benefits both for the ocean as well as for your health. Not to mention it has glutamates, these amino acids, which give gives the umami flavor so you can reduce some of the salt intake in terms of other food you’re eating.
Lisa Belisle: You’re definitely singing a tune that I have sung before. I love seaweed.
Mitchell Lench: That’s great.
Lisa Belisle: I think it’s really important for health and I actually, I believe that we are going to see with its increased use, decreased thyroid problems in our population in the state of Maine.
Mitchell Lench: That’s something a lot of people are unaware of, but it does in terms of the iodine and regulating thyroid issues and plus all of the other vitamins, 60 some odd vitamins and minerals. It is just this wonder food. One of the things that impressed me most about seaweed, especially looking also at finfish aquaculture. The issue you have in finfish aquaculture, one of the tough challenges that everyone’s really trying to focus on is the input of forage fish, small fish to feed the aquaculture fish. It’s not a very sustainable business model so they’re coming out with other ingredients that could be used that are not forage fish to have fish meal. In seaweed it’s the only zero input food I’m aware of where there’s no other feed that’s required that’s not naturally occurring in the ocean. There’s no pesticides. There’s no fresh water. From just a pure sustainable type of food source it’s unmatched as far as anything I’ve looked at.
Lisa Belisle: It also is known as something that essentially detoxifies the environment. We know that when they had their nuclear reactor problem over in Japan that they were finding that the seaweed was using … they were using it as a kind of giant sponge I guess to soak up a lot of the stuff that was being spewn out there.
Mitchell Lench: That is definitely the case. We’re looking at issues in terms of coastal remediation in terms of planting seaweed along more polluted parts of the coast, whether in Maine or elsewhere. This is something the nature conversancy is also evaluating. You may be familiar with the work that Nichole Price is doing at Bigelow Labs where she has sensors around seaweed farms looking at how it changes the water column from absorbing CO2, and nitrogen, and phosphorous. The studies are showing it has a halo effect in the area where you plant seaweed, which is positive from an acidification perspective, which also has an impact on our shellfish because the acidification is impacting the growth of shellfish. I think there’s all these untapped applications for seaweed way beyond just the food and fertilizer, which you hear most about. The Department of Energy, just to give you an example, just put out a call for proposal and they gave out grants for 22 million dollars. Maine absorbed some of that to scale up seaweed farming.
They were looking at it both from an energy source of biofuel, but other application as well because there’s beyond food. You have food and fuel. You have fertilizer. You have animal feed. The list goes on from there.
Lisa Belisle: Does it interest you that you have all of this financial background but you’ve really gotten drawn into the science of this, and more than the science, sort of the ecology and all of the sustainability factors that are involved? That’s a much bigger thing than just understanding finance.
Mitchell Lench: It is and I think kind of marrying those two parts together, having some … I’m really happy that I did spend some years working for some big financial institutions and learning how the markets work, how some of the financial technology, and learning some of the skills. Having that exposure plus some development exposure and putting those together, I think, is a good combination. I’m seeing more … What’s really encouraging to me is I’m seeing more and more students now who are kind of following that type of path where there’s now kind of a defined world of impact, and investing, and other areas of social entrepreneurs where it really didn’t occur back when I was in school but now that’s becoming more mainstream. I think a lot of issues that we’re facing where you had people who kind of come from cross disciplines like that, some important issues can be solved.
Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about Fish 2.0.
Mitchell Lench: Yeah, Fish 2.0, which I just got back from last week. It was at Stanford University. They hold this about every year or two. It’s a … What they do, they put it together as a contest to bring all different types of sustainable seafood and fisheries, technology, companies together to pitch new ideas. The reason they have it out at Stanford is you have the Silicon Valley and you have a lot of new venture capitalist who are interested in maybe taking some of their earnings and wealth and putting it some good use in terms of some of these new technologies that are emerging.
Some of the areas that they’re focusing on are these alternative fish feeds. Aquaculture becomes more sustainable. They make fish feed now out of algae products. Out of black soldier fly larvae. A whole mix of things and these were companies that presented on that. Also, things like bycatch. Fish that are caught out on fishing vessels that the fishermen don’t actually want and they have now smart releases in their nets to allow those fish to survive. A whole slew of interesting new developments going on in the seafood world from the consumer perspective all the way to the fishermen in aquaculture. It’s just a great gathering of people and there’s really one or two people who put this all together and I think they’re having tremendous success in changing the way our oceans are fished and try and protect it.
Lisa Belisle: What lessons do you think that we here in Maine can learn from work that is being done across the nation, and really across the world?
Mitchell Lench: I think Maine, in some ways, is a leader within the US in a lot of aquaculture technology and new developments. Also, there’s a lot of issues going on overseas that I think Maine can learn from. My own hope is that Maine becomes more of also a technology hub with aquaculture where we have some of the bioscience, maybe people from Boston moving up. I know the Gulf of Maine Research institute is very interested in encouraging that and some other institutions here in Maine. We have, I think, almost all the right ingredients to really create a viable industry outside of just the production of farmed fish. A lot of that I think requires bringing in some new people as well into the state that have certain science backgrounds to help this technology move forward.
Lisa Belisle: How do we get the people who have lived in Maine and have fished and farmed along the coast, really for hundreds of years, how do we get them into conversations with people who are more on the technology side of things?
Mitchell Lench: I think there’s quite a bit of education going on right now with coastal communities, with fisherman. The Island Institute is doing some great work. They just did whole seaweed study to bring more fishermen and lobster men into the seaweed industry. U of Maine puts on a whole slew of programs, which we’re involved with some in terms of teaching aquaculture and the science of aquaculture to both students, but also to adults. To teachers, we did a … Tollef and my colleague Lisa Scali did a boot camp for teachers this summer with the University of Maine to start getting them educated in terms of how aquaculture and science mix together. I think there are some really interesting developments going on and I think if more people get involved in doing that we’ll see some transition going on with some of the communities, local communities.
Lisa Belisle: I would assume that there are things that people who are in aquaculture and biotech could actually learn from individuals who have been out there doing this type of work for decades.
Mitchell Lench: Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. I think it’s two way street in terms of the knowledge base and the Maine Coast Fisherman’s Association, I think they do a really good job in terms of bringing the fishermen together with other constituents. We learn from them and it’s not just a scientist looking at this in a very sterile environment. I’m a trustee at the Nature Conservancy in Maine and very focused right now on marine science and changing the focus away from just forestry. Although, forestry is still a key part into looking at different solutions, whether it’s from a river, the Penobscot River Project to projects in the Gulf of Maine.
Lisa Belisle: One of the things that has been happening lately is conversations around bringing environmental regulations. Deciding whether they belong more at the state level, more at the national level. It seems like it would be really a problem if we decided that every state should really be responsible for whatever was going on within its borders and ignore the fact that the borders really don’t mean anything to the trees, and the rivers, and things that grow.
Mitchell Lench: Yeah, I think there is … Some issues I think right now being decided at a local level, luckily, I think within for Maine the local momentum for creating sustainable aquaculture and some other programs is moving in, I think, a good direction. Maine can act as a demonstration state for other states in our country that may be not as progressive. In terms of the balance between federal, there has to be some strong federal regulations. In some ways the US has some of the strictest regulations and I’m talking now about aquaculture because that’s an area that I see this in most. What’s going on is you were mentioning between federal and state, but it’s also international. So the lowest common denominator countries, a lot of times is where the production flows to. So some parts of Latin America or some parts of Asia. Really what I would like to see is even at a federal level, more encouragement of sustainable aquaculture in the US so we don’t have so much production going overseas, or we’re not really paying attention, because what’s happening in South America can really impact us where we live as well.
Lisa Belisle: What would you ideally like your children to grow up with? I know that you have two children, you’re married, you live in Cape Elizabeth. You mentioned when they were younger you really wanted to kind of be more available to them as a parent. What type of world do you want to see them live in?
Mitchell Lench: I want … One of the main reasons wanted to move to Maine and with the kids is having grown up and coming to Maine a lot as a child and the nature here, I think, just living in Maine with the wilderness and being exposed to it and the people around you. I think that has the biggest influence on my kids and in a very positive way. I also, I try to expose them to some of the issues going on without scaring them. Some of the ecological issues going on in the world. Showing them where they can have some impact in their lives.
I think Maine, with so many institutions in Maine, whether it’s GMRI doing the program for sixth graders or fifth graders, they have an awareness that I know going back to cities where we have some friends, the kids are not growing up with that type of awareness around them. I’m actually pretty hopeful that my kids will be pretty evolved by the time they get to be adults and hopefully they pursue something that they’re very thoughtful in terms of what their career … the impact their career could have on the world.
Lisa Belisle: What is your most interesting or exciting venture as of right now that Treetops Capital is a part of?
Mitchell Lench: One of the most exciting ventures right now is a project we have going on in Romania, which is a mushroom compost factory. It sounds kind of esoteric and not something very well known, but they’re actually very complex factories or farms to put together. They’re large investments. Romania, for years, for decades, they had imported compost, which is a very heavy substrate to import from Hungary and from the Netherlands. That was having a … just dampening any prospects of growing a real mushroom industry in Romania. There was a lot of mushroom farmers who were just not able to compete with other countries. We built, with the help of the US government as well, providing some financing and then private investors, a full commercial scale production facility of compost, which is now producing compost for small farmers, mushroom farmers throughout Romania. So, that’s exciting.
Lisa Belisle: That is fascinating. Along with seaweed, compost is another one of my favorite topics so I feel like we’re on the same wavelength here. I appreciate your coming in today. I’ve been speaking with Mitch Lench, Mitchell, who is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Treetops Capital and Impact Investment and Management Company found in 2008. Keep up the good work.
Mitchell Lench: Great. Thank you, very much.
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Lisa Belisle: Jessie Dowling is the owner of Fuzzy Udder Creamery in Whitfield and President of the Maine Cheese Guild. Sam May is the Advisory Board Chair at the Maine Harvest Credit Project, an organization aiming to open a credit union supporting small farms and food businesses.
Thank you for coming in.
Sam May: Thank you for having us.
Jessie Dowling: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in what you’re doing because we talk a lot about creating sustainability for small businesses and this is a very important step. Making funds available through a credit union, which is interesting.
Sam May: Yeah, well, it’s very interesting. It’s also an innovative approach. Maine farms and food businesses definitely need access to appropriately priced and scaled financing. Maine Harvest Credit Project, which is looking to form a credit union statewide under the auspices of Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener’s Association (MOFGA) and Maine Farmland Trust (MFT) to create a financing platform that can be available to farmers for farmland access and food producers on a statewide basis.
Lisa Belisle: So why a credit union versus just a small bank?
Sam May: Well, the short answer is that we’re raising 2.4 million to start a credit union. To start a new bank would be 25 to 35 million so it in order of magnitude less. We believe a credit union is the right platform to use. Obviously it’s less expensive. It also is a member governed cooperatively structured institution. It can use a lot of … It has access to a lot of resources that in the form of a bank would be too big for the scale of the problem in Maine.
Lisa Belisle: Jessie, tell me what your experience has been with this organization.
Jessie Dowling: Well, I’ve been in communication with Sam May and Scott Budde and I’ve been really excited for the potential for a credit union that’s focusing on farmers and the farm based business because farmers like me end up in a situation where we have a hard time finding the credit for the projects that we’re doing. You can get a mortgage from the Farm Service Agency, but there’s a lot of red strings attached around how much milk you produce on your farm if you’re making cheese, or how much of the raw product you’re producing and if you’re doing a value added product. It might not make sense to produce it all yourself right away as you’re trying to build your business. That’s where I have been really interested in the Maine Harvest Credit Union.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like what the Maine Harvest Credit Union would be able to offer would be kind of something more along the small scales that small farms and small businesses would need.
Sam May: Well, we think it’s appropriately scaled. We envision three loan products. One is the land loan product in the $250,000 range and then business loans in the $100,000 range and equipment loans in the $25,000 range. Your typical evolving farm, diversified farm in Maine often is looking at farmland in the $200,00 to $300,000 price range. We can offer a product that would be very compelling with excellent rates for that sort of access. In Jessie’s case, Maine cheese producers, a lot of our stronger evolving smaller foodstuff manufacturers that are concentrating on very high quality local product, sourced from local products, they really are looking at business loans for expansion of a cheese room, a dairy room. In the $50,000 to $150,000 size. We’re gonna be appropriately … That’s gonna be right in our sweet spot in terms of what we lend. It’s not for really big, big, big projects. They will move on to commercial banks, but for the evolving small food producer in Maine that needs a new cheese room or a new cider processing facility for hard cider, some of the craft distilleries, they are in need of funds that would be right in our sweet spot.
Lisa Belisle: Jessie, how did you choose to focus on cheese?
Jessie Dowling: Oh, well, I did a Masters in Food Policy in London and was learning about kind of food issues and food insecurity, and issues with industrial agriculture on a global scale, and I felt like the best way I could really make a difference was to become a farmer and I worked on a lot of different farms and I found myself through the MOFGA, Maine Organic Farmer’s Gardener’s Association’s apprenticeship program. I found two apprenticeships, one at a sheep dairy and one at a goat dairy in Appleton and Union. I just … It just clicked. I started working for Appleton Creamery and I stayed there for five years until I learned that I wanted to do it on my own.
Lisa Belisle: I see that you have a goat tattoo on your arm so I’m assuming you must have an affinity for that particular animal.
Jessie Dowling: Yeah, I started with goats. I also love sheep equally. Yeah. Sheep and goats milk is awesome. I also use cow’s milk cheese. I’m pretty into milks.
Lisa Belisle: Sam, is this part of the business important to you? I know that you are on the board of the Maine Organic Farmer’s and Gardener’s Association. You’re also on the steering committee of the Slow Money Maine Organization. Is food important to our economy?
Sam May: I think food is very important to our economy and a re-localized food system in Maine, it’ll have a lot of health benefits for people. We know that nutrient dense food is much … is incredibly important for people’s health. I would just back up and say a word about MOFGA and MFT, Maine Farmland Trust. We’re very blessed in this state to have very strong institutions that have been working very hard for a long period of time. MOFGA through its journey person program is training new farmers. Maine Farmland Trust is helping to find access to farmland for farmers. The restaurant community here in Portland is a huge … is hugely important in this sector.
Mainers have an appreciation … We’ve always had an appreciation for local food. Blueberries, lobsters, fiddleheads, you know, we like to eat food in season, but we import 95% of the food we consume comes from out of state. There’s a keen interest in a revitalized food system in Maine. The Portland restaurant scene definitely showcases all of that. We have a lot of producers working hard that have been trained through MOFGA, Maine Farmland Trust, to be on the land, to be producing food, and now making value added great tasting cheeses, craft brews, craft distills, foodstuff, food products. We have a lot of work to do to revitalize that infrastructure and those production facilities. We need access to fairly priced capital for growth to occur in those sectors.
Lisa Belisle: Is there something about the emotional connection that we make with food and specifically locally produced foods like goat’s milk cheese, or sheep’s milk cheese, or even a cow’s milk cheese, that is going to help us be more successful in the future at getting locally grown and locally created products available on a more year round basis?
Sam May: Jessie, do you want to speak to that first because you’re a producer?
Jessie Dowling: Yeah, I would say yes. Obviously I’m biased but I do believe that farmers are the best stewards of the land and if we take care of our land and environment we’ll be able to produce more food for people, for multiple generations. I think industrial agriculture has proven time and time again that it’s not sustainable and so not only is it better for the environment, but knowing who’s growing your food, knowing how they’re taking care of their animals, knowing about where that food is coming from. I have to believe that that is going to make a difference in the future.
Sam May: Yeah, I think it’s going to make a tremendous difference. Consumers have a real desire to eat locally sourced food because they understand the health benefits of that. They also understand the community benefit of that. It’s a re-localized food economy, which will help to revitalize our rural economies and it will also help with population health. People understand that. Look at the growth in fermented foods. The connection to the microbiome to the important health considerations for eating fermented foods for personal health, but I think a lot of people are responding to fermented foods. There’s an explosion in fermented foods. We have some great producers of a wide variety of fermented food products. Do people … Are they going out and shopping because they want their microbiome to be healthy? No, but they do know that at some intuitive level. I think that’s an important … people want to eat a locally produced cheese, a locally sourced milk. People are interested in terroir in their wine. Well, why shouldn’t they make the connection to their parsnip?
It’s the same set of features. It’s a revitalized soil that is producing the health benefits in the foods that people are eating. Then you have all the economic multiplier effects of producing and sourcing food that’s local.
Lisa Belisle: In many of the conversations I’ve had recently I’m running across people similar to you, Jessie, that have an academic background in the subject but also very practical interest in the subject of food systems. It seems like this is becoming more and more important that the two worlds need to co-exist. Actually along with the idea of being able to finance things.
Jessie Dowling: Yeah, I think that the more you know the more you realize you don’t know and I felt like learning how to actually produce food was the best way to influence farm policy. That’s why I’m really excited to be working with the Maine Cheese Guild to promote cheese in Maine. We’re really hoping that when people look at Maine and they think, “Oh, I’m gonna come to Maine for a vacation,” and they think lobsters and blueberries, they’re gonna also think, “Maine has these amazing cheeses.” We’re the fastest growing state in the country for cheese makers. We have probably more cheese makers per capita than anywhere. There’s almost 100 facilities in Maine that are making cheese and they’re all small scale. It’s a very exciting time to be a cheese maker.
I think the biggest issue with cheese making in Maine right now is we have all these new producers and as we all are learning to grow our businesses, we’re finding that going from a small scale to mid scale, to kind of trying to long term age our businesses is very difficult in this current economic climate, which is why I’m so excited to be talking more to the Maine Harvest Credit Project.
Sam May: So, Lisa, on the sort of new immigrants to Maine, the well educated people that are coming here and looking at putting down some roots to become farmers or food producers, that’s an incredibly key aspect. MAFGA’s journey person program is there. Our traditional ways of passing on farming knowledge from one generation to the other have been broken by various larger economic forces and now we have a lot of young people that are college educated. They show up with a lot of interest and knowledge about global food issues but they don’t know how to fix a John Deere tractor. We have big infrastructure and educational gaps that have to be filled if we’re gonna bring this thing home and really revitalize and re-localize our food economy then we’re gonna have to have infrastructure elements there. Maine Harvest Credit Project, Credit Union being one of those.
We’re blessed here in Maine to have some very important institutions that have been working for a very long time, specifically MAFGA and Maine Farmland Trust that have been working to help provide training for young farmers. To help grow our markets. There’s a lot of support for our farmer’s markets and for our food distribution system. Maine Farmland Trust has a lot of very key programs for, not only protecting farmland, but putting that farmland back into the hands of young farmers for production. We also have our Slow Money Maine chapter here in Maine. It’s one of the largest in the country and it’s been working for several years, many years now to help provide financing for food entrepreneurs and a lot of other parties that are working on this very difficult problem of how do we actually reconstruct a local food system and have that food system underpinned by some of the elements of infrastructure that are so key.
Whether that’s new slaughterhouses or whether that’s some grain processing. I’m thinking of the Somerset Grist Mill in Skowhegan, which has emerged as a very large player and is now contracting with farmers to grow human grade grains for milling and production. We also won, another instance I can think of is some of our barley malt producers, Blue Ox nearby in Lisbon. Our growth, growing main craft brewers are now able to source barley malt that’s grown in Maine and produced into barley malt here in Maine so they can produce 100% locally sourced barley malt for their beer. All those businesses have taken significant infrastructure upgrades that have required capital and I think that’s what we’re talking about. It’s very difficult to rebuild some of the elements of infrastructure that will underpin a re-localized food system.
Lisa Belisle: Jessie, you said that you spent time learning about the trade from a local farm and that was very important to you. How did you find out about the local farm needing someone who could take part in their organization in this learning capacity.
Jessie Dowling: Right, well that was one of the reasons why I was farming in Maine is that I had heard about MOFGA’s apprenticeship program and it was really easy online to read different listings of different farms and I visited about 12 farms in 2007 when I was looking to apprentice. I ended up settling up on Appleton Creamery and [inaudible 00:41:22] Sheep Dairy, which were in neighboring towns and split my time between the two. The listings were really helpful and I was able to then visit the farms and kind of make the right fit.
Lisa Belisle: Is this something that you had any experience with growing up when you were in school? I’m not sure exactly where you’re from.
Jessie Dowling: Yeah, no, I’m originally from right outside Washington, DC from the Virginia side.
Lisa Belisle: So there’s not a whole lot of cows out there, or sheep?
Jessie Dowling: No, there’s actually no livestock in Arlington County. When I went to college in California, I went to one of the Claremont colleges in Claremont, California and there was a student led gorilla garden that became part of the college’s master plan on Pomona’s campus and because students were learning about farming on their own terms and then they planted hundreds of fruit trees on a small several acre plot, and the school saw how much learning was happening on this hands on way. It was really exciting part to be part of. I was hooked after that. It was like, wow, you can engage local community through food and that just sold it for me.
Lisa Belisle: Somehow you found your way to London to study this further.
Jessie Dowling: Yeah, I worked at the Center for Food Safety as an intern in 2004 and I was working on fighting genetically modified foods in DC and I found out about some master’s programs in London that were on that topic and it was a very exciting time.
Sam May: I think Jessie’s … you know, her story is interesting and it’s not all that normal. In some ways it’s exceptional, but in other ways it’s indicative of some of the strong work that’s been done here in Maine by MAFGA and MFT, and other institutions. Jessie went to college in California. She went to university in London. She’s from Washington, DC. How did she get to Maine and why did she come here and there were institutions on the ground that were working at solving real problems that she could see from a conceptual perspective were meaningful and important. Why did she end up on the ground here? That’s an interesting question and I think it’s because we’ve actually been doing a lot of good work here in Maine from a very Maine perspective to tackle problems locally.
The situation on the ground that she saw here in Maine attracted her from her big conceptual perspective of what the problem were in the world with food system. Now she find herself in Whitfield with sheep and goats, and a neighbor’s cows producing some really good cheese that’s resonating with the market. That’s what we have going for us here in Maine. We need to have other elements of infrastructure to support the growth of her vision and her product to take her craft artisan cheese to another level and allow her to grow to the level that she’s comfortable with. That doesn’t mean that she has to make the next largest nationwide cheese, but she has an opportunity to grow her business and the Maine Cheese Guild is working hard to support all the cheese producers in Maine to reach their full potential. That includes market development and it’s gonna also require infrastructure in terms of financing to help fund that.
Lisa Belisle: One of the questions that I have been pondering as you’ve been talking is the fact that Vermont is known for cows and cheese. We happen to be known for lobster, and blueberries, and I don’t know, I guess summer corn. We’ve always had cows so why did Vermont get to be known as the cheese place and the cow place? How did that happen?
Jessie Dowling: That’s a really good question. One thing that I do look at is that the way that government funding for cheese, there’s a … I’m not sure about the names of all the organizations, but there’s no money coming from the Maine State Government going to cheese, but I know that in Vermont there’s quite a bunch of funds that are going into the … I don’t know if it’s going directly to the Cheese Council or if it’s going to cheese makers, but I think their state government is more supportive of their cheese community. It might be because they do have that notoriety. I think they’ve had cheese making happening in Vermont perhaps on a larger scale longer. They have Cabot, a much larger producer than what we have in Maine. Our largest producer is Pineland Farms and they’re not, they’re large, but I don’t think they have the market reach that Cabot has so I think we’re a growing industry and hopefully over time we’ll get more support from our state government as well.
Lisa Belisle: It just speaks to the fact that there’s a lot of back story to all of these things. It’s not as straightforward as Vermont has good cows and therefore the best cheese, and therefore that’s what they’ve become known for. I mean, there are lobsters in other parts of the country, in other parts of the world and whatever it was about Maine, somehow that all worked to that benefit and now we have to figure out how to make it work for other industries.
Sam May: So the lobster business in Maine is about, I think, the boat landing, it’s about a half a billion dollars in 500, 600 million dollars. That’s a large business but it has an iconic place in our consciousness. We’ve got a number of small food sectors. How big is craft brewing now in Maine? It may be approaching that amount. Cheese is maybe a $20 million a year, $25 million a year business in Maine. It could be $125 million a year in five years but there’s a lot of infrastructure required. I think Maine’s a large state. It’s as big as the other five states of New England combined.
We have twice the population of Vermont. There are a lot of other sectors that are vying and legitimately vying for mine share in terms of how Mainers conceive of their local food. I see no reason why artisan produced local cheese in Maine can’t become a much bigger element of Maine’s food consciousness. We have the land, we have the cows, we have the resources, and we have the young entrepreneurs such as Jessie and older entrepreneurs that are also working on cheese production. We want to be able to support the new food sectors that are going to emerge that make the best use of Maine’s resources, and certainly cheese is one of those, but there are a lot of other candidates here in Maine.
Lisa Belisle: Did we have to almost go through this, I guess this downplaying of the importance of local foods in order for us to come back again so strong? I mean, back in the 80s there with big agriculture there were a lot of farms that failed in a very big way nationally, but I think also in Maine. It almost seems as though we had to get that far down to the bottom before we actually started to value small farms again. I’m just putting this out there as a thought.
Sam May: Yeah, I don’t know if we had to. I mean the … Nixon’s USDA Secretary, Earl Butz, who was an Economist Engineer from Purdue, I believe, or maybe Notre Dame. I think it was Purdue. He’s the one who famously said, “Get big or get out.” There was a Wendell Berry movie at Space Gallery a couple of weeks ago and they were very clear about, yes there was a lot of emphasis on the USDA’s official government policy was, “We’re gonna scale up food production. We’re gonna reduce the number of farmers.” As a result of that the USDA has a rural program, which actually supports housing for displaced farm people in rural communities throughout the country. There were a lot of economic forces at work to scale up food and to marginalize, to de-emphasize, and to put out of business small scale producers.
That’s come at a tremendous, tremendous cost to population health in the US. We have a crisis of obesity, diabetes, chronic complex diseases. Those are all directly related to the production of an industrial commodity agriculture product that is the biggest vector of public disease in the country, I think, that we’ve ever experienced. We’re not gonna get out of that if we don’t have a better local nutrient dense food. It could be local, it could not be local. Local’s a good way to approach this. If you want to eat nutrient dense food that’s actually good for you and not a vector of public disease, try local organic, locally sourced food.
Lisa Belisle: This isn’t the first time that we’ve dealt with people who have come back to the land, essentially. Maine was known for this back several decades. It seems as though there’s almost a cyclical aspect to this. Would you agree?
Sam May: Definitely. You asked me about how I got to Maine. I came to Maine in 1954 because my father was the first instructor of wood turning at Haystack two years after it was founded. Haystack Mountain School of Crafts was a back to the land movement of post World War II urbanites who wanted to move to New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont. The Nearings moved to Vermont in the early 1950s. I grew up in the back to the … I was from Maine. I didn’t have to move back to Maine, but when I graduated from college everybody was moving to Searsmont, and Montville, and Appleton in the 70s and the late 60s. We’ve had successive waves … This is a clear wave pattern. There is nothing … You can’t describe it as anything but a series of waves and we keep coming back to this, but now we have a very clear strong opportunity to catch this wave. Let’s get all 10 toes up on front of the board and be going down the wave, not be swimming to get up the wave.
We don’t want to miss this wave. This is an important opportunity and we’re so blessed here in Portland, we have a food business here in Portland, a restaurant scene that’s leading that way. We have a lot of consumers that are passionate about eating local food and we need to support the producers and the farmers and give them some economic vitality and viability. I couldn’t agree with you more, Lisa. This is just another wave, but let’s catch it a little better this time.
Lisa Belisle: Jessie, did you know that you are going to be part of this movement or did you just have a sense that you were following what you were following what it was that you were meant to be doing?
Jessie Dowling: Well, I think I had a political awakening when I was volunteering on a Native American reservation in Arizona when I was in college. Seeing the connection between people and land, and how important water was, and how if we don’t protect our environment then people can’t have the cultures that they have been having. Those connections just made me have a fire under me since then. I’m kind of on a track to supporting small scale local agriculture. That’s kind of my life goal.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate you both taking the time out of your very busy schedules to come in today.
I’ve been speaking with Jessie Dowling who is the owner of Fuzzy Udder Creamery in Whitfield and President of the Maine Cheese Guild, and also Sam May who is an Advisory Board Chair at the Maine Harvest Credit Project, an organization aiming to open a credit union supporting small farms and food businesses.
Thank you, so much for your good work and for your time today.
Sam May: Thank you, Lisa.
Jessie Dowling: Thank you for having us.
Lisa Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 330. Our guests have included Mitchell Lench, Sam May, and Jessie Dowling. For more information on our guest and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our E-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. Please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are pleased that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.
Introducer: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music are by Spencer Albee. Our Editorial Producer is Brittany Cost. Our Assistant Producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our Community Development Manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our Executive Producers are Andrea King, Kevin Thomas, Rebecca Falzano, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.
Outro Songs: All is quiet on the Western front. I hear the ground beneath my feet. Scraping the crackle as I move along. There ain’t nobody here but me. But in a couple days they’ll open up the gates and the streets will flood with a thousand waves of people’s victories, some helpless on their knees, some wander aimlessly throughout their days.
For now it’s quiet as I walk around over the hill into the East. They drink the coffee sharing what went down. I shake my head and stir my tea, but in a couple days they’ll open up the gates and the streets will flood with a thousand wave of people’s victories, some helpless on their knees, some wander aimlessly throughout their days.
In a couple days they’ll open up the gates and the streets will flood with a thousand waves of people’s victories, some helpless on their knees, some wander aimlessly throughout their days.
So good.
How can you paint a picture of a person who is already a work of art? Who’ll be the last and surely not the first one. Couldn’t choose a perfect place to start. I’ve seen greener pastures. I’ve been to the moon. I wish I’d never asked her if she missed me too.
If she were dollars she would be a billion. If she were water she would fill the sea. If she were taller she could crush a building. If she were honey I would be her bee.
I’ve seen greener pastures. I’ve been to the moon. I wish I’d never asked her if she missed me too.
So all the black and white that filled these pages have run together into so much gray. Even though I don’t know how to read it, I just can’t seem to put this book away cuz I’ve seen greener pastures. I’ve been to the moon. I wish I’d never asked her is he missed me too. Cuz I’ve seen greener pastures. I’ve been to the moon. I wish I’d never asked her if she missed me, missed me, missed me …