Farmers’ Market: Our best crop

    No one with even small powers of observation would claim that being a farmer/grower is an easy job. It begins with a huge leap of faith in mid-winter that, all evidence to the contrary, spring will eventually arrive. Farmers evaluate the previous years’ successes and failures, revisit and revise marketing plans, and place orders with appropriate vendors for seed, lime, fertilizer, and growing supplies.  Livestock owners repeatedly recalculate tonnage to reassure themselves that their supplies of hay, silage, and grain will last long enough. Apiarists snowshoe out to their hives to see if a bright sunny day yields healthy bees making cleansing flights or the discouragement of another dead-out hive. Growers with greenhouses have waterlines and endless pots to prepare, flats to plant, and lighting or heating mechanisms to adjust.
    Dawn ‘til done does not even begin to describe the workload once the snow recedes; s/he is up and going long before the sun rises and work is never done! Preparing fields, pastures, or beds and seeding crops means endless days in the heat and blackflies on the business end of some tool, be it tractor or trowel, and nights trying to ease a tired, stiff body into a horizontal position for a few hours’ respite before beginning all over again. Planting days breathing dust are followed by cultivation, pest management, soil manipulation, and a thousand other chores. Finally, the soil yields a crop and growers focus on harvest and, with luck, some monetary return for the blood, sweat, and tears invested.
    “You should hire some help!” a farmer hears repeatedly. But even in these economically challenging times, help is hard to find. Workers want year-round employment and full benefits. Though impossibly busy most of the year, most small business owners can’t offer either … the money is not there. The work is long and hard, too hard for many workers for whom farm labor is just a job. Work is easier and cleaner “in town” and unemployment checks look attractive compared to 16-hour work days.
    Danny Stewart of Stewart’s Potato and Vegetable Farm in Presque Isle, offers a solution that he and many farmers find they must take. They “go to town” themselves (or send their spouses) and they “hire” their children or grandchildren when they simply must have extra hands. They teach these young folks at an early age that farming is a labor of love.
    Danny argues, “You have to get them when they are young and eager, then teach them how to work.” At 10 or 11 years old, they learn the pride of hard labor and a difficult job finally completed. As time goes on, they master more and more necessary skills. He speaks with pride about his own children, now grown with children of their own, who willingly take time from their jobs “away” to come and help, to do what needs doing, and to get their hands dirty in the earth … their earth … to help their dad on a family farm. Equally important, they carry forward that mind-set to the next generation.
    For all the fussing about the kids today who “can’t or won’t or wouldn’t if you begged them,” young people are perhaps our finest crop grown here in northern Maine. Our young citizens have learned by the example of their elders that “People help people here,” as Danny points out. “It is a good place to be from and a good place to come back to.”
    For another generation, Maine remains The Way Life Should Be.
    Editor’s note: This weekly column is written by members of the Presque Isle Farmers’ Market. For more information or to join, contact their secretary/treasurer Steve Miller of Westmanland at 896-5860 or via e-mail at beetree@xpressamerica.net.