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FARMINGTON – The question of how to help farmers grow their business as well as their crops, was the topic of a well-attended conference, Food for Future: Investing in Maine’s Best Kept Secret, held at the University of Maine at Farmington on Tuesday.
The conference is a result of formation last year of the Franklin County Agricultural Task Force when local farmers, the USDA Farm Service, and other interested agency representatives held a series of meetings to look at the state of farming in Franklin County and to find viable economic strategies to help continue the traditions. The task force’s findings report can be read here.
Author Woody Tasch of the Slow Money Alliance, a nationwide organization dedicated to developing financial resources for food producers, hosted the event Tuesday that featured farm tours in the morning and an afternoon of panel discussion featuring farmers and farm investors. Organizer Tanya Swain, director of Western Mountains Alliance, said 110 people registered to attend the event.
Farmers have to be patient when it comes to making a living.
“Money comes slowly,” quipped panelist Bob Neal of The Turkey Farm in New Sharon. In order for bank loans to help farmers, he said, the financial agreement needs to be flexible enough to meet the needs of a business based on seasons. In the 24th year of raising turkeys, he detailed the difficulties of getting the right loans to build the slaughter and brooder houses he needed to continue staying in business.
His mother-in-law lent him the money to build a slaughter house and later, Coastal Enterprises, Inc. granted a loan for the brooder house he needed to keep the temperature-sensitive turkey poults at a toasty 99 degrees during their first week. There’s the difficulty in getting traditional loans in a business where most of the production’s yearly revenue comes at Thanksgiving and Christmas that makes sustaining the business impossible without alternative funding, such as mother-in-laws, on hand.
“Seasonality is a key issue,” Neal said and added on his farm, “at the end of December there’s nothing walking around but farmers.”
The theme of a cash flow based on the seasons was repeated by the diverse group of farmers on the panel.
Don Thibodeau of Green Thumb Farms in Fryeburg, started growing 350 acres of potatoes when he took over the farm in 1977 to now where he produces 635 acres of potatoes. But, he noted, he needed to diversify his business and, along with potatoes, grows corn, dry beans, and grass turf. Four years ago, he help start and is a partner of Cold River Vodka, a distillery business that produces vodka from his farm’s potatoes.
“You have to be real resilient and keep reinventing yourself,” Thibodeau said of farming. “Nothing lasts forever.”
John Cancelarich, initially a chemical engineer, who has spent the last 40 years as a general manager of large food processing industries in Maine, such as Vahlsing, Inc. & Maine Sugar Industries; AKF Foods, Inc.; Northland Frozen Foods and Maine Natural Oils; LLC, knows a thing or two about resiliency and reinvention.
“I walk through the supermarket looking for what’s not there that I can produce,” Cancelarich said. He said he noticed on one venture through a food store that there weren’t frozen red potatoes, so he went to work to produce the product. Always looking for new products, he came up with the first frozen roasted potato.
“It’s important to be first,” he said. Right now he’s looking for a farmer who can grow anywhere from 20 to 100 acres of oil crop, such as canola and mustard, for his specialty, niche-type oil producing company.
Farmington farmer Richard Marble works with his family at Marble Family Farms on 135 acres to produce hoop-greenhouse-grown greens and other vegetable and herb produce, eggs and free-range chickens. They added a commercial kitchen and now produce baked goods, which brings a stream of income year round.
“Right now we’re looking at wheat production. We use a lot and need to produce it ourselves,” Marble said. But with that idea comes the daunting task of figuring out how to afford the equipment that will be needed to grow and harvest a new crop.
The panelists advised farmers in the audience to make a good, long-range business plan, look for financing from a bank that is used to working with farmers, and continually look for ways to run the farm more efficiently.
All noted that in order to compete, competitive price and excellent service were both important but the quality of the product is most important factor toward success.
“We’re trying to put out things that are good for you,” Marble said. “Food that’s good.” The panelists who are farm investors from Maine Farm Credit, Maine Department of Agriculture, Coastal Enterprises, Inc, and Sandy River Charitable Foundation, asked how they can better help nurture farming here, and what other obstacles farmers face led to discussions of the difficulty of affording liability and health care insurance.
Some said they aren’t medically insured but all are required to carry liability insurance. Some hire part-time employees to avoid having to pay for heath care insurance, while others carry crop insurance.
“If you get sick, be sure to die quickly,” Marble advised if there’s no heath care insurance on the farm. “It’s a sorry state all around.”
“You’re going to have some bad years; it’s no different than the ski industries,” Thibodeau said of farming. “You can do everything right and still go wrong. You need patient money, preferably with a low interest rate.”
