By Zack Anchors
Staff writer
    Stacy Brenner and John Bliss, the farmers selected by the Scarborough Land Conservation Trust as the new tenants of Scarborough's Meserve Farm, are bringing a new type of farming to town.
    Last month, they moved onto the farm on Broadturn Road, which has been renamed the Broadturn Farm, and already they are busy at work setting the groundwork for a community supported agriculture program (CSA) and an agricultural camp for children. They have been busy lately – along with fixing up and settling into their new home, they have had to finish up the harvest at their old farm in Cape Elizabeth and just recently had their second child. But they have big plans for Broadturn Farm and are excited at the great potential they see there. Their overall goal, they said in an interview at the farm last week, is to promote sustainable living in a way that builds community.
     "People have an idea that buying sustainably and locally is all about buying produce – but that's only the tip of the iceberg," said Bliss.
     At the Broadturn Farm next season, residents of Scarborough and other towns will be able to buy fresh produce, as well as poultry, lamb and pork. But just as importantly, said Brenner, people will be encouraged to get actively involved on the farm – volunteering to help weed or harvest, dropping off their children at farm camp to learn where the food they eat comes from and just generally coming to think of the farm as a community resource.
     "It's about finding how we can make this a viable business and still make it feel like a community," Brenner said.
     The central focus of the Broadturn Farm will be the CSA program, which will allow people to sign up for an entire season's worth of vegetables from the farm. Since moving to Maine six years ago, Bliss and Brenner have run two different CSA programs – one at Turkey Hill Farm in Cape Elizabeth and, before that, one on Sunrise Farms in Cumberland.
    A CSA model, said Bliss, makes the business of running a farm much more practical for the farmer and the customer.
     "Traditionally, a farmer would need all this capital to invest in seeds and everything," said Bliss. "It's a huge risk."
     When a farmer invests a substantial sum of money in their farm each year, Bliss said, they then have to count on selling enough of their harvest to make that investment back. If they cannot, then the next season they will not have any money to put back into the crops.
     "Obviously, from the way small farms have been disappearing in the last few decades, it's a model that doesn't work," said Bliss. "We need to figure out alternative business models."
     The main advantage of a CSA model is that it allows the farmers to plan out their growing season during the spring, so they can then focus on growing in the following months.
    "We'll know how many shares the garden is going to have to provide for," said Bliss. "All those costs are apparent in the early part of the season."
    At Sunrise Farms, the CSA Stacy and John ran had about 100 members at one point, while Turkey Hill had around 50. Eventually, they hope the Broadturn Farm CSA will have a comparable size.
    "There's a lot to getting the farm off the ground in the first couple of years – there's lots of construction," said John. "We're gonna shoot for 50, but within a few years we'd like to hit 100."
     One reason Stacy and John are optimistic about Broadturn Farm's potential and one reason they left Cape Elizabeth to move there is the soil.
    "In Cape Elizabeth we spent a lot of time digging out stones," said Stacy. "This soil here is a lot better than in Cape."
    Only a few years ago, before the SCLT bought the 434-acre property. A family that had been farming the land there for generations occupied the farm.
    "They were a pretty typical old-generation farming family," said John. "The young generation didn't want to continue on with it. They had done row crops and dairy – most recently they had poultry. ... When you find an old farm today that's still in production, that indicates to me that the soil is pretty good and that there is still an opportunity there."
    The high quality of the soil was also what led the SCLT to come up with the idea of trying to preserve the agricultural heritage of the land. The original purpose of purchasing the property was to prevent development and maintain open space with trails, but after an agricultural expert visited the farm, the SCLT realized the farm could have a greater potential.
    "This woman told them, 'This is prime soil – this should be farmed,'" said Stacy.
    The SCLT decided to establish a farming easement, fix up the old farmhouse for a farm family to live in and rent the site out to some committed farmers.
    "They put a call for proposals out last year," said Stacy. "We spent all winter making up a business plan and writing up a proposal."
    Along with John and Stacy, another family of farmers, the Snells, were selected by the SCLT to farm on the property, which they had already been doing for years. The SCLT still has plans to build trails on the property too, though that may be a few years away.
    When Stacy and John first started up a farm camp for children at Turkey Hill Farm, John was a bit skeptical of what they were getting into. He had visions of kids running around the farm out of control and causing chaos on the farm. But it turned out that the farm offered a perfect outlet for the kid’s energies.
    “Some of the parents have said they never knew their kids could care so much about animals,” said John. “Parents say that some kids start saying they will only eat ‘happy chickens’ that farmer John raises.”
    At farm camp, kids get involved in many different aspects of the farm – from harvesting and weeding to caring for the animals and running a small market. The underlying aim is to teach kids about how the food they eat everyday is produced.
    “I like to think of farm camp as creating the next generation of consumers and farmers,” said Stacy.
    Stacy and John even say that attending farm camp has turned some children into avid vegetable eaters, which makes for pleased parents. Kids appreciate vegetables a lot more, said John, when they see the magic of a row of seeds growing into something that can be pulled out of the ground and eaten.
    “Seeing a kid pulling a carrot out of the ground – their face just lights up. They just think it’s so cool,” said John.
    Although the children at farm camp learn how to do a lot of the tasks that need to be done to keep a farm going, Stacy and John admit that running kids camp usually produces more work for them than the kids get done.
    “If we have a harvest of something like garlic that’s easy to harvest, we’ll have the kids help out with that,” said Stacy. “But they have their own garden that they work on, that we prepare ahead of time. There’s also a huge hole that they dig every year.”
    “I think some of the kids are more interested in being excavators than farmers,” said John.
    One aspect of farm life that kids at farm camp do not get exposed to is the butchering of livestock. Stacy and John say they were a little worried that some parents might not be happy if their children came home with tales of seeing a chicken that they had taken care of killed. But John said that some adults come to the farm specifically for the purpose of seeing animals processed.
    “We call it the recovering vegetarian program,” joked Stacy. “That’s definitely a big part of our clientele – people who want to get to know their food and where it came from.”
    Stacy and John are still getting to know their new town, but they like that Scarborough is more rural than Cape Elizabeth and has a more diverse mix of people.
    “Since we moved in, most of our interactions have been with hunters who have wanted to use the property to hunt on,” said Stacy. “That’s been nice, because these are people we probably wouldn’t usually get the chance to meet.”