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with chicken bearing the farm’s bright-yellow label. “The biggest issue is trying to overcome the fact that Americans have always demanded cheap food, and farmers have been able to produce cheap food,” he said. “But the consequence of producing more cheap food is more antibiotics, more pesticides, more fungicides, and more use of fertilizers.” Buying a bird from Barnstein will cost you a bit more—whole chickens go for $5.25 a pound at local retailers—but he’s convinced customers will earn the difference back in health and longevity.

Sinisi, who follows a complex series of grazing and cover-crop rotations, represents the more idealistic—and expensive—side of raising meat in Maine, and Barnstein and Common Wealth a more pragmatic approach. But the best path forward for a sustainable meat economy in Maine may bend a bit more toward the conventional side of things than some might imagine.

“The trick is finding the way to supply that demand in a way that's sustainable for the farmers,” Percy said. “Sometimes, that means making some reasonable compromises, and educating both consumers and farmers about what is truly humane husbandry, and what might contribute more to buzzword status than to animal welfare.” For example, she has frequently heard from both would-be farmers and consumers that the ideal is pork raised wholly on pasture—an “ideal” that, in reality, would be impossible, and would leave pigs undernourished.

Inside the barn at Old Crow Ranch, the scene looks a lot different than the picture of summer on the farm as described by Sinisi. On a hot August day, sometimes he’ll be out working—baling hay, or moving cattle—and notice a cloud of dust rising up from the hog pasture. “And you go over and you just see pigs running—they're chasing each other and slamming into each other, and they're just like, playtime!” In the cold of early December, the pigs are more sedate—they actually eat more in the winter, despite the lack of forage—but they gamely snorted at our arrival, the piglets retreating to a pile, while the hogs that would soon fill the cases at Slayton’s shops continued sniffing at the fences. There’s clean bedding covering the concrete floor, and plenty of rooms in the pens, and yet it’s not anything you’d describe as a bucolic scene, but this set-up works for Sinisi, and that’s what is most important to him. He wants consumers to see how his animals are raised— and he wants them to be comfortable with it.

“There is a farmer out there somewhere for you,” he had said back at the house as we discussed the various ways that people handle confinement, feeding, and forage, and the words they use to describe the product that approach lands them on. “This is how I do it, this is what I do. If you don't like it? Fine! Go find a farmer for you.”

willy blackmore is a freelance writer and editor who covers food, culture, and the environment. He lives in Hope, Maine.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOLLY HALEY BY MELISSA COLEMAN

FIVE MAINE FARMS Six Talented Women

In my earliest memories, there are women in the garden. Lots of them. My mother, with her bandana and braids, bending over the earth to dig potatoes. “Like an Easter egg hunt,” she said, as I followed along behind. Then my two stepmothers, too, planting and harvesting over the years. Now it’s my sister, washing baby spinach for market, and carrying on the family business.

Just as there’s an abundance of inspiring female farmers in my life, so too, are we blessed with hard workers in Maine. Some are carrying on the family tradition, others came to it on their own, but they all do their jobs with pride, dedication, and commitment. May they inspire many more to come…

SUPERPOWER Staying on schedule SPECIALIZATION Dairy

Betsy Bullard

The first thing you notice about Betsy Bullard is how calm she is. That she and her family run a dairy of 600 milk cows is nothing to stress about. Besides, that would not be good for the herd. “Cows like to be bored,” she explains. “It’s my job to make sure they stay that way.” At Brigeen Farms, a 10th generation dairy farm in Turner dating to 1777, this is no small feat. “One of the fantastic things about farming and working with living creatures is that ‘the average day’ is a misnomer,” she says.

After studying animal science at Cornell, where she met her husband Bill, the couple decided to return to Maine in 2000 to partner with Betsy’s parents, Steve and Mary Briggs. They grew the herd from 60 to 600, with nine employees, to become a Dairy Farmers of America wholesale milk provider for brands like Oakhurst and Hood. This means they have to keep their standards high, and their cows bored. Betsy says that’s just how she likes it, too.

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SUPERPOWER Three generations SPECIALIZATION Vegetables & flowers

Carolyn and Ramona Snell

It may be an anomaly these days to find three generations of women farmers working together, but at Snell Family Farm in Buxton, it’s business as usual. Henry and Ruth Snell started the farm in 1926, and their grandson, John Jr. runs the farm today, alongside his wife Ramona and their daughter Carolyn (who manages the flower business). Rita, Ramona’s mother, (who turns 90 this year) still helps with the garlic and pumpkins, and John Jr. takes care of the apple orchards.

“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” Carolyn says. “When I do flowers for a wedding, it builds a sense of connection and loyalty. The same people come back for vegetables, apples, and other items.” Customers find them at the farm stand (located on 70 protected acres a mile from the Saco River) or at the Portland Farmer’s Market, where Snell Family Farm has been a vendor since 1980. Now, with daughterin-law Abby in charge of the farm kitchen, the other items for sale include hand pies, raspberry jam, and rhubarb BBQ sauce. Next up, perhaps a fourth generation?

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SUPERPOWER Two jobs SPECIALIZATION Beef cattle Denise Carpenter

If you’ve woken up from open heart surgery in the care of nurse Denise Carpenter, you may not have guessed she’s a superhero who just swapped her Carhartts for scrubs. When she’s not at Maine Med, she’s raising 30 cattle on Chellis Brook Farm’s 231-acre protected farm in Newfield. “I can mow a hayfield in the morning and still take a shower and get to work in time,” she says matter-of-factly.

The key to a one-woman, parttime farm is in thinking ahead. Instead of having “to futz around with hitching and unhitching” one tractor, she has five tractors rigged to the tools she needs for making hay and spreading manure. “I can just hop on and go.” At first, she sold steaks at the farmer’s market until colleagues at Maine Med asked if she would raise some cattle to split for quarters of beef. As her business has expanded, she’s made plans to retire to the farm in a few years. But for now, life as a superhero seems to be working just fine.

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SUPERPOWER Sharing the wisdom SPECIALIZATION Herbs Deb Soule

For Deb Soule, the secret to being an herbalist is “being a teacher so people feel more confident using herbs,” she says. Indeed, she counts with gratitude her own mentors, two famed herbalists, Adele Dawson and Juliette de Baïracli Levy, who passed on their wisdom to her as women healers have done for centuries. After a semester learning traditional healing methods in Nepal, she was inspired to start growing medicinal plants on a friend’s land and making her own herbal preparations. She launched Avena Botanicals at age 25 by handing out tinctures and herbal salves at the Common Ground Fair.

When the small mail order business outgrew her workspace, a friend loaned Deb money to buy her own farm in Rockport in 1995. The gardens were planned as a living classroom, “a healing space that fosters birdlife and pollinators to grow native plants for education and Avena’s apothecary,” she says. In the past 24 years, Avena has become just that—a place to experience and pass on the wisdom of herbs.

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