Outstanding in Their Fields

Out Standing in Their Fields Alumni Find Balance in Agricultural Endeavors

Kristin Dillon

By Jane Dornbusch

Farming isn’t a typical career path for PA graduates. But for a small, dedicated group of alumni, it was the only path that made sense.

Some of these Andover-educated farmers fell into it almost accidentally; some came to agriculture after pursuing other careers. Most, faced with the economic realities of farming, are augmenting it

with work off the farm, either their own or a spouse’s. But whether they’re saving the family farm, fighting for community food security, making organic food more accessible, or advocating for farmers’ rights—as are the alumni featured here— they all share a passion for the pursuit. Meet four alums who’ve chosen careers in agriculture—and see the fall issue of Andover magazine for four more profiles of PA farmers.

Kristin Dillon

Alice Percy ’02 A champion of farmers’ rights

Read more about the alumni farmers listed below in the fall issue of Andover magazine.

Jim Blackmon ’57

Court. of Bag End Suri Alpacas

Lessons outside the classroom

Jill McElderryMaxwell ’88 Raising a rare breed

Tina Hartell ’91

Skye Chalmers

The accidental sugar maker

Marcus Smith ’12

Kristin Dillon

A cricket in every pot?

“Farming can feel like playing God,” says Alice Percy. “It’s about as close as a person can get to creating something out of nothing. It’s a fantastic job for anyone who gets bored easily, because you’re never going to do the same thing two days in a row. And I probably get to hold more baby animals and drive bigger machines than any of my Andover classmates.”

That’s the upside. But it’s the downside that occupies Percy’s thoughts and actions these days. “The problem is no one wants to pay you to do it. I’m not sure there’s another career where you can so reliably invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, work overtime in statistically unsafe conditions with no vacations, no retirement fund, and no health care, and still not make minimum wage 10 years later.”

Percy is a third-generation PA alum and a second-generation farmer: her father, Jim Torbert ’64, did a stint in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua after college, and, with his wife, operated several goat dairies, eventually ending up in Whitefield, Maine, where Percy was raised. Percy says her parents were “thrilled” when she and her husband returned to the family spread in 2005, converting Treble Ridge Farm into a diversified organic farm.

But they’ve pulled back from farming a bit—they’re still raising pigs and grain but have cut back on hay and produce—and the reasons are largely economic. Says Percy, “The small diversified farm is getting a lot of positive press right now, and Americans

are more aware than they’ve probably been in a hundred years, or maybe ever, of what they’re putting in their mouths and where it comes from. This is fantastic, but the small farmers still aren’t getting paid.”

To make ends meet, she’s taken a job off the farm, managing the farm supply division at a local seed company, but much of her time and energy go into venting her frustration with the modern agricultural economy by advocating for farmers’ rights to a living wage as board president at MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association). The problem is a thorny one, as Percy would be the first to admit, but she’s not ready to throw in the towel. “When I found that farming full-time was not enough to pay the bills—and that none of my friends who farmed full-time could pay their bills either—I could have just shrugged and gotten a day job,” she says.

“Instead, I find myself pushing MOFGA to be more responsive to the needs of commercial farms, to better support their economic viability, to put resources into promoting their organic certification label,” says Percy, adding, “I’d love to think this means I’m a fundamentally good person, but I’ll give credit to PA for the endless non sibi talk at All-School Meetings.”

“The small diversified farm is getting a lot of positive press right now.… This is fantastic, but the small farmers still aren’t getting paid.”

Photos by Janet Century

Louis Rorimer ’65 Keeping the family farm alive When Louis Rorimer’s family bought the land that’s now Snake Hill Farm, it served as a country retreat. Today, says Rorimer, the Chagrin Falls spread, not far from Cleveland, is under development pressure from encroaching suburbs. But Rorimer, who grew up in New York and spent childhood summers working on the farm, is determined to keep the place going as long as possible.

A few factors are working in his favor.

Explains Rorimer, “We’re a diversified family farm,” meaning they do a little of everything. They sell beef, make maple syrup, grow vegetables, and keep beehives and a few chickens—all certified organic, and nearly all of it sold at local farmers’ markets. The growing demand for organic foods has been a boost to the farm, and, says Rorimer, “The local food movement has made a huge difference in our ability to survive.”

Rorimer has served on the board of his local farmers’ market, which has thrived in recent years. “We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary at the market. It really started from nothing, and now it’s very popular. It’s been a real community builder,” he says.

Farming is a second career for Rorimer.

“I retired from law around 2011, and since then, in theory, farming has been my day job. It’s pretty demanding,” he says, noting that he does much of the deskwork (yes, there is deskwork in farming) while wife Savery is the “hands-on farmer.” There’s a tendency among nonfarmers, he says, to romanticize the work: “People say, ‘It must be wonderful to be outdoors and in the countryside.’ It’s not like that. You’re scrambling to keep it afloat, and it’s challenging. It does provide balance, but not in the way you’d expect.”

That said, he adds, “We do love the place. You don’t farm to make money, [you do it] because you love it and you love the land and you want to make a difference.” He jokes that at his recent PA reunion, he noticed the beehive on the school seal and said to himself, “Maybe that’s why I’m a beekeeper— because 50 years ago, I had to look at that all the time.” More seriously, he adds that the Andover ethos of non sibi may play a part in what he does. “I’m doing something for my community, producing good, healthy food, and people love it. That’s rewarding,” he

says. “You’re not exactly giving to charity, but you’re doing something that’s useful and beneficial.” And carrying on the family legacy is no small consideration: “When you have something that’s been in your family for 100 years, you can’t just sell it,” says Rorimer. “In my case, it’s unthinkable.”

“I’m doing something for my community, producing good, healthy food, and people love it. That’s rewarding.”

Photos by Alan Brian Nilsen

“I’d been interested in hunger issues from an early age. It was partially a family value … but it was reinforced at Andover.”

Lisa Mosca ’89 A passion for fighting hunger A career in farming appealed to Lisa Mosca for the most fundamental reason of all: “My passion is food and hunger relief,” says Mosca, senior manager of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s City Harvest Program. As manager of a program that supports urban gardeners at 140 sites in Philadelphia, she’s not surrounded by rustic beauty or pastoral vistas.

But she says that the sites—for which the program supplies organic growing materials, seedlings, pest control kits, and more, as well as technical assistance and manpower in creating new gardens—are producing annually, by conservative estimates, 100,000 pounds of food that is consumed by the gardeners themselves, donated to food pantries and soup kitchens, or sold at farmers’ markets in the community. In a city where, according to Mosca, more than half a million people (one-third of them children) are considered foodinsecure, those crops make a difference.

Mosca gets excited when describing the many initiatives undertaken by City Harvest: hoop houses to extend the growing season, a network of “green resource centers,” seedlings that are “culturally appropriate” for the immigrant communities served by the program. “There are a lot of urban gardening programs,” says Mosca, “but our focus is on getting people a set of supplies, all free, in exchange for their data”—data on crop yields and where those crops are going.

Mosca did spend years in a more traditional farm setting. After she’d been out of college a few years working on pollution prevention efforts, she went through the organic farming program at UC Santa Cruz. “I didn’t think I was going to run a farm; I just thought it was absurd that I didn’t know more about growing my own food,” she says. She did end up running a farm—a 24-acre CSA outside

Philadelphia—but she’s always been more interested in urban agriculture.

The City Harvest program, which she joined in 2006, was the perfect confluence of her passions.

Those passions are deep-rooted. “I’d been interested in hunger issues from an early age,” says Mosca. “It was partially a family value taught to me by my parents, but it was reinforced at Andover.” She also credits the PA community with leading by example: “People’s passions for different academic areas showed me how to be passionate.”

Working on reclaimed city lots with students, seniors, immigrants, and volunteers is a far cry from typical farming, and Mosca sometimes misses that lifestyle. “I loved being out in farm fields,” she says. “I like to be out somewhere beautiful, in nature, as much as the next person. But,” she adds, “my real concern is community food security.”

Andy Molloy/Portland Press Herald

Spencer Aitel ’74 Changing the world, one gallon at a time it was 50 cows, and, says Aitel, “The carpentry was bringing in cash and the cows were sucking it up.... We backslid into commercial dairying, scrabbling as we slid downhill, like Sisyphus.” Two Loons Farm became certified organic in 1997. For a time, the farm was part of an effort by several farms to create a new brand, Maine’s Own Organic (MOO) Milk, but the group disbanded Changing the world wasn’t precisely on in May 2014; today, Aitel’s milk goes to “The only real reason we yogurt-maker Stonyfield Farm.

Aitel’s radar when he graduated from do this is we’re trying to Colby; he planned to get a PhD degree Going organic was partly an economic change the world.” in cell biology, but watching his sister’s decision; Aitel says that, unlike conexperience in academia (“She did a more conventional role. Yes, farming ventional dairy, “Organics has a stable the associate-professor-of-something is hard, but, Aitel notes, so is being a price structure that doesn’t fluctuate route”) made him realize that path with market forces. It provides a differ- doctor or playing the oboe: “Anything wasn’t for him. Instead, he says, “I did ent economic environment, where you done well takes all you’ve got.” a little carpentry and a little farmcan actually plan your future.” But more Aitel says he’s unsure whether he’s actuing—which turned out to be a 30-year paramount was the desire to “demonally changing the world. But of this he career.” Both building and farming strate that you can do this and feed the is certain: “We’re good employers, and were a struggle, initially: “You starve to world, and show that there are more I’ve been able to live in paradise. The death for a while till you figure out how ways forward than genetic engineering view from my tractor beats the view to run a business.” The endeavors grew and farm systems that aren’t resilient.” from an office. If you work all your life organically, as it were: He and then girlfriend (now wife; pictured above) Paige The self-described workaholic says that, to take vacation, what have you done? as challenging as his career has been, he In a weird way, I’ve been on vacation Tyson bought one cow because they wanted their own butter and milk; soon has no regrets about choosing this over since I graduated from college.” ■

Kristin Dillon

Spencer Aitel has a pretty compelling explanation for having chosen his career path: “The only real reason we do this,” he says, “is we’re trying to change the world.” What he’s doing is producing organic milk on a 500-acre farm in Maine and trying to demonstrate that it can be done economically, within the arcane and complex system of milk pricing.