SOUTH PORTLAND — As Caitlin Jordan waited on a steady stream of customers
Sunday at the Scarborough Farmers’ Market, she speculated on why such things
have grown roots in recent years.
“It’s really taken off,” she said. “It’s been amazing. I
would hope it’s because people want to be eating healthier.”
Jordan, who runs the Alewives Farm in Cape Elizabeth, took
on management of the Scarborough farmers market last year, the second for the
fledging operation. Together with Penny Jordan, who co-owns the 60-acre Jordan
Farm, also in Cape Elizabeth, she will also manage the new South Portland
Farmers Market, which opens for its first day of business at 3 p.m. on
Thursday, July 14, in Knightville Park.
Jordan, the 13th generation to farm family land
in Cape Elizabeth, says food safety is a large part of what’s driven the growth
of farmers markets, but there are also aspects of economics and community
spirit mixed into the cornucopia of local agriculture.
In large part, she says, support for local farmers has been
spurred by E. coli scares, which seem to have cropped up in the news with
increasing regularity, usually tied to large, industrial-scale agricultural
concerns. In many ways, she says, the “eat local” campaigns – which coined the
new word “locavore” – have come about because people want to know where their
food comes from.
“When you are mass producing, you can have mishaps because
you are handling so much product, and one mistake can impact a lot of people,”
says Jordan. “But here, you are taking pride in your work. You don’t want
something like that to happen.”
At a booth next to Jordan’s, Dick Piper, while passing a
frozen filet to a customer, said the small-scale nature of farmers markets is
what makes them so appealing, and ultimately so much safer.
“I’m not just an employee for a giant business,” he said.
“That’s my name on the label. There’s a USDA label there, too, but it’s my name
that matters to me. It has to be good.”
Piper raises grass-fed Scottish Highland cattle on his farm
in Buckfield. He started in 1988 as a gentleman farmer – a hobbyist, really –
and his experience speaks to the economic aspects behind the farming spurt.
Initially, after retiring from road construction, Piper made
the bulk of his income from real estate.
“This used to be just a write-off for the real estate,” he
says, pointing to pictures on the banner he uses as a showpiece for folks who
ask if his beef really is raised in Maine. “But then, well, you know what
happened to that. So, now I do this.”
Piper used to do pretty well selling entire sides of cattle,
getting $1,200 for roughly 300 pounds worth of various cuts, but that market
collapsed along with the real estate, he says.
People simply could not afford to shell out that much at a
time, he says. So now Piper works the farmers market circuit, saying that,
because he’s been wait-listed for booth space at markets in Portland, Topsham
and Brunswick, he feels “excited and fortunate” to have gotten in on the ground
floor in South Portland.
Things have been going so well at the four markets he
attends, says Piper, that he’ll soon be branching out to raise pork, lamb and goats.
Jordan says about half of the 14 spaces at the South
Portland market have been spoken for. She and Penny Jordan have worked to get a
mix of vendors, and specifically picked Thursday evenings to facilitate shopper
needs.
“We don’t want to flood the market, so we thought very
carefully about the hours, the variety,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure
that, at that market, you can get everything you need to go home and cook a
main meal.”
That, she says, appears to be part of the appeal of farmer’s
markets.
“It’s one-stop shopping,” Caitlyn Jordan says, “I mean,
that’s why people go to Walmart.”
And, although people may frequent the Walmarts of the world
for price, the shop farmers market for value. Piper and Jordan agree they
charge a bit more than the local supermarket, but freshness is the value
they’re selling.
“I know it may cost a little more to buy local, because
people are having to make a living doing it and they aren’t mass producing food
like what you get at the grocery store,” said Jordan. “But it’s fresh. We cut
lettuce every morning and you can buy it that day. When you buy it at the
grocery store, it definitely was not cut that morning.”
Richard Brzozowski, an educator with the Cumberland County
Cooperative Extension Office – the agricultural branch of the University of
Maine system – said that while the eat local campaign has been a national
phenomenon, Maine “got kind of a jump on it.”
In many ways, it’s a reversal of what happened around the
time of the Civil War, when the industrial age made it cheaper to grow foods in
bulk out West and ship them east than it was to try and hew them out of the
rocky Maine soil. At that time, the market simply made the decision for most
people.
But now, with energy costs on the
rise, and greenhouse gases being blamed for global warming, people have begun
to vote with their hearts, as much as with their wallets.
“People would rather support local
farms because of the energy costs of shipping food, and to be less dependent of
other things they can’t control,” said Brzozowski.
As people have begun to pay more
attention to where their food comes from, many have wanted to get in the game.
“I get calls at least weekly from
somebody wanting information about how to start a farming enterprise,” said Brzozowski.
“It’s not really a turnkey enterprise.”
But it seems another root of the
rise in farmers markets is a growing need to control other aspects of life many
have felt as though they’ve lost, such as a sense of community.
Jordan’s father, Jodie, had success
in the late ‘70s with a simple roadside farmstand. But then people stopped
coming, preferring instead to go to the markets. The reason, he theorizes, has
as much to do with the camaraderie of the markets as with one-stop shopping.
South Portland Mayor Rosemarie De
Angelis had togetherness in mind when she championed bringing a farmers market
to South Portland as centerpiece of her campaign.
“My interest was around increasing this sense of this being
our community,” she said, conceding that an attempt to bring a market to the
area in 2004 was “a little bit ahead of its time.”
This time, however, everything aligned, in part because so
many groups are now on board with the concept.
“I think the really exciting part about this has been the
way it’s really been a shared, cooperative efforts, between the farmers, the
city, the neighborhood association, and the business community,” said De
Angelis. “I only facilitated bringing it to fruition. All those players are
ones who made it happen.”
“I think everyone is really looking forward to this,” said
Leah Lippmann, chairwoman of the Knightville/Mill Creek Neighborhood
Association. “Since the new bridge has been put up, it’s become a really sleepy
place.”
And that remains the one bit of work left to be done. Even
with all the stars seeming to align in its favor, both economic and cultural,
the South Portland Farmers Market could fail at its chosen location, in Thomas
Knight Park.
As Lippmann notes, the area where the old Million Dollar
Bridge once touched down has become quite quiet since the Casco Bay Bridge
bypassed the spot in 1997.
The pylons that once held up the old bridge now have a dock,
making the South Portland Farmers Market one of the few anywhere with drive-up
boat access. But, as De Angelis notes, so few people seem to know the amenity
is there.
“With very single poster I have dropped off to promote the
market,” said the mayor, “everybody has said, ‘So where is Thomas Knight
Park?’”
A Closer Look
Local farmers markets:
• Biddeford – Thursdays and Saturdays, 3-6 p.m. (May-Nov.) and Saturdays, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. (Dec.-Apr.), at West Point Stevens Mill.
• Lakes Region – Saturdays, 8 a.m.-noon (May-Oct.), at Manchester School, Windham.
• New Gloucester – Thursdays, 2-6 p.m. and Sundays, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. (May-Oct.) at Thompson’s Orchard.
•Saco – Wednesdays and Saturdays, 7 a.m.-noon (May-Oct.), at Saco Valley Shopping Center.
• Sanford – Saturdays, 8 a.m.-noon (May-Oct.), at the corner of Gowan Park Drive and Main Street.
• Scarborough – Sundays, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. (June-Oct.), at Scarborough Town Hall.
• South Portland – Thursdays, 3-7 p.m. (June-Oct.), at Thomas Knight Park.
• Westbrook – Thursdays and Fridays, “all day” (Apr.-Nov.), at Saccarappa Park.
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