Kickstarting a family farming tradition

Jodie Jordan and daughter Caitlin in the vegetable stand of
 the family farm on Ocean House Road in Cape Elizabeth,
 which they hope to rebuild with $60,000 raised from the
 “crowd-funding” website, Kickstarter.com.

CAPE ELIZABETH — A Cape Elizabeth family steeped in tradition is turning to technology in hopes an online funding drive can push their farming operation into the next generation.

But it's down to the wire and farm needs a last-minute push from supporters to keep its dreams from withering on the vine.

Alewive’s Brook Farm at 83 Old Ocean House Road, run by the Jordan family since 1957, has launched a campaign to raise $60,000 through “crowd-funding” website Kickstarter.com. The money will be used to rebuild the site’s aging farmstand, add an office, and, most importantly, create a production kitchen to cook lobsters and can produce.

“It’s all about what people want,” said family patriarch Jodie Jordan. “They want to be able to grab it, go home, and put it on the table. They don’t want to fuss. Right now, 30 to 40 percent of the people who come in here turn around and go right back out because we don’t cook lobsters. Others, well, they say, ‘All right, I’ll buy them and cook them myself,’ but then you don’t ever see them again.”

However, the campaign ends Friday and, as of Tuesday morning, the Jordans were only 16 percent funded, with $9,705 in pledges from 73 supporters. Per Kickstarter rules, each fundraising drive is an all-or-nothing affair. If the campaign falls even $1 short of its stated goal, not one pledge will be collected.

“This needs to happen in order for my generation, my siblings and I, to continue,” said Caitlin Jordan. “If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to have to go crawl and beg, I imagine. It will mean a real re-evaluation of what we’re doing, whether my siblings and I should cut out losses and go get jobs.”

The 19-acre farm was purchased 55 years ago by Alvin Jordan, when son Jodie was just 6 years old. At first, the first grew mostly cabbage, along with lettuce and squash, wholesaling the produce to Hannaford, Carr Bros., and other local grocers. By the mid-1980s, Jodie Jordan had taken over day-to-day operations of the farm, moving the operation into retailing as area supermarkets began to look increasingly to the Midwest for their produce.

That kept the farm going, and Jordan’s four children fed, but farming was never a money-making proposition for the Jordan family.

“No, it’s not a real lucrative career, not from what I’ve seen of it anyway,” said Jodie Jordan. “It was fine back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but then the ‘90s it started giong downhill and it’s just gone down from there.

“But, I just enjoy watching stuff grow,” said Jordan, explaining why he stuck with it. “And, then, hopefully, I’m able to harvest things and sell them to somebody to pay the bills. I don’t care about making money, I just want to be able to pay bills.”

Today, Alewive’s wholesales to a few local businesses, including the Inn by the Sea, the Good Table restaurant on Route 77 and Scratch Bakery in South Portland. Most income is made at the retail farmstand and at farm markets around the area.

But in order to continue, Caitlin Jordan says, the family needs to transition once more, to cook and process what they grow, on in the case of Tucker, the oldest male of the Jordan siblings, what they catch.

With Tucker hauling lobster pots, younger brother Lincoln working the fields alongside his father, Caitlin running the day-to-day operations on the business end, and younger sister Casey handling promotion, the family feels it has everything in place to succeed. They’ve even lined up volunteer labor from friends and extended family members to tear down and rebuild the century-old farmstand and replace it with a state-of-the-art (or close to it) production kitchen.

“I’m getting old,” said Jodie Jordan. “I’ve told them, if they want to keep this going they need a better, a more modern facility.”

The only missing element, it seems, is capital, a rare crop among farmers.

“My father gave us everything we needed to survive by running this farm, but the economy has been not so great,” said Caitlin Jordan. “His credit is non-existent, really. I’m pretty tapped out from my student loans. I’m just barely making payments on those. So, to go to a bank is not likely to happen.”

The Kickstarter campaign is not a call for free money, although Caitlin Jordan says it is a call for community support. The family gives something for every donation – “We can at least give back that which we have,” said Caitlin Jordan. Pledge gifts range from your name written on the donor wall of the new produce stand, given for a $1 donation, to a five-year, all-you-can-eat bonanza from Alewive’s produce for $10,000.

“We figured, let’s give it a shot and see if the community will respond to our cry for support,” said Caitlin Jordan. “If nothing else, it’s been a great community experiment to see, do people want to have farming continue in Cape Elizabeth?

“If we could just get a lot of a little, it will add up quickly,” she said.

Locally, food-based Kickstarter drives have seemed to be hit-or-miss.

The Oyster River Farm in Warren recently made its $10,000 goal, allowing it to start a weekly, horse-drawn delivery service from March to August in Rockland. Last year, Food Coma TV of Portland raised more than $7,000 to produce a series of short films on the Maine’s food culture in the suburbs just outside the limits of its largest city. Meanwhile, Open Water Theater Arts of South Portland last year successfully launched Of Farms & Fables, a cross-pollination of actors and farmers, with $5,540 raised on Kickstarter.

But The Long Barn, an educational initiative at Scarborough Land Trust’s Broadturn Farm property, failed in August to raise $4,000 to pay for a cob oven used for various cooking classes.

However, Long Barn director Beatrice Perron Dahlen says there were gains to be had even in the failed fundraising attempt.

“We learned a lot from this one attempt,” she said. “Kickstarter is a pretty neat tool if you can figure out how to utilize it to its best advantage. Even though our first attempt failed, we found use of the site was still a great tool for building our community.”

Perron Dahlen pointed out that most of Long Barn’s pledges came from locals, and many made good on those promised donations by visiting the site in person after the Kickstarter drive ended Aug. 31.

“Kickstarter is all about getting the word out and I think we were more successful at that toward the end,” she said. “It can be very successful, you’ve just got to make it a  compelling story.”

Caitlin Jordan feels her family’s struggle to stay true to their roots and continue working the land, given their descent from the founders of Cape Elizabeth, certainly holds that promise.

If the Kickstarter funds do not materialize, Jordan says she’ll apply for a USDA grant.

“Beyond that, the only backup plan is to piecemeal it together over the next couple of years,” she said. “We won’t be able to have a kitchen, we won’t be able to expand that way. The focus will be to just find a way to make the repairs necessary to keep the roof from falling in.”

And, if that’s as good as it gets, that’s not so bad, she said.

“I have my degree, I could go get a job, but I really don’t want to,” she said. “I love this way if life. I love farming. And I’d like to see my kids raised on a farm someday, like I was.”