State’s women farmers on rise, but acreage loss clouds future

TROY – Twenty-five years ago, when Joyce Benson was a student at the University of Maine, she knew the dairyman whose farm existed where the Bangor Mall now sprawls.

Today, as she raises organic vegetables in Troy, Benson said shrinking farm acreage is Maine’s biggest agricultural challenge.

“We’re losing all our farmland,” Benson said Friday. “Acre by acre, field by field, pasture by pasture.”

Benson, 57, enjoys a dual occupation: She is farmer and an economic analyst.

For more than 30 years, she has run Village Green Farm in rural Waldo County while at the same time analyzing data for the Maine State Planning Office.

This gives her a distinctive perspective on how farming and development affects the state, and how it is affecting women farmers.

Benson is one of a growing population of women who have returned to the land for their livelihood. Following a national trend, the number of women operating farms in Maine has increased by more than 30 percent in the past seven years.

Benson grows produce and herbs that she provides to 110 elderly citizens through the state’s FarmShare program.

She markets the bulk of her produce through Hannaford supermarkets and two area farmers’ markets, one in Brewer and another in Fairfield. Her largest crop is hay, which she bales from more than 450 acres in and around Troy.

On Friday morning, she was busy harvesting pumpkins, tossing out the ones the woodchucks had nibbled on. Bent over the plants, wearing knee-high black rubber boots and a visor to shade the sun, Benson reflected on women in farming, sprawl and her career.

Benson said she always knew that once she completed her education at the University of Maine and Cornell University, she would return to farming. Having grown up on a dairy farm in Livermore in western Maine, however, she knew that the investment in a dairy operation would be out of reach.

“That’s why a lot of women turn to vegetables and small livestock,” she said. “The land is your biggest investment. For most women, five to 10 acres is manageable. I know women who have herb farms that are able to use just a rototiller for machinery.”

Thirty years ago, heads turned when the tiny woman, long braids flying, rolled by on a tractor hauling a massive piece of machinery, she said. “But not anymore. They have gotten used to seeing me and I don’t get a second glance,” she said.

Benson is just starting to admit that the work is hard. She is forced to juggle her demanding work schedule at the planning office with spring planting through fall harvests.

“I get up at 5 and go to bed at midnight,” she said. “Yesterday I attended [a planning office] meeting in Orono, came home, changed my clothes and picked until dark.”

During peak harvest, she has as many as six other women working for her.

Census figures released last year show that in 1997 – 23 years after Benson began raising her vegetables – there were 1,154 female farm operators in Maine. Today there are 4,105, compared with 6,991 male operators.

“I don’t know that farming is really any different for women than men. The work is hard. You have to be healthy and have a lot of energy,” she said. As far as the machinery goes, Benson uses a mechanic for repairs she cannot do herself. “It really is not much more than taking care of your car, just bigger.”

But her deepest concern for the future of Maine farming is not which gender will be running the farms, but if there will be enough land left on which to farm.

Because many Troy-area farmers have land and livestock and no equipment, Benson has forged a strong hay business, either selling her own hay or cutting their fields. But every day, she said, someone asks her about buying some of her hayfields for development.

“The general public thinks hayfields are great places to build houses,”‘ she said. “They would never ask me that if the field was full of strawberries.”‘

Grass and hayfields are the fastest-shrinking land base in Maine, Benson said. “It is going to become critically important to save our farmland.”

From hayfields to houses is an easy leap, she said, especially when developers are offering so much money for property that yields a financially low return.

“That’s why I’m so happy to see so many small farms starting up, and a lot of them are operated by women,” she said. “My advice to them is get some experience and find a niche. Farming should be something they love.”