Betting on the farm Dairy couple discover ‘real’ life worth the struggle

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BAR HARBOR – On a clear, cold winter night, the greenhouse of the Smith Family Farm was lit up like a beacon in the dark, its generator-powered glow illuminating the bustle of the evening milking.

Inside the chilly plastic structure, two Jersey cows chewed hay as they waited their turn to be hooked up to the milking apparatus. A pig rooted in the muck as Motown tunes spun on the radio.

Maggie Smith, 33, clipped a bottle filled with fresh milk inside the pen of her newest family member: Paris, a sweet-natured calf born just over a month ago.

“Precious little baby,” she crooned, planting a kiss on his nose as he nuzzled her leg.

The calf suckled quickly from the bottle, emptying it in minutes while Smith’s children, Thorin, 4, and Sirri, 2, rolled rambunctiously on the hay-strewn dirt floor.

The Smith Family Farm, despite its solid-sounding name, is a baby, too – an organic dairy and vegetable farm in its nascent stage. The six cows of owners Maggie and Lucian Smith, a husband-and-wife team, now produce 10 gallons per day of raw, unpasteurized milk so rich that the cream rises to the top of their glass jugs in a 3-inch-thick layer. Their customers buy milk directly from them.

“It’s not bargain-basement milk,” Lucian Smith, 37, said wryly of the family’s $6 per gallon commodity.

The farm has not yet joined the ranks of the state’s 58 organic dairy farms, but as the Smiths work to construct a permanent barn from the ground up, they are busy planning their future.

Maggie Smith hopes to build up her cottage yogurt business and her husband plans to start a community-supported agriculture program that will provide participants with shares of vegetables in the summer.

The farm is a positive place of hopes, dreams, playful young ones and even a miracle or two.

One miracle is that it exists at all.

Valuable land

The Smith Family Farm, straddling 64 acres of fields, apple orchards and pine woods, began milk production in the fall of 2003. Maggie and Lucian Smith’s handmade, solar-powered saltbox home and makeshift barn stand where the old Fogg Farm once operated on the Crooked Road, just a mile from Hulls Cove village.

The couple, keen proponents of recycling, used some wood from the old farmhouse when they constructed their house.

They picked a good farm to use as a building block.

The Fogg Farm is remembered as being one of Mount Desert Island’s most successful and diversified farms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Fogg family sold milk, grew produce, cut wood and even hauled fuel in a horse-drawn wagon to start the island’s first gas station.

Though the land is still suitable for farming, its fate easily could have been different because of the island’s skyrocketing real estate prices and wide-spread development.

The 64 acres was valued at $225,000 by town assessors in 1996 and would be worth many times that if it were put on the open market, according to the Smiths.

The fact that they were able to purchase the old Fogg Farm at all in 2003 is due to the machinations of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust – a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving Maine’s wild lands – and former property owners Aaron and Barbarina Heyerdahl.

The Heyerdahls, with the help of the MCHT, put restrictive but environmentally friendly easements on the land. These easements made the property’s purchase undesirable to developers but possible for the Smiths, who had a lot of farm experience but little capital to invest. Though the easements limit their use of the land – they can have only three building sites on the property and power lines must be buried – to them it was well worth it.

“It was such a good deal because of the easements,” Lucian Smith said. “The first week we were on the island we saw this place and said: “This looks like a good farm and nobody’s using it. We are building it up from scratch. We want to do it right.”

Taking a chance

Dairy farming, once a principal industry of Mount Desert Island, can seem like little more than a losing gamble today.

Perley Fogg, the grandson of George Fogg, the family’s last full-time farmer, lives just across the street from his old family homestead. He now works as a lobsterman and mussel dragger and was blunt when he talked about the demise of the dairy industry on the island.

“The price of a gallon of milk’s the same,” Fogg said. “It’s been that way for the last 30 years. Fuel goes up, milk stays the same. How can you make any money?”

According to the MDI Historical Society, there were 40 dairy farms on MDI in the early 20th century. By 1987, there was only one: the Bordeaux Dairy, located at the head of Somes Sound. When it closed that year, after more than a century of business, it was the end of an era that had seen the demand for milk rise along with the island’s popularity as a tourist destination.

Local historian Raymond Strout shook his head as he talked about societal shifts that have led to the end of the family farm.

“People don’t do anything for themselves anymore. People don’t cook anymore,” he lamented. “In 1920, people didn’t buy stuff out of a can. What is happening today? Why are we changing?”

The future of farming

Statewide, the number of dairy farms has decreased to 378 from a peak of 5,100 in 1945, according to the Maine Milk Commission. Thanks to larger, consolidated farms and increased efficiency, milk production remains high, but problems foreshadow the industry’s future.

It can be hard to find younger farmers who want to replace those who are retiring, Stan Millay, executive director of the commission, said. Worse, hanging on to the farm’s most valuable commodity, the land itself, can be difficult. This is true especially in southern or coastal Maine, where land prices, and property taxes, are often too high for young farmers like the Smiths to afford property.

“The property tax issue’s going to get you,” Millay said. “There has to be a way, if we want to keep our farms viable, that we have a method to keep the land in production.”

Millay cautioned that land chopped up for subdivisions is land that is lost to farming.

“Once land starts producing houses, it stops producing crops, forever,” he warned.

Maggie and Lucian Smith have firsthand knowledge of the southern Maine housing boom. They ran a 2.5-acre market garden in Kennebunk before moving to MDI to manage the College of the Atlantic’s organic Beech Hill Farm.

“We built that one up and did well down there,” Lucian Smith said. “Development pressure down there was even as high as it is up here.”

Good work

He and his wife, with their handful of carefully nurtured cows, are trying their best to buck the trend that bigger equals better, and persuade their neighbors that purchasing local milk and produce can be worth a lot. Saving land from development is just one perk.

Lucian Smith thinks MDI would be a pretty sterile environment without agricultural land. “For us, [farming] locally promotes the highest-quality products for people who live right here.”

He and his wife, despite the risks inherent to farming, the high start-up costs, the difficulty of taking a vacation or even a trip to Bangor and the relentless, occasionally back-breaking nature of their work, said that they were in it for the long haul.

“I like being outside and working with the elements,” Maggie Smith said. “The elemental aspects of it. The physicality of it.”

Her husband agreed.

“It’s all for real,” he said. “It’s not made up. It’s not a computer screen.”

The 4-year-old son bounded around the barn, a tiny tornado of energy and farming knowledge packed into his pint-sized body and preschool brain. He, too, is enthusiastic about the animals and the lifestyle he leads – which might be exotic to many of Maine’s youngsters nowadays but would have been the norm two generations ago.

“I like working,” Thorin said. “I’m a super, super good worker.”