I chose a color scheme for all the new buildings: Yankee Barn Red siding and Forest Dark Green roof and trim. The builder instructed me to roller paint both surfaces of all the siding, and said, “for that you need a pair of hosses”. Having already begun to decipher the downeast accent, I came back with, “I farmed with mules and Haflingers in NY, but I don’t see any here”. That response earned me the silent stare one gets from locals when they think “away” people say something stupid. But he furnished some ageing sawhorses on which to paint the clapboards, and even let me keep them after the house was built. I decided to set up my paint shop in the finished open-front shed where the building crew took refuge from the sun to eat lunch, and where they could enjoy the view to the St Croix bay. If they could see me working – right through lunchtime on occasion – I might gain access to their chatter. Eventually this worked to a degree, and they invited me to lunch with them.

Conflicts on timing arose occasionally between the builder, the earth mover, the chimney mason and the specialist who I contracted to apply an unusual stain finish on the concrete floor. I learned about such glitches when the parties grumbled to me privately. But since they were all locals who knew each other, often from childhood, I figured that they would work things out.

As the fall season arrived, I tested out the new fireplace, a so-called Rumford design based on the old colonial heating hearth, and relatively energy-efficient for an open hearth, then retreated to NY for our last winter in the state. By then I was sufficiently impressed with the building crew to let them finish the interior without oversight. The new house would have no heat but the sun until we moved up the trusty old cast iron kitchen range that had done superb duty for thirty years in the NY farmhouse. The builder, unaccustomed to the heat storage capability of energy efficient design, feared freezing pipes, and moved in a gas heater for the winter. To his amazement, he never had to turn it on, for the house temperature rarely dropped below 60°F.

The carpenters put the finishing touches on the interior by early winter. Photos the builder sent back to us in NY revealed a visually attractive interior with the warm feeling that I had hoped for from ample use of the inexpensive timber resources that dominate the landscapes of the state. We declared the house a success. We had invested our bits of inheritance and savings over the years in more lucrative places than our farming ever yielded. Occasionally these placements did well. We often say that this is the house that Netflix built.

Once installed permanently on the new property in June 2012, and a garden and a brick patio started, we took time to enjoy the view of the water. We also began to encounter the uneven legacy that the previous occupants had left on the property and in relations with the neighbors. New to the vocation of farming, the last occupants had struggled for several years with a steep learning curve before giving up and selling the farm to us. Attempts they had made to outfit the farm as cheaply as possible yielded outbuildings and fencing already in a late stage of deterioration. A grove of nice old apple trees around the gardens had been debarked to within an inch of their lives. The tractor and hay machinery, of far higher quality when new than I had been able to afford in my commercial farming career, showed signs of mistreatment and lack of maintenance. Even in its present state of disrepair, it represented more of an investment than a farm with only 15 acres in fields could justify financially. I had grudgingly accepted it as part of the deal to seal the purchase of the property. From experience with worn out soils in NY, we could see in the varieties of vegetation on these pastures that fertility had not been rebuilt. Worn out soils are typical of abandoned farmland.

Neighbors who came to welcome us regaled us with stories of pigs, goats and chickens free ranging beyond the farm, which immediately confirmed our suspicions about what had damaged our apple trees. Stray chickens had ended their lives roasting on the fires in the adjacent campground, affecting neighbor relations in that sector. Clearly, the welcoming neighbors shared these stories in the hopes that we would do a better job that the previous occupants in keeping our livestock at home.

Property Development

Our general goals for living in Maine had been the same for decades: build a reasonable level of self-sufficiency in food production, water access, and energy capture, and live an active, satisfying life connected to the natural world. For us this meant restoring ecological health and productivity of a landscape worn out from farming that depleted soils, the same sort of ‘farmed out’ land that we had learned to restore while farming in New York state. Because farming had died out decades ago in this part of Maine, farming support services, both human and technical – resources that we had relied on in New York – were not available or far away and more costly. Our retirement income allowed us to afford the costs, but having been raised in the frugal tradition of New England, we were reluctant to invest in a project whose scale – limited by our declining energy with age – promised never to produce enough to financially justify the expense. However, the satisfaction gained from land restoration became its own justification, so we embarked on a project that would not always come up to the standards we knew were necessary.

Over a long period of education in ecosystem science and its application to farming, we had developed a method of holistic management that uses livestock in a key role in a farm understood as an agroecosystem. I have described the design of such a system in Human Designs for Ecosystem Management and Survival After the Oil Era. The most important principle derived from the way natural ecosystems work is to replace, as much as possible, external inputs with ones available within the system. Used holistically, livestock can provide food, fiber, soil fertility and draft animal power. Integrated with other organisms they can improve productivity and general carrying capacity of a farm. I had designed the farm in New York to use livestock in all these ways. On this less ambitious farming project, livestock still provide food and fertility.

Here in Maine, we have 20 acres of open land and 60 acres of forest. On it we manage a handful of sheep grazed in ways that improve soil fertility and forage production and quality. We cut hay for winter feed, build a winter barn manure/bedding pack and compost it, and grow mulch for several gardens. In the gardens we grow two dozen annual food crops and about a dozen perennials. And we cut all our firewood. Our well includes a hand pump, and a new pond ensures water for irrigation and livestock when well water is not enough.

Progress toward our land restoration goals is much slower than on our New York farm, due to the lack of farm services in a region that lost its farmers a couple of generations ago, and our declining energy to contribute farm labor at our retirement age. A key component of soil health and productivity regeneration is calcium, generally deficient in soils in the US Northeast. In actively farmed regions like New York, a phone call brought a truck to spread the necessary tons of lime over the fields. Here, such services are two hours trucking away. However, we soon learned that the local paper mill gives away lime as a byproduct, and we lined up a local trucker to dump the tons necessary to begin restoring calcium levels. We found a couple of old ground driven manure spreaders that we cobbled together into a working machine to pull behind our pick-up truck.

To reduce the lime spreading rate to a level the soil could handle (about 2 tons/acre) we wanted a source of manure to load along with the lime in the spreader. The imported manure would also help jumpstart the soil regeneration. As luck would have it, we discovered that the remaining dairy farmer in the neighborhood would give away his mountain of manure for the cost of trucking. So, for the first two years at least, we were able to economically jump start the process.

Grazing livestock, the other major component of low-cost farmland improvement, was also available locally. One of the rare remaining sheep farmers in the region, was happy to sell us females from his annual lamb crop. They were Katahdins (or at least a cross with that breed), a sheep breed created in Maine by crossing African sheep brought to the Antilles with a British breed, and thus a hair breed, and easier on the back because they shear themselves. Sheep husbandry with a mere handful of grazing animals as implements of land restoration slowed improvement of the open acreage, especially as we favored the gardens over the hay/pasture land with each winter’s bounty of composted manure bedding, but it kept farm labor requirements light in line with our retirement age energies.

The tractor that came with the property, oversized for the size of the farm, helps to dig out the bedding pack and spread the fertility.

But some hand labor is necessary.

A ten-year reckoning

Nearly ten years after the choice to resettle on a small farm in Robbinston, Maine, several thriving gardens produce three dozen fruits and vegetables, and the tiny sheep flock yields a couple of lambs per year for our freezer and several to sell to local customers.

In addition to the attached greenhouse, a cold frame dug into a slope and a free-standing greenhouse extend the growing season into winter on each end.

In the hard times coming, our annual harvest would go far to assure self-sufficiency in food. The main Achilles heel in the system is the machinery – tractor, haying equipment, chain saw, freezers, well pump, etc. – which will function only as long as the industrial economy delivers spare parts. As fossil energy depletes, the wheels are slowly coming off industrial civilization (see my explanations elsewhere). Hence, simpler technology machines and more hand labor will eventually have to replace these current labor-saving devices. One example that we have achieved so far is a pond near the top of the hill to gravity feed water to gardens and sheep as necessary.

In sum, the life we have made for ourselves here is satisfying, consisting of retirement farming, woodlot labor for firewood, continuing research into the ways of the world, pieces of writing like this one and occasional interactions with the natives.