Local food goal brings benefits, challenges
The University of Maine System is vowing to direct millions of dollars in food spending towards Maine farmers over the next decade, offering a new market for small and large farmers in Aroostook County.
UMS officials say they have a vision for supporting Maine farmers with more than $1.5 million per year by 2020, or 20 percent of the UMS $8.7 million food and dining budget. “It’s very reasonable goal. We’ll be able to exceed that,” said UMS procurement officer Rudy Gabrielson, in a presentation at the recent UMS Board of Trustees meeting in Presque Isle.
The request for proposals being sent out for the new 10-year food contract this fall calls for “a partnership to think about the way that we engage the agricultural economy in Maine,” he said.
While many of the specifics of the contract remain to be seen next spring — such as the mileage radius defining “local” — the new policy should be a boon to farmers around the state, said John Rebar, executive director of Maine Cooperative Extension.
“We’re going to become a customer of the people who’ve been our customer for generations,” he said of the university’s relationship with Maine’s more than 8,200 farms. The university’s newly-renamed Maine Food and Agriculture Center will be “a single point of contact for” farming resources and the local foods procurement, he said.
With the university contract and beyond, Rebar argued that Maine farmers have a potential to serve growing local, national and global food markets, and that rural communities can look to agriculture to help “reverse the brain drain.”
Young people from other parts of the country, including Amish families, have come to Maine for affordable land and a chance to live and work as a farmer, Rebar said at the trustees meeting. “There’s something about a liberal arts education that makes you want to farm.”
So far, Rebar said, traditional and new farmers have helped grow a significant economy. The value of Maine’s agriculture products expanded almost 25 percent during and after the Great Recession, between 2007 and 2012, according to the USDA.
“Stuff lives here that didn’t when I was a kid,” Rebar said. In Aroostook County, he pointed to successful ventures such as the Mountain Springs Trout Farm, the state’s largest private hatchery, and Pineland Farms, the state’s largest cheesery, as well as smaller operations in dairy, meat, fruit and maple syrup.
“The Amish should be a bellwether of a changing community,” Rebar said. “They recognize a good thing.”
Already some Amish and other large and small farms are selling to the universities through Circle B Farms, the Caribou-based blueberry and apple farm led by Sam Blackstone.
Blackstone acts as a kind of produce aggregator for about half-a-dozen farms. Circle B Farms receives crops such as apples, blueberries, carrots, rutabagas, squash and potatoes, and then prepares and stores them for distribution to University of Maine campuses in Fort Kent, Presque Isle and Machias.
Over the past few years, Circle B farms has sold enough regional produce to the point where at least one and possibly two farm crew members are working year-round, managing storage crop sales through the winter.
Part of the challenge is for people to learn — or relearn — how to eat seasonally, but more chefs and eaters, especially college students, are open to eating a variety of fresh produce, such as squash in burritos or on pizza. Chefs in dining halls can rely on rotating seasonal standards with versatile vegetables and source products that aren’t available at a scale here from large vendors like Sysco, Blackstone said.
For Aroostook County farmers, selling vegetables commercially to University of Maine’s contractor and other large companies may require some adaptation and compliance with government regulations, although an aggregator like Circle B can handle some of the quality control.
Selling to a large company like Aramark is also not going to come with a large profit margin.
Although it might be “a little close to the bone,” farmers selling to the university will have a fairly predictable buyer and the chance to increase their volume, Blackstone said.
“I think there’s a lot of room to do this,” Blackstone said of the UMS 20 percent goal. “You don’t need to be taking in potatoes from Idaho or apples from Washington,” Blackstone said. “If we can grow it we ought to be selling it.”
