Aroostook County’s potato harvest heritage

by Angie Wotton
    Northern Maine is one of the last places in the country where each year middle and high school students return to classes in mid-August only to have the schools close again a month later for Potato Harvest Break. During the one- to three-week break, many students work on local farms, providing the necessary extra help needed to farmers in harvesting the potato crop while earning a good income for themselves and learning real life work skills.
    For those who no longer feel a school harvest break is needed, I’m certain the majority of farmers would disagree. For those students like my nephew, Sam Dunbar, who not only work during SAD 29’s one week of potato harvest break, but continue working an additional school-approved two weeks while school is in session, ask them. Sam, for one, deposits a portion of his earnings in a savings account, buys school clothes and even big-ticket items like a snowsled. At 16, he has worked the potato harvest since he was 11. The first couple of years he picked potatoes at Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater and has worked at Corey Farms in Monticello since then. Jim Gerritsen of Wood Prairie Farm used to set Sam as the bar to rate other potato pickers and I believe his reputation has followed him to the Corey Farms’ fields.
    Work skills: work begins at dawn and continues for 10 hours or more with time off for potato fights and warming hands on a thermos of hot chocolate. If it is a particularly cold morning or raining outside? Workers tune into the “Potato Picker’s Special” on WAGM TV from 4:30 to 6 a.m. to find out what farmer is starting on time, going late, or not “digging” at all. The show, now in its 50th year, also aids in helping farmers find harvest workers.
    Previous to 1950 schools stayed open through potato harvest and only those who lived on farms were excused from school to stay home and help out. Upon the farm students’ return to school, they were expected to make up the work they missed. In the fall of 1948, one woman remembers sitting in her classroom alone for several weeks while the rest of her classmates were on their farms working. Schools began to close in the 1950s for the economically important harvest and the tradition, while it still continues, has diminished in recent years in southern Aroostook and the St. John Valley. Parents of school-age kids today, if they grew up in The County, picked potatoes themselves and are happy to have their kids experience a true potato harvest, just as they and their parents before them did; connecting the generations agriculturally.
    I’m proud of Sam and all of the other students who help our farmers get their fall crops in and by doing so, continue to add to our agricultural heritage.
    Editor’s note: Angie Wotton loves her work as district manager for the Southern Aroostook Soil and Water Conservation District. She also raises pastured pork and vegetables with her husband on their small West Berry Farm in Hammond. She can be reached 532-9407 or via e-mail at angela.wotton@me. nacdnet.net.