BDN photo/ Anthony Brino PRESQUE ISLE — A group of northern Maine food businesses want to capture a bigger piece of the New England fiddlehead market this spring and summer — and share the growth with more foragers.
In a collaboration between Troy Haines, owner of SPW Meat Cutting in Mapleton, the Van Buren-based farm Northern Girl and the Crown O’Maine Cooperative distributor, fiddleheads picked in Aroostook County will be sold at Whole Foods throughout the Northeast for the second year in a row. This year Northern Girl-packaged “Wild Aroostook Fiddleheads” will also be sold at Hannafords.
With sales deals in those and other stores, the team is trying to tap into the market for fiddleheads, the young fronds of the ostrich fern, and make sure local foragers fare well under Fair Trade practices, said Haines.
“We’re narrowing the aggregation margins and the distribution margins to pay our pickers more, and we’re making up for that in volume,” said Haines, before a training session with more than 20 prospective fiddlehead pickers at the Presque Isle Career Center in late April.
Haines estimated that as many as 45 foragers will be hired this season, twice as many as last year.
“We’re incentivizing people staying (and picking the whole season) and trying to regulate the glut, so it’s not a buyer’s market or a seller’s market.”
Pickers selling to the collaborative earn $1.50 per pound of unwashed fiddleheads. Last year, top foragers earned $400 to $600 a day, while average harvesters brought in around $200, Haines said.
It’s a back-aching, seasonal job. But “it’s an opportunity to make good money,” Haines said.
It’s also work spent along some of Aroostook County’s cleanest rivers and streams.
In addition to recipes, the Northern Girl fiddlehead packages include a code customers can use on the farm’s website to find the waterways where that package of fiddleheads originated from.
