Fresh donated vegetables from the Friends of Aroostook Farm in Houlton have been making their way to senior citizens around northern Maine, as harvesting begins with the help of many volunteers.
The eight-year-old farm is working with both of northern Maine’s Area Agencies on Aging, the Aroostook County Jail, and others to bring a range of produce to seniors and families in need of good, fresh food.So far so good this year with the farm, said Dale Flewelling, a retired automotive mechanic who started the organization in 2008 after concluding that a lot people with limited incomes and transportation are not eating well. He remembers some of his former auto customers struggling to pay for adequate food and their car repairs.
Today, Friends of Aroostook is donating thousands of pounds of fresh food – including to some of Flewelling’s former customers now in their elder years – and collaborating with multiple organizations and getting volunteer help from individuals, student groups and inmates at the jail.
“It’s a learning process,” Flewelling said. “We want to give people the most bang for our buck. Like squash: people don’t realize how much vitamin A there is in squash.”
Last Monday, a group of volunteers were on hand at the farm to help pick potatoes and green beans, including youngsters and volunteers with the Presque Isle Boys & Girls Club and staff at the Aroostook Agency on Aging. This was a day of “silver harvest,” Flewelling said, with bags of potatoes and beans headed to seniors across Aroostook and Washington counties.
Potatoes and beans are among the first crops to be harvested of more than a dozen being grown at the Ludlow Road farm, along with beets, cabbage, carrots, rutabaga, zucchini, squash, tomato, lettuces, cantaloupe and watermelon. This year, they’re also raising four heritage variety pigs for the jail, and sourcing some of their feed from the kitchen scraps of Grammy’s Country Inn in Linneus, Flewelling said.
The farm is helping create a new kind of food bank by connecting people who use food assistance with fresh, local produce, rather than high-carbohydrate processed food and baked goods commonly given as food donations.
It’s estimated that more than 200,000 Mainers, or 16 percent of the state’s population, face food insecurity, and 25 percent are children.
That kind of insecurity leads people to adapt by gravitating towards low-cost, high-calorie foods that often amount to sugar-laden junk food, according to Kristian Maile, the president of the Good Bangor-based Shepherd Food Bank.
“We are left with the paradox of a whole generation of people who are overweight but malnourished,” Miale said in June, at a health conference in Bangor.
The Good Shepherd Food Bank is leading an effort similar to the Friends of Aroostook as a new kind of farm-to-food pantry effort in central and southern Maine. The food bank contracts with farmers and supplies year-round produce to individuals, families and seniors.
