Blind from birth, Steve Hoad, Bates College Class of 1972, was raised by a mother who “understood that children were children,” he says. “It was expected that I would do things children do.” His outdoors experiences as a child and a desire to conserve land solidified Hoad’s dream to one day live with his family on a farm.

Today, on Emma’s Family Farm in Windsor, Maine, Hoad and daughter Rose sell vegetables from a stand and include rare heirloom breeds among the chickens and turkeys they raise for customers’ holiday tables.

And to the Hoads, “good food” and “high prices” needn’t be synonymous. “We have a really basic philosophy that says everybody has a right to good food, and everybody, if they want, should know where their food comes from,” Steve explains. “That philosophy includes helping out wherever we can, keeping our prices low, and at the same time, protecting the earth that gives us the food that we need.”

Gabe Clark '02, with his wife, Amanda Waterhouse Clark '02, raise grass-fed beef on their farm in North New Portland, Maine.

The Bates Contemplates Food initiative is a call for an informed examination of food choices. For many of us, these choices involve what foods to buy. A select few, though — such as the alumni on enumerated below — are choosing what foods to produce for the people who buy.

And while every food decision is a life decision, the choices made by people whose livings depend on producing food take place on planes different from the ones we occupy.

At one extreme, there’s the importance of dirt. Dirt is furthest from your mind when you tuck into a sustainable, made-in-Maine dinner of grass-fed beef from Cold Spring Ranch and organic salad from Hackmatack Farm.

But for Gabe Clark ’02, whose cattle thrive on Cold Spring Ranch grass, and vegetable grower Nicolas Lindholm ’86, dirt is all important. Soil quality can make or break their products.

“It’s taken me years to realize that I don’t need to put so much attention toward growing the tomato plant,” says Lindholm. “I put my attention toward growing healthy soil, and the tomato plant just comes along very happily on its own.”

Then there’s the macro view. By choosing to work in Maine, Jason Perkins ’97 and the husband-wife team of Tim Kane ’82 and Beth George ’85 have engaged in a conflict that conscientious consumers face every day: what’s desirable vs. what’s local.

Perkins is brewmaster for Allagash, a popular craft beermaker. Kane and George run a bakery dedicated to the unusual grain called spelt. Both businesses can legitimately claim to be “local” and “sustainable.” And yet: Allagash brings in hops and malted barley from across the U.S.; Canada and the Midwest produce the spelt for George and Kane’s business.

Neither Perkins nor the Spelt Right bakers want to rely on supplies shipped long distances, with the attendant carbon emissions and loss to the local economy. All are actively seeking Maine sources.

But in the meantime, they negotiate daily a thicket of complex food questions, just like the rest of us — except for the rest of us, the quantities aren’t in tons and livelihoods aren’t at stake.

So, if you need a break from your own food choices or a new perspective on them, meet this group of Batesies whose most important food choice has been simply (but not so simply) to produce it in Maine.

Photographs and reporting by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Text and reporting by Doug Hubley

Skarstad worked for Norwegian sheep farmers Anders Braanaas and Hilde Buer, seen here walking hand in hand on an island adjacent to Grøneng Island, where Buer has her farm.

Last summer, Anna Skarstad ’11 lived amidst Norwegian farmers, hoping to learn a little about their lives and more about her own.

Skarstad, you see, wants to be a farmer, but she’s not willing to hoe that row until she understands why. A quote from Thoreau’s Walden is one of her favorites: “As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”

Skarstad, of Pleasantville, N.Y., wasn’t raised to farm. Her father is a noted violinmaker, and her mother is a composer who also handles press coverage for the Tokyo Quartet. In fact, there’s a break with farming in the family tree: To immigrate to the U.S., her father’s Norwegian grandparents left a family farm.

But farming apparently didn’t leave the Skarstad genome. When she was 10, Skarstad saw a documentary about Norwegian farming. She saw men, tethered by ropes, descending a Norwegian hillside to harvest hay. “I couldn’t believe that was a reality,” she says.

Last spring, she won an Otis Fellowship, a Bates grant program designed to help students explore their relationship with nature.
“I wanted to go to Norway to see how the farmers survive,” she says. “I knew that farming was much harder than I thought. It’s deeper, too — it’s a life.”

She found hosts in Norway through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms: Anders Braanaas, whose inland farm was in Førde, and Hilde Buer, whose coastal farm was on Grøneng Island. Each had been widowed several years ago, and, to skip a lot of details, “the two sheep farmers fell in love,” explains Skarstad.

She recalls a moment: the couple working together in a sheep pen filled with noise, manure, and confusion. “But Anders and Hilde were happy and laughing together. That’s where their relationship was: with the earth, nature, and especially their animals.”

Skarstad helped both farmers, often driving a banged-up Czech car between the two farms. At first, it all felt helter-skelter: painting a barn here, putting up a fence there. “All the tasks seemed unrelated, like pods of work,” she says. Slowly, she saw unity in all the farm duties. “It all had so much of a point,” she says now. “We were working to keep pace with the earth.”

By H. Jay Burns