Aldermere Farm

We've driven through and walked next to Aldermere Farm in Rockport hundreds of times by now and have yet to stop in. If you are a habitue of the mid-coast, it's locally famous; if you are interested in the cattle called Belted Galloways ("Belties"), it's internationally famous. I look at the website ( http://www.aldermere.org/ ) and say, "We really ought to participate somehow."

Not that we're all that interested in farming, but then this is not your grandfather's kind of farm. It really only has one product, the meat and semen of the Belties. In addition, there are art shows and art workshops. There are gardening programs, nature walks, and moonlight ski tours. It borders on Penobscot Bay between Rockport Cemetery and Megunticook Golf Club, on some of the most expensive real estate in the country. A wind turbine generates electricity. It does, in at least a little bit of tradition, host a 4-H club that centers around Beltie calves.

All this happens (is necessary?) because the farm's last owner gave it to the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.

My grandfather's farm in Minnesota was a little different. Yes, it had black-and-white cows, but they gave milk, not semen. It had chickens. It was muddy. The fields weren't picturesque meadows bounded by ponds and bay and rock walls, but were planted in pedestrian rows of corn and swatches of hay. The barn was partly falling down. The house featured tar paper siding. The roads defining its quarter section were gravel that had long ago lost their gravel. We walked them looking for agates, not Belties. The windmill pumped water. I expect the farm is now swallowed up by a corporation.

Is this the fate of all small farms, selling out one way or another? I'm sure it's true for salt water farms, which spawn subdivisions of big houses with fake widow's walks, for the views, don't you know. A beauty in Lincolnville succumbed last year. But our grandfather's farms, let's hope that the local food movement can help them survive the agribusinesses. As much as I love forests and woods, Maine would not be the same without the undulating fields and white barns and prickly independence of its small farmers.