Lately there’s been an ugly smattering of articles in the press telling us that if we grow organic food, especially if we are small-scale growers, we are deluded, elitist, anti-technology and anti-science. They tell us that our farms and gardens are very pretty, and what we do is very sweet and well intentioned, but it can’t feed the world. They say the earth’s population is exploding, people are starving and it’s all our fault. Now isn’t that just a load of bunk?

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Kerry Hardy grew up in Lincolnville, Maine, exploring the outdoors extensively and eventually writing about traditional foodways of Maine in his book Notes on a Lost Flute. He now lives on a Hopi reservation in Arizona. He was the keynote speaker at the Common Ground Country Fair on Sept. 24, 2010. This article is based on his talk.

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Jim and Megan Gerritsen have owned and operated Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater, in Aroostook County, Maine, for 35 years, and they are raising their four children there as well. Their farm, MOFGA-certified organic since 1982, focuses on producing organic early generation Maine Certified Seed Potatoes, seed crops, vegetables and grain.

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Woody Tasch, founder of the Slow Money movement, author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money and resident of New Mexico, presented the keynote speech at the Common Ground Country Fair on Saturday, September 25, 2010.

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A junior at Monument High School in Great Barrington, Mass., Sam Levin is one of three co-founders of Project Sprout, an organic, student-run, 12,000-square-foot garden on the grounds of his school. Project Sprout supplies the school cafeteria with fresh fruits and vegetables, helps feed the hungry in the community and serves as a living laboratory for students of the Monument school system

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One of the region’s most successful young farmers, Mark Guzzi has been growing and direct marketing produce through farmers’ markets since 1993, when he started working on farms. A former MOFGA apprentice and a 2000 graduate of the University of Maine Sustainable Agriculture program, Guzzi now owns Peacemeal Farm in Dixmont, one of the area’s oldest organic farms, which he bought in 2003 from farm co-founder Ariel Wilcox. Along with his wife, Marcia Ferry, and their crew, he grows 10 acres of MOFGA-certified organic vegetables, which they sell at six markets a week – in Orono, Camden, Belfast and Waterville.

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Lynn Miller, editor of the Small Farmer’s Journal, gave a surprise speech – accompanied by Vaudevillian entertainers – at the 2009 Common Ground Country Fair. Miller said that he has “taken the draft horse and small farm community around the country, pulled them together, and now embarked on a new adventure trying to get us all to work together to save what’s good, valued and important.” Small farms, that is.

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We are working on a tremendous offering of speakers and presenters for this year's Fair. The final schedule won't be ready until later this summer, but here's a preview of a few of this year’s presenters.

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In his keynote speech, Gary Paul Nabhan said that many of the so-called “local” foods he sees in the Southwest are addicted to fossil fuels and fossil water. He sees communities like those of MOFGA as building blocks that balance local with fair trade between watersheds.

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Jeffrey Smith told of Monsanto scientists who switched to drinking organic milk when they learned about the dangers of Monsanto’s recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (now owned by Eli Lilly); about research showing health dangers from genetically engineered foods; and about a plan to get genetically engineered foods out of the market.

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Palermo was never the apple center of Maine. For that you must go west to Wilton and Turner and Winthrop. But for most of Palermo’s 204 years, nearly everyone lived on small self-sufficient diversified independent farms. And every farm had a small apple orchard. I picked Palermo to write about because the town has been my home for 36 years. I also picked Palermo because it was and is in many ways a typical small town of the Pine Tree State.

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Each day of the Common Ground Country Fair, MOFGA presents a keynote speaker at 11 a.m. in the Common. Friday features a MOFGA grower, while Saturday and Sunday feature others working in food, agriculture and the environment. This year MOFGA welcomes John Bunker, Jeffrey Smith and Gary Paul Nabhan.

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On Sunday, September 23, at MOFGA’s Common Ground Country Fair, Ted Ames discussed parallels between organic farming and community-based fisheries in his keynote address to fairgoers.

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Hannah Pingree, of North Haven, is the Majority Leader of the Maine House of Representatives. A second-generation MOFGA member (her mom, Chellie, organized MOFGA's apprenticeship program), Pingree is a leader on issues dealing with toxic materials in the environment. She was the prime sponsor of this year's successful legislation to phase out the brominated flame retardant "deca."

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Pickles and teenagers took center stage on September 21, 2007, when long-time MOFGA farmer Amy LeBlanc of Whitehill Farm in East Wilton delivered her keynote speech at the Common Ground Country Fair.

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“I must make fabulous dill pickles,” says Amy LeBlanc of Whitehill Farm in East Wilton, Maine. “Every time someone new comes to work, a veteran employee goes to the cellar and gets a jar of pickles to share for lunch.”

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My husband, Bill, and I, and our children moved from Massachusetts in 1976 to an abandoned farm, which we named Darthia Farm, located in the coastal village of Gouldsboro, way Down East. No one had farmed the place since the ‘40s, and all the land was overgrown with poplar, alder and raspberry bushes. Since we began, our children have grown, we now have grandchildren, much of the land has been cleared, we have a successful farm store and mail order business, we’ve bought a woodlot, and we’ve had around 200 apprentices who have worked and learned with us over the years.

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For those of you who don’t know me, I’m an educator and I’m also a dietician, so being at Common Ground Fair is the destination point for me as I’m sure it is for you. It’s an opportunity to learn, to educate ourselves, an opportunity to work on what we all know is true in our heart of hearts – sustainable agriculture and how to make it work in Maine.

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Ken Geiser, director of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, was the Sept. 23rd keynote speaker at the Common Ground Country Fair. Geiser is the author of Materials Matter: Toward a Sustainable Materials Policy, which covers the economic, ecological and health benefits of using clean materials from the beginning of any industrial production process.

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Let’s talk about food. We all think we know a bit about food. My kid sister perched above the floor in a high chair, taking a sizzling slap shot at a spoonful of steaming, strained carrots; she knew about food all right. And so do you: what tastes good and what doesn’t; what’s good for you and what isn’t good for you. For a few minutes, let’s talk about some assumptions we have about food.

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John Howe has a plan to get us through “the most important problem ever to face civilization,” i.e., the period following “peak oil.” Peak oil refers to the halfway point, the point at which we’ve used half the oil, the major component of all fossil energy originally made on earth, and after which less and less oil becomes available, extraction becomes more difficult, and prices climb rapidly.

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When Jason Kafka started his keynote speech at the 2004 Common Ground Country Fair with, “Mission Accomplished!” his announcement had substance: He held up a giant kohlrabi and massive onion that he’d grown on his Checkerberry Farm in Parkman.

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In introducing Common Ground Country Fair Keynote Speaker Percy Schmeiser, Sharon Tisher, chair of MOFGA’s public policy committee, noted that the Canadian canola farmer had been on three expeditions to Mount Everest, where he’d climbed to 26,000 feet. The Canadian press, she continued, often asks Schmeiser which is harder to deal with: Mount Everest of Monsanto. Schmeiser says that’s a “really hard question.”

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He could be known as Jason ‘Ailsa Craig’ Kafka, after the mammoth ‘Ailsa Craig’ onions he grows. These are the same onions you see sliced into rosettes and onion rings served at the Common Ground Country Fair by 4M Productions.

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For everyone who has ever dreamed of starting a farm, Lynn Miller has some solid advice: Start where you are. Even if you’re living in a city apartment, you have a place, somewhere, to grow a plant for food or for beauty. And one plant can become two, or more.

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MOFGA and GE Free Maine are pleased to welcome Percy Schmeiser to the 2004 Common Ground Country Fair. A conventional canola farmer for over 40 years, Schmeiser was sued by Monsanto when it found that his Saskatchewan farm was contaminated with its genetically engineered (GE) Round-up Ready canola.

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For her keynote address at the 2003 Common Ground Country Fair, Dr. Sandra Steingraber read the eloquent “Organic Manifesto” that she wrote for Organic Valley Family of Farms, which has published it as an attractive booklet. The Manifesto and accompanying photos by Carrie Branovan are reprinted here with permission of Organic Valley Family of Farms and are available at www.steingraber.com/ as well.

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We are very happy to be here with our sisters and brothers of MOFGA. My name is Juvelina Palma, as they have told you already, and we are a delegation that has come to join with our brothers and sisters here at MOFGA. The delegation is composed of Ernesto Morales, Marisol Ramirez, Santiago Serrano and myself. We feel very strongly that we’re happy to be here with our MOFGA family. We are very happy to be here at this beautiful and happy fair. And on behalf of the delegation, I’m thankful to everyone who’s here together with us.

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The writings of this year’s keynote speaker, Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., Cornell University biology professor, 1997 Ms. Magazine “Woman of the Year,” cancer survivor and mother of two, are the best antidote I know to what Rachel Carson called those “little tranquilizing pills of half truths” that we still too often hear when government officials talk to the public about toxics.

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In introducing keynote speaker Jim Hightower at last September's Common Ground Country Fair, MOFGA's executive director Russ Libby said, "Jim has been out there for the last 25 years talking about agriculture and democracy, and he's put it into practice. I was sitting with some friends in a meeting in Washington a couple of months ago and we were saying, "How many good commissioners of agriculture have we had in these United States?" And we came up with a few and two of them were Jim, because he got elected twice."

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On Friday, Sept. 21, Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy, addressed a crowd of Common Ground fairgoers. His address was moved inside the Exhibition Hall because rain threatened outside. For over an hour, the large group of listeners stood among the glorious display of fruits, vegetables and crafts and listened as Dugger told how to return the United States to a democracy. Doris “Granny D” Haddock of Dublin, N.H., the tough old soul who walked across the country to promote campaign finance reform when she was 89 years old (she’s now 91), stood with him. After his talk, she said in amazement, They all stayed! They stayed and listened, even though they had to stand! Dugger’s message was that important.

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Barry Dana, Chief of the Penobscot Nation, grew up on Indian Island in the Penobscot River. A long-time participant at Common Ground Country Fair, he was a keynote speaker there this year. While growing up, “for some reason I liked being in the company of elders,” says Dana, and thus he learned about canoeing, basket making, snowshoe making, hunting, gathering plants, and other Native traditions. “It was really great growing up where I was connected to my culture,” he says.

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We’re deeply honored to have Dr. Vandana Shiva with us today to share her experiences as an international leader in many environmental and social movements, particularly in her efforts to promote organic farming. Dr. Shiva came to Unity all the way from Doon Valley, India, and she arrived just yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately she has to return to India, and she’s leaving shortly after her address today. In the midst of all the international uncertainty and terror, we especially appreciate her courage and resolve to travel half way around the world to join the Fair and share her experiences with us.

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• Penobscot Nation Chief Barry Dana
• Founder of the Alliance for Democracy, Ronnie Dugger
• Jim Hightower
• Shall We Chautauqua? To Quell a Corporate Coup, by David Kubiak
• Dr. Vandana Shiva, Founder of the India-based Research Founda­tion for Science, Technology and Ecology

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Thank you. I am deeply honored and moved to be here. A quarter century ago, in February, 1975, while I was living in a neighbor’s barn and building my house, I plunked down five bucks to join MOFGA and shared my intentions to start an organic market garden.

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Brian Donahue enjoyed the Common Ground Fair last summer. “The type of activities seen at the Fair should be part of our daily lives,” he said. For many of us who live in rural Maine, they are; but Donahue goes a step further: “We should do them in the suburbs.” This is his key to countering sprawl.

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Activist Michael Sligh grew up on a family farm in West Texas and farmed for a decade before taking a sabbatical to “square away policies” that were detrimental to family farming. That sabbatical began some two decades ago, and hasn’t ended yet. Sligh described those detrimental policies to a crowd that gathered on the earthen-banked amphitheater at the Common Ground Country Fair in September to hear him.

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• Genes and the Food Supply, Michael Sligh of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI)
• Tools to Fight Sprawl: Protecting Open Spaces and Using Common Lands Productively, Professor Brian Donahue of Brandeis University

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