By Lily Macone
During one of the last slow breaths of autumn in 2025, I found myself sitting at an unfamiliar kitchen table with a kitten curled into my chest, a toddler who was practicing drawing flowers folded into my side, and the familiar smell of woodsmoke, manure-coated muck boots, and sun-warmed, century-old floorboards surrounding me.
I’m an organic farmer and also work as an organic inspector within MOFGA Certification Services (MCS), and on that morning I was helping to conduct an organic inspection. We were entering the record-keeping part of the inspection, a crucial part of the process in which MCS conducts several auditing exercises and reviews receipts and production totals.
These records reviews are objective and can be tough if files are absent or numbers aren’t quite adding up. That doesn’t take away, however, from the very human element of being welcomed into the heart of someone’s home and listening to stories not only of their production years but often of their family. Relevant questions come up and answers are often nuanced. In response to questions about organic feed, for example, a dairy farmer might say, “I was going to move the cows to a friend’s field up the road this week, but my kid had a hockey game two hours away, so they’re scrubbing and getting baleage,” or “My mom got diagnosed with dementia and moved in with us, so we weren’t able to get an order in for organic hay from around here for the winter, and that’s why we had to get it from Canada.”
The stories begin out of necessity and unfold in the thirsty, automatic way leaves do when it begins to rain. It’s the natural way of things when farmers get together: a mutual understanding and level of trust that allows joys and burdens that often silently color a farmer’s day-to-day to be said and heard. I’ve found myself on many inspections feeling that my role was not only to be a witness to numbers but also to the emotion and stories that shape each farm: whether that be family lineage, community investment, or an inability to not tromp out back to your fields and imagine them blooming from your every care and action.
As a farmer myself, I can tell you that the reality of farming is that you’re not doing it with any illusions of financial abundance. You’re doing it because you don’t know how not to, just like you wouldn’t not know how to ride a bike if someone put you on it. You just keep pushing the pedals and steadying the handlebars. This is evident to me not only through my work with MOFGA but also from my own experience running farms for over a decade.
Owning a farm, in case anyone has any doubt, is not a single-minded venture. It’s about supporting your family with nourishing food, tradition, and exposure to the cycles that define our ecosystems, environment, and food system. It’s about a not-often-enough-recognized devotion to caring, in good times and very bad, for the living soil and creatures that feed your community — and a devotion to the community as well.
During a record-keeping review at an organic vegetable farm, one of the owners had to run and grab records from his wife, who couldn’t bring them to us because she was supervising all four of their children in the canning of hot pepper salsa (they were homeschooled and it was a feed-two-birds-with-one-seed kind of project). Do they make a significant amount of money selling hot peppers? Not really. Are they going to stop growing them? No way.
At another farm, the owner had stopped dehorning his dairy cows because he read that the process gives the cows migraines for weeks. He instead chooses to duct-tape tennis balls to their horns.
At yet another farm, I shared a moment of appreciation and nostalgia for tie-stall milking parlors with a farmer who swore he’d never switch to a carousel in the name of efficiency, preferring to be able to see and examine each animal as he hopscotches down the line, swapping pumps.
These small moments with farmers all over the state serve as a reminder that organic agriculture is not simply an industry, or a mechanism designed for capitalism. It is a way of life and a necessary bulwark for tradition, local ethics, and ecological stewardship. Organic agriculture remains a source of community education and connection in Maine, and beneath the numbers are stories and hearts integral to our communities.
Lily Macone has been an organic farmer for over a decade. She owns and operates Crowded Hearth Farm in Lincolnville, Maine.
This article was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.