The Pioneering Farm

THE SMITHS BROUGHT this same energy to Maine. They tried some early enterprises, including growing one acre and a half of cucumbers for pickles, requiring constant picking by family and guests, and lasting only one year. They employed local people to make small wood products. But they were also thinking how their new land could be useful to the community and the state. EHS had grown up in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, surrounded by open land and a small farm that supplied fresh produce for the family. She spent her childhood roaming this landscape and was proud that she had become a member of the Audubon Society when she was seven years old.

Mrs. Smith was familiar with the writings of Louis Bromfield, considered by many to be the father of organic agriculture in America, still a very new idea in the late 1940s. Key to the approach was the natural enrichment of the soil. By 1949, EHS had made the Smith land an early Cumberland County Soil Conservation District. That year the Smiths’ Maine letterheads began carrying the name Wolf Neck Farm.

Meanwhile LMC, with his international wartime experience, had set up a lumber business with connections in Central America. He would take the lead in making their Maine woods into a properly managed tree farm in the mid1950s. He purchased the first woodchipper in the state of Maine to facilitate the business. The Soil Conservation and Tree Farm signs began to mark the place as ahead of its time.

Actual farming began in 1953, when the couple made their first purchase of Black Angus cattle—seven bred heifers, a steer, and a bull—all with pedigrees from breeder Foster Grant in Dover-Foxcroft, highly regarded in the business for 30 years. They intended at first to focus on breeding animals for sale. A July 10, 1954, article and photo spread in the Portland Evening Express, “Freeport Farm Brought Back to Life,” announced the presence of this new farm in Freeport, giving all credit for its creation to EHS. “Mrs. Smith was saddened,” it reported, “by the run-out, nonproductive, abandoned land, and the two empty barns.” The article reports her long-range planning began with her membership in the Cumberland County Soil Conservation District in 1949. “She saw it as a challenge. Her enthusiasm was caught by her husband. Looking back, LMC said: ‘It was as if the land was telling us what to do.’”

Mr. Smith is identified under his photograph holding an Angus calf, as “Administrative Assistant.” The Smith children remember working on the farm throughout the summer.

The Smiths had purchased four adjacent and nearby small farms to acquire the hayfields they would need, doubling their acreage to about 600 by 1954. In all cases the farmers were elderly and retiring, the next generation not interested in farming, in most cases given life-tenancy while their fields remained productive. They asked James T. Mann, of a local family whose Ulster-Scot roots in the area went back more than 200 years, to be farm manager. He had been with them since 1948 managing the farm’s early lumber business. He was an invaluable colleague, employee, and friend during the early years of the farm.

From the beginning no chemicals were used as fertilizer or weedkillers, and no antibiotics were used on the animals.

The Smiths were swimming against the tide. Wartime chemicals were surplus and new uses were being found for them in agricultural products; state agriculture agents were promoting them. It would be 1962 before Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring brought the dangers of DDT and other chemicals to animals, to humans, and to the ecosystem to broad public attention for the first time.

As noted above, EHS was inspired by the American organic farming pioneer, Louis Bromfield, his 1943 book Pleasant Valley stuffed with related clippings in her library. His book described the land conservation practices he was using to bring back a worn-out farm in Mansfield, Ohio, named Malabar Farm. As an expatriate novelist in France in the 1930s, Bromfield had visited the botanist Sir Albert Howard, a British agricultural agent in India, whose work and publications would come to be considered the inspiration for the world-wide organic farming movement. Howard saw a connection between the healthy farms and animals he worked with in India and the ancient organic methods the people used. At the heart of the system was healthy soil, naturally enriched by hummus, manure, and plowed under cover crops called green manure. Bromfield also practiced contour plowing, the management of water flow, and strip planting to prevent erosion, with the devastation of the Dust Bowl still ravaging the American heartland clearly in mind.

Mrs. Smith’s early involvement in soil conservation directly reflected the experience of Bromfield in bringing back the abandoned fields of Malabar Farm. The 1954 news article pointed out that at Wolf Neck Farm, “sod waterways and drainage ditches have been built with technical assistance of the county soil conservation district to control water and conserve soil. A farm pond has been built and another is in the offing.” Bushes planted along both sides of Wolf Neck Road near the big barn to manage wind and attract and sequester birds remain a feature of the farm landscape today. In 1955 Cumberland County Soil Conservation District officials named Wolf Neck Farm the outstanding conservation farm of the year. In 1960 four Maine county soil conservation districts would come to the farm for a Demonstration Day. The farm from the start was a place where new methods were showcased. The Smiths would be in personal touch with fellow organic pioneers, J.I. Rodale of the Rodale Institute in Emmaus, Pennsylvania and Helen and Scott Nearing of the Good Life Center on the Blue Hill Peninsula in Maine.

The Smiths were thinking ahead of the times in many other ways. Their beef was grass-fed and low fat, not a recognized value until recently. A marketing system begun in 1956 sold meat in large frozen packages direct to the customer by air and farm pickup. Later truck deliveries were made to customers throughout New England. An experimental vacuum system of making silage for winter, and bunker feeding with fresh chop brought to the cattle in bunkers in summer saved costs—no expensive silos or elaborate fencing were necessary.

Pioneers in organic agriculture, the Smiths were among the first to market grass-fed, lean beef raised without chemical fertilizers. This worn sign carries the date of incorporation, though the farm started in 1954, well before Rachael Caron’s book Silent Spring first alerted the general public to the dangers of DDT and other chemicals to the environment.