The Organic Movement Grows

THE CUTTING-EDGE WORK of the farm would be carried forward by Mrs. Smith and Mr. DeGrandpre in new ways. The skill and innovation that DeGrandpre brought to the farm drew increasing attention from the daily press and agricultural journals. A November 1979 article in the Brunswick Times Record touted Charlie’s healthy sales of organic beef. The herd was at about 300 animals, and between 100 and 125 were being slaughtered for the organic market annually. DeGrandpre said the organic movement had become pronounced in the early 1970s. Now there were more orders than they could fill. The farm was featured on the cover of the 1984 Annual Report of the American Farmland Trust, noting the farmland was protected by an AFT conservation easement.

The new, big, red pole barn was often the setting for meetings of the Maine Beef Producers Association, of which DeGrandpre had been a co-founder. Farmers came from around the state to learn about rotational grazing and fencing and other innovations. Charlie received its first Beef Producer of the Year award. He developed a working relationship with the Cumberland County agricultural agent who came often to see what was happening at Wolfe’s Neck Farm, the support for organic farming now growing. DeGrandpre was an early member of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and was among the first to bring animals to the MOFGA Common Ground Fair in its early days.

It was EHS who made the biggest change. She had the idea to build a large pole barn at the Little River Farmhouse to provide for the first time a central place to birth and care for the calves, to feed the cattle about to go to market, and to bring parts of the herd together for other special needs. She loved that barn and said that she had purchased it instead of a fur coat she happened to see, a high-price-tag dangling. “I could build a barn for that,” she told others she thought. And she did that in the early 1980s.

In 1984 Mrs. Smith at age 74 decided along with her six children— Lewis, Eleanor, Sam, Meredith, Sallie, and Minie—to preserve the farm for the future by donating it in its entirety to the University of Southern Maine. She backed it up with the gift of a conservation easement on the entire farm to the American Farmland Trust that required its use as farmland in perpetuity. The stone house was given for use as a USM conference center. In 1986 she donated the map, atlas, and globe collection she and her husband had enjoyed putting together to the USM library. It now operates as the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education in the USM Glickman Family Library. The globe collection is the finest outside that of the Library of Congress. Mrs. Smith would pass away after a short illness just three years later in August, 1987, while building a new house on some remaining property overlooking the sea. The headline on her obituary in the Maine Sunday Telegram noted her philanthropy and called her a “leader in alternative agriculture, environmental protection, conservation, and historic preservation.” She had championed it all “long before their importance became generally recognized.” She had been a founder and director of the Institute of Alternative Agriculture, in addition to her pioneering work with the Nature Conservancy. Her many memberships and honors included the prestigious Margaret Douglas Medal of The Garden Club of America in 1985. That same year she had been named the Cumberland County Extension Association Outstanding Person. In the spring of 1987 she had received the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science.