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| Women spend a working
weekend down on the farm |
It's not the Holiday Inn or a weekend
at the beach. It's mucking out barns, repairing a fence,
milking cows at dawn, making bread by hand, and maybe cooking
breakfast for 30 or so. Women-including city folk-are flocking
to the working weekends at Nezinscot
Farm in rural Maine-and loving it.
| Gloria Varney got the idea
to teach her well-honed farm skills to other women when
she started getting so many questions about how she does
things at Nezinscot Farm, a farm and farm store specializing
in organic meat, vegetables and dairy products in Turner,
Maine. The farm is also the site of a café
and a yarn shop with natural woolens. |
The Nezinscot family of Turner, Maine |
| Because her farm
is so diverse, Gloria says she gets a lot of curious
inquiries as to how she and her husband Gregg manage
to do things. The local county extension agent encouraged
her too, and together they hatched a plan for a hands-on
weekend of farm chores, workshops on breadmaking, food
processing, fiber arts, animal husbandry, cheese-making,
fencing, gardening, herb-drying—you name it. |
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| With the support
of Stonyfield Farm’s Profits for the
Planet funding, Gloria launched her first
workshop last fall, able to offer sleeping space for
25 attendees. She filled the class and had 100 women
on the waiting list, so it was clear to her she had to
offer her workshops again. The average age of the women
attending was 50, and many of them had not stepped foot
on a farm before. Some owned land and were trying to
decide what they might do with it. Others had successful
businesses or jobs of their own, but really wanted a
weekend of “doing something different.” Some
were contemplating starting an herb shop or a community
farm. Young women came who had an interest in agricultural,
and some others wanted to learn a specific new skill.
For $250, the student women got all meals, some door
prizes, and some excellent teaching from Gloria and other
teachers. |
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 “I see a lot of young
women who are interested in agriculture but they don’t
have any background in it,” Gloria said. “They
didn’t grow up on a farm, so their parents can’t
help them, but they still want to
explore it.” |
Gloria says the weekend workshop can help the explorers sort out what they might
do. They might decide to go into vegetables, rather than animals. They might
decide their community needs a Community Supported Agriculture project--a farm
supported by “shares” sold to the community. |
“At the very least, they’ll know where their
food is coming from, they’ll understand why prices
are the way they are, maybe they’ll see how a woven
blanket becomes a woven blanket,”
Gloria said. “And cheese-making is something everyone
should see.” |
programs are growing,
because the market for organic food is growing. They often
have a waiting list, but Lindsey’s hope is that all the
alumni projects will create more and more opportunities for
others to learn and spread the organic seed even further. |
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