AmeriCorps volunteers from Ohio, Michigan, Montana, Washington, Illinois, Maine and Pennsylvania have been in Aroostook County three weeks helping the Catholic Charities Maine Farm for ME program in Caribou prepare for the 2016 harvest.
“Everything is ready to begin,” Dixie Shaw, Catholic Charities’ director of hunger and relief services, said Monday. “We will easily exceed 30,000 pounds of food.”
Last year’s harvest was more than 33,000 pounds, and the AmeriCorps team already has brought in 2,000 pounds of beets this year.
Sometimes called the domestic Peace Corps, the federally supported AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps is a team-based community service program for men and women 18-24.
The nine-member “Moose-3” team (the local significance of the name is coincidental) was scheduled to remain in Aroostook until Nov. 3, but Shaw was notified on Wednesday that the team will be deployed to Louisiana on Sept. 30.
“I am still reeling from this news,” Shaw said Wednesday.
Moose-3 is one of only four teams of AmeriCorps volunteers not deployed earlier to Louisiana to assist with emergency flood relief. The Baltimore-based AmeriCorps program had indicated it was imperative to send a team to Maine because Farm for ME is so important to the region.
“It was a very difficult decision. They are thoroughly enjoying their time there,” Nicole Hayden, AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps assistant program director, told me from Baltimore Wednesday.
She said Maine’s team was among the last of the 14 Atlantic region teams pulled from their original assignments to serve in Louisiana, where disaster response services are shifting to long-term recovery work.
“Catholic Charities is an incredible opportunity to serve in a community where we had not been able to serve,” Hayden said. “We look forward to seeing that relationship thrive in the years to come.”
Moose-3 workers have rallied to bring in as many crops as they can before their premature departure, offering to work late and on the weekend toward a goal of harvesting 5,000 to 6,000 pounds before they leave.
“Conditions are perfect for harvest,” Shaw said, praising the thinning and weeding the team has done to prepare the fields. “They are great workers; they have done a great job of helping us get our arms around this [task].”
But the bulk of the harvest usually occurs in October.
“I will lose them at the most vital time,” she said, issuing a call for muscle power.
When I visited the team on Sept. 12, members were weeding long rows of beets, squash, carrots and rutabaga in a 6-acre field on the edge of Caribou donated for the project by Ryan Guerrette of Caribou.
“He gives from the heart. He’s a good soul,” Shaw said of Guerrette, for whom Farm for ME vegetables serve as rotation crops for potatoes.
Farm for ME, which is in its fourth year, increases local access to nutritious vegetables, focusing on root vegetables that can be stored into the winter when the need for food in Aroostook County is greatest.
“We feed 23,000 people in Aroostook County,” Shaw said, adding that one-third of the county’s 70,000 residents experience daily hunger. “We grow root crops for a reason. We want to be sure we’ve got [food] until fiddlehead season. My goal is to get them through until they can pick fiddleheads.”
Through a partnership with food processor Northern Girl LLC in Van Buren, locally grown vegetables are processed for distribution throughout the winter. Vegetables stored in warehouses in Monticello and Caribou are sliced, diced, packaged and flash-frozen as needed under a private “Farm for ME” label for distribution through the county’s food pantries. The products are not for sale.
Many of the recipients are elderly residents who once grew and preserved their own food but are no longer able to do so.
“They know how to can and preserve, they just can’t do it any more,” Shaw said.
She added that packages of frozen vegetables make it easy and convenient for them to get nutritious, locally grown vegetables.
“We have the only food bank north of Bangor,” Shaw said, stressing the difference between a food bank, where food is stored for distribution, and a pantry, where it is given to residents. The Monticello facility serves as the bulk distribution site for food pantries in southern Aroostook. The Caribou warehouse serves pantries in central and northern Aroostook.
In addition to the county’s 24 food pantries (a 25th was recently discontinued), the food bank serves as the Aroostook County distribution center for the Commodity Supplemental Food Program for the Aroostook Agency on Aging and the commodity distribution site for the U.S. Department of Agriculture emergency food assistance program. It also is the staging site for the Maine Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster.
Guerrette’s field is not the only source of vegetables for Food for ME. Last year the program created “Glean Teams,” to comb the fields of partner farms after their harvests were completed. Last year’s teams collected 3,826 pounds of produce.
“We’ve got to be able to react quickly [when a grower invites the gleaners to a farm],” Shaw said. “The team is the muscle power when that happens.”
In 2015, Food for ME also received “a staggering donation of 70,034 pounds of produce” from the farming community, to bring the program’s total bounty to more than 107,500 pounds.
This is the first year an AmeriCorps team has helped work the fields of Food for ME vegetables. Working 40-hour weeks, the Moose-3 team has been housed at Northern Maine Community College in Presque Isle.
“I love giving back,” said Deante Talbert, a team member from Chicago, Illinois, who said he appreciated the peacefulness of Aroostook County. “I love making America a better place.”
For more information, to volunteer or to contribute, contact Dixie Shaw by email at dshaw@ccmaine.org, by mail at Catholic Charities Maine, P.O. Box 748 Caribou, Maine 04736, or by phone at 493-8915.
Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her column appears in this space every other Friday. She can be reached at olmstead@maine.edu or P.O. Box 626, Caribou, ME 04736.