MORRILL, Maine — Seven years ago, when Rose Rapp took the plunge into farming full time with her small livestock farm in Morrill, she had vision, experience, a passion for humanely raising animals and no fear of hard work.
But that wasn’t enough for The Farmetta Farm to survive.
A couple of weeks ago, Rapp and her husband, Wes Soper, announced to their customers that financial and other considerations had driven them to sell off their animals and to begin closing down the farm.
“My heart is broken,” Rapp, a no-nonsense 47-year-old who is usually known for her salty sense of humor and happy, energetic mien, said this week while wiping away a tear. “I’m a farmer, so of course I’m stubborn. I don’t even understand what it’s like not to be. Easiest path — what’s that? But I was exhausted, and Wes was exhausted. … This decision didn’t come easily.”
The story of the end of the farm began in some ways, they said, at its beginning. That was just a year after their marriage, when Soper, now 56, was still working full time as a papermaker at the Verso paper mill in Bucksport. Back then the couple jumped into livestock farming by renting a barn and more than 40 acres elsewhere in Morrill and started building up their flocks of meat birds and sheep, litters of pigs and herds of beef cattle. They had to rent because their small house sits on less than 2 acres of land, and they didn’t have enough capital to invest right away in a farm of their own.
But renting land meant that they were limited in what they could do there.
“You can’t put in a perimeter fence, you can’t get a bulk grain silo bin, you can’t put in a good water system,” Rapp said. “I still loved that we were there, but the hard part was that we really wanted to own our own farm. We wanted to be able to have our animals on our own land.”
They wanted to expand but didn’t have the right infrastructure to do so, they said. And costs were still high, including the equipment they had to buy and the grain they fed their animals. At one point, when Rapp was charging for chicken what she figured the market could bear — $3.50 per pound — Soper sat down and figured out how much it cost them to produce that pound of chicken.
“That was a kind of turning point,” Soper said. “If you’re not selling chickens at $6.25 per pound, you aren’t even breaking even.”
“And there aren’t a lot of people who can pay that for chicken,” Rapp said. “I get it. I really do.”
He told her they had to raise their prices or the couple would have to go into foreclosure. They raised them. During the summers, when Rapp participates in farmers markets in Bayside in Northport, Bucksport, Ohio Street in Bangor and Searsport, they do well.
“I have people come to market who say they’ve never had such good flavor. ‘What do you do?’ I tell them I love the animals. It is phenomenal meat,” Rapp said. “But my chicken breast is $9 per pound. That’s crazy.”
When the summer ends, the farm’s economic balance shifts precariously.
“This is kind of an economically depressed area,” Soper said. “Once the summer people go home, market revenues go down dramatically.”
When the Verso Paper closed the Bucksport mill in 2014, the loss of the job he had held for nearly 30 years was tough but brought some new opportunities. Soper enrolled at Kennebec Valley Community College in a two-year program to become an energy services tech. He loves the program, and expects to graduate in May. The loss of his income, though, shifted the balance again for the farm, which had largely been subsidized by his millworker’s income.
But the true end of the line came earlier this year, when it became clear to Rapp and Soper that in order for The Farmetta Farm to survive, they needed to stop renting and buy land of their own. They found a rundown farm with 30 acres of land in Montville for $180,000 and approached the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency to talk about getting a loan to help buy it.
In order to successfully qualify for an FSA loan, Rapp and Soper would have to submit a detailed business plan. Among other things, the plan needed to include their farm mission, vision and goals, their current assets, their debts and other liabilities and a marketing plan. They also needed to show the income generated by the farm could pay for farm and family living expenses.
The loan officer told Rapp they couldn’t give the farm a loan while Soper was in school and that to qualify financially to purchase a new farm property they would have to increase their present farm’s productivity by as much as 75 percent.
The FSA loan officer was just going by government guidelines, Rapp knew. But a 75 percent productivity increase? Impossible.
With pressure mounting, the couple began to fight more and fight harder about their lack of time and everything else.
“Wes said there’s a choice that’s got to be made,” Rapp said. “The marriage or the farm. I took a deep breath, and processed it. I said, ‘You’re right.’ That’s when we started to get out.”
Rick Kersbergen, a professor with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension’s Waldo County office, said it was disappointing to learn The Farmetta Farm was closing.
“I’m always sad to hear of a farm closing,” he said. “It’s hard. All livestock business is very difficult. Think about having a diversified farm like she has. Processing those animals. Trying to find markets for the meat where people are willing to pay that premium, because her costs are high. It’s a dilemma, that’s for sure. I could tell it’s a very, very difficult business to be in.”
So Rapp is selling her animals and trying to empty out her freezers of the meat that is ready to be purchased. In the end, they’ll be down to a dozen hens, five ducks and their pets — four cats, two dogs and three donkeys. No more pigs, cows, sheep or hundreds of meat birds.
The couple is not sure what’s next for them. After Soper graduates, he’ll look for work. Rapp may continue to manage area farmers markets, as she has been doing, or find something else to do. They always plan to have some animals, but the dream of running a livestock farm has been put to pasture for good.
“The cycle is amazing. How you are just thwarted on so many levels,” Rapp said. “But it was a fantastic adventure.”