On common ground

The country’s largest celebration of organic agriculture grows more relevant with each passing year.

By Dan Sullivan

Russ Libby has been attending the Common Ground Fair far longer than the 14 years he’s been executive director of the event’s parent organization, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA).

“I was in college and my advisor said “There’s this thing happening up the road and you should go to it,’” Libby recalls of the fateful pronouncement that cast him into his current calling. “So I got on my little Lambretta motor scooter and puttered up the road about 25 miles and I started meeting all these people, and here a few years later I’m still meeting with a lot of the same people—plus about 50,000 more.” Thirty-two years later, to be precise.

“It’s been kind of fun.”

Libby was one of several fair attendees the Rodale Institute—one of only a handful of organizations outside the state of Maine to be invited to the homegrown festival— asked to characterize just how the event has changed over the years.

“I think maybe there have been three major changes,” Libby said from the fairgrounds/MOFGA office in Unity, Maine. He reflected on the most recent extravaganza celebrating a blend of traditional folkways and progressive ideas about how to live sustainably in place, and in challenging times.

“For one, it started out as a harvest celebration that was really a celebration for the back-to-the-landers. Now I see it as really a harvest celebration for the entire state and beyond; we’ve got people coming from all over the country and the world.” Despite the international appeal, Libby said, the Common Ground Fair remains at its heart a celebration of all things Maine. Libby added that the children of those original back-to-the-land founders and fairgoers now make up a critical component of the event’s 1,000-plus-strong volunteer crew. “And now some of their kids are starting to come.”

The current iteration of the fair brings together hundreds of vendors, exhibitors and demonstrators for a Friday to Sunday in late September (this year it was Sept. 19-21) to share organic, Maine-grown food, local fine crafts, practical knowledge about how to live lightly on the earth, and to celebrate the harvest through dance and song (including a daily children’s parade).

The second big change, Libby said, is the scale of the thing.

“The first year there were almost no food vendors,” he recalled. “This year we had 60 food vendors. These vendors are able to source local and organic food and to provide food for 60,000 people. We didn’t have the supply network back then or the capacity to get that supply to where the customers were…and, really, the capacity to feed what amounts to a mid-sized city for three days.”

Last but not least, Libby said, was finding a permanent location.

“We rented the fairgrounds for 20 fairs,” Libby recalled. “Eleven fairs ago we started on our own site. That just makes a huge difference in our ability to do show-and-tell stuff.” This includes everything draft-horse demonstrations, vegetable crops actually growing on premises, and even people in the woods doing forestry demonstrations. “It’s real tangible.”

The next stage, Libby said, “is taking it and stretching it out for the rest of the year and having people come in for a year-’round learning experience.” MOFGA currently hosts 45 educational days, about half of them on site in Unity and the other half scattered across the state. Plans are under way to expand these offerings.

In addition to all that, MOFGA has three extension agents, of sorts, in the fields of livestock, vegetable crops and marketing. These are employees of MOFGA, Libby said, though they do work closely with official state Extension agents. The University of Maine has Extension agents who are very supportive of organic agriculture, Libby said. “And part of that is that we’ve been having conversations with them for about 20 years now.”

While Maine produces more calories than it actually consumes (exporting a lot of high-calorie foods like potatoes), Libby said, in terms of foods produced in Maine that actually gets eaten there, the figure is about 20 percent. “Our goal is to have the capacity to produce 80 percent of our own food.”

For all practical purposes

Josh Trought lives, works and plays on D Acres (www.dacres.org), an organic farm and nonprofit educational homestead based on the principles of permaculture nearby in New Hampshire. While Trought has been a speaker at the Common Ground Fair for two years running (another rare out-of-state invitee), he’s been making the trek to the Unity gathering for many more. “It’s definitely grown during the course of time that I’ve been here,” he said. “The practical aspects have really improved—what’s being advocated and what’s being promoted—and the solutions that are on the table.

“The tone for me has become a lot more practical, sort of ‘here’s what you can do at home on a small scale.’” Trought said he still marvels at the logistics of bringing so much hands-on knowledge to such a large volume of people.

“For me the idea of ‘organic’ has sort of transitioned from a set of national standards to more of a lifestyle, people bringing stewardship and ethics into the way they live. I guess I’m also impressed with the diversity of the attendees, from die-hard farmers to the upper crust of Maine, lots of kids and extremely multigenerational.

“This is one of the few places you can go and be yourself and be a farmer and be respected.”

Visiting the Rodale Institute booth, twin sisters Noni and Liza Campbell—who said they have been attending “off and on over the years” —also commented on the practical aspects of the fair. “It’s becoming more down to earth,” Liza Campbell offered. “People are realizing they have to get into the land to survive. It’s more hands-on than it ever was.”

“This,” said Noni Campbell surveying the scene around her, “is the antidote to our country going down the drain. These are the real people of the earth.”

Rachel Katz (left) and Sonja Heyck-Merlin (right).

“Money!” quipped Sonja Heyck-Merlin, only half kidding when asked to characterize the significance of the fair to most farmers. “I think a lot of people would say that. It’s like a pretty big event for a lot of people in terms of their financial success.”

“You can make a lot of money in a short amount of time, but it’s a lot of work,” added her friend Rachel Katz, who, along with her partner, recently took possession of an old apple orchard that had been in a local family for five generations, the current one no longer having an interest in farming.

The couple markets kimchi, sauerkraut and pasture-raised meat and has learned by doing. Katz offered that while the applicable skills taught to fairgoers via hundreds of hour-long workshops is certainly valid and important, its also fairly basic. “I’m glad that they’re doing it, but it’s pretty introductory, level 1-type stuff. We use draft horse on our farm, so it’s great to see the culture that we are part of represented here.”

Trought and others who are eager to share what they know about living off, and with, the land as fairgoers seem to be to soak up that knowledge. The intensity and scope of interactions at the event shows that these practical skills are more valued than ever.