Episode 44: Farm Service Agency with Lucia Brown and Amanda May

On this of the Maine Farmcast, Colt is joined by Lucia Brown, Deputy State Executive Director and Acting Farm Loan Chief for FSA and Amanda May, Agricultural Program Chief to discuss some of the programs and loans that FSA offers farmers. 

Episode Resources

• Farm Service Agency
• Farmers.gov
• Farm Loan Options
• Protection and Recovery Programs
• Conservation Programs
• Disaster Assistance Discovery Tool
• Natural Resource Conservation Service

Automated Transcript

Colt Knight: 00:28

Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And today, I have two awesome guests, Lucia and Amanda from FSA. Lucia, Amanda, it’s great to have you in the studio along with my dog, Leila, who’s just hanging out on the carpet. Would you mind introducing yourselves?

Lucia Brown: 00:55

Good morning. This is Lucia Brown. Let’s see. I work for the Farm Service Agency and I’m a resident of Exeter, Maine. I relocated to Maine probably twenty one years ago, to pursue a career with the Farm Service Agency, and I’ve lived here ever since.

Lucia Brown: 01:15

And I enjoy it here, and I enjoy doing what I do for work.

Colt Knight: 01:18

Excellent.

Amanda May: 01:19

And good morning. This is Amanda May. I also work for the Farm Service Agency with Lucia Brown. We both work out of the state office in Bangor. I live locally right here in Old Town.

Amanda May: 01:33

However, I grew up in Aroostook County on a dairy farm, picking potatoes in the fall. From there, I attended the University of Maine right here in Hitchner Hall, majoring in animal science. And upon graduation, started with FSA.

Colt Knight: 01:51

Excellent. We have an alum in the studio. Lucia, I know you better, because you’re in the livestock industry. You know, you have your farm and a bunch of kids that

Lucia Brown: 02:03

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 02:04

That’s shown and everything. So we’ve interacted quite a bit over the years on a non FSA level. So, I think you’ve got a a beautiful farm with a with a lot of nice animals. Would you mind telling us about your your farming background?

Lucia Brown: 02:20

Sure. I would love to tell you about that. First off, I think I need to go back to I grew up in rural New York, with parents who I think wanted to be a little bit of homesteader. So we had a big garden and we raised our own chickens, meat birds, layers, our own pigs. So that kind of probably started my interest in all that.

Colt Knight: 02:40

Mhmm.

Lucia Brown: 02:41

And then I also, like Amanda, went to college for animal science. But I grew up in the state of New York, so I went to, one of the New York State ag and tech schools, finished my bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, with a degree in agricultural science, and had a couple different, paths that led me to my career with farm service agency that also, you know, I met my husband, and he had an interest in cattle. And so pretty much ever since we lived in Maine, we’ve had beef cattle. We started very small with just a couple head, and then our interest in Simmental cattle grew. And so now we probably have around 25 head, you know, 12 or 13 mama cows and some different, you know, age groups under that of cattle, all Simmental.

Lucia Brown: 03:29

And then we also have a small flock of sheep, which is an interest of mine and kinda grew out of my kids’ interest in four h. They have shown beef, dairy, hogs, and sheep through four h, and we’ve probably raised a little bit of all of that over the years, although we’ve never milked our own cows, gotta draw a line somewhere. And so today, with the Simmental cattle and then we also have some borderlesser sheep and Katahdin sheep are our main, you know, interest there. My 14 year old really enjoys his Catawdin sheep flock, recently has welcomed two sets of triplets. So we’ve been pretty excited here this spring with that, and well, not spring yet, this winter.

Lucia Brown: 04:14

So, anyway, I guess that that covers a little bit of our agricultural interests and where we’re at. My older two kids both came through the four h program, and they’re now both in college for ag business and ag economics. So they’re pursuing that dream as well, I guess.

Colt Knight: 04:29

When when I was a graduate student in Texas, we lambing and kidding season was really hectic because we had, oh, about five, six hundred Mhmm. Sheep and goats lambing and kidding, usually within about a three week period.

Lucia Brown: 04:44

Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 04:45

And one of my jobs was to go and and work up all the lambs and kids. And I remember one Sunday, we had 20 when I was by myself, I had 29 sets Wow. Of lamb and kids to do.

Lucia Brown: 04:59

Can’t even imagine. We try to keep the numbers down, you know, so that it’s manageable, a fun project, but we can also juggle with

Colt Knight: 05:06

the animals. When you’ve got that quantity. Because when you have that many animals, anything that’s gonna go wrong, you’re gonna see it at least once. You know, when you only have a handful, you know, you can go a long time and never actually see any

Lucia Brown: 05:19

Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 05:19

Crazy, weird things happen. But it prepares you, I think, for a career in in ag education. Absolutely. Amanda, we’ve not met very much. We we’ve seen each other around at meetings and things, but I could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Amanda May: 05:41

Well, you know, I’m honestly impressed with all that Lucia does, at work and in her personal life. I do my best to stay up with work, a couple teenagers, and three dogs and a cat. I’ve always kind of wanted to pursue some ag outside of my work life, but besides having a couple raised gardens, that’s about the extent of it. Like I said, I did grow up on a dairy farm, and I, you know, I miss throwing hay in the summer. But, having kids keeps me busy, so maybe that’ll be something I pursue as a an extracurricular, when I’m empty nesting and have a little extra time.

Colt Knight: 06:28

I do really well with livestock. But when it comes to gardening, especially my raised beds, I kill more plants than I raise by tenfold at least.

Amanda May: 06:40

Maybe I’m taking credit for something I shouldn’t because my husband is definitely the plant guy. The plants inside the house, outside the house, he definitely I I cook them. I prep them. Yeah. Yep.

Amanda May: 06:52

So and I’m definitely more of a livestock person, which is why I lean towards the animal science major here at Umaine back in the day. And, frankly, I feel blessed to have found a career in agriculture because, you know, that’s where my heart is. And, yeah, I’m I’m happy to work with farmers on a daily basis.

Colt Knight: 07:16

Yeah. So could you tell us a little bit about FSA? I mean, I think a lot of new and beginning farmers are unaware of its existence and and what it does and and kind of what the mission of that agency is.

Lucia Brown: 07:32

So Farm Service Agency is an agency that’s part of the United States Department of Agriculture, and we really support farmers in two major ways. One is through our lending program and the other is through our farm programs. Amanda is our farm program chief. I used to be the farm loan chief, and I’m now in a different role with the agency, but those are the two major sets of programs that we provide to support farmers. And our goal is really to help create some stability, safety net programs, and also help people get started or recover from economic setbacks, and get on a stable path.

Lucia Brown: 08:15

And it just helps overall support food production in in The United States, you know, that supports our whole nation and people’s ability to eat and have fiber and other products like that. Amanda, you wanna talk a little bit about the farm programs?

Amanda May: 08:32

Sure. One thing I was gonna add to what you said though was that a neat thing about our agency is we pretty much have a footprint across the nation, having representation for all all counties nationwide. So in Maine, we have 16 counties and we have 13 county offices. Three of those offices are in Aroostook County because it is a big county with a big agricultural presence. And then a few of our counties are shared management.

Amanda May: 08:59

So like Penobscot Hancock is one office. But, pretty much anywhere you turn statewide, you can find an FSA office. And if people are interested in visiting or finding an office, you can go to farmers.gov. I think we might reference that more than once, on this podcast. And we’ll

Colt Knight: 09:21

have a link to it in the description.

Amanda May: 09:23

Okay. Perfect. Farmers.gov is where you wanna go and there’s an office locator right in there. You put in your state, your county, and it will tell you who to contact and where to go and who to call. So, yeah.

Amanda May: 09:35

Farm programs, I can touch on those a little bit. There is no way I can tell you every program that we do in one podcast. But I can give you an idea of what we do so that if you’re interested in finding out more, you can call the county office or you can go to farmers.gov. We have three different types of programs, conservation programs, price support programs, and then safety net disaster assistance programs. The conservation programs are, the type of program that take environment environmentally sensitive land.

Amanda May: 10:09

We cost you to install a practice on that land to kind of conserve or repair the land, and then we’ll pay you an annual rental fee to maintain that practice on that land. We work with NRCS on that program. They’re our technical service provider. So NRCS is the Natural Resource Conservation Service. That’s a sister agency of ours and they’re co located in all of our county offices.

Amanda May: 10:34

So they would come out and they would give you a plan to on how to repair that the land or to just what to do to conserve the land. And then we would cost share to implement that practice and then maintain that practice. So that’s conservation programs kind of in a nutshell. And there’s a few different types of programs under that heading. Price support was the next one I mentioned.

Amanda May: 11:00

Those programs are kind of intended to enable the producer to get the best price for their commodity or their product, and to kind of stabilize prices a little bit, I guess. So one big one that we’re taking enrollment for right now is the dairy margin coverage program. We’re taking sign up on that until, I believe, it’s March 31. I I have it in my notes here. And sign up started January 29 for that.

Amanda May: 11:30

That program works so that for if you’re a dairy producer, you can enroll at a certain coverage level that covers a margin. And that that margin is the difference between your input cost and the the cost you’re receiving for milk. So when that margin starts to pinch and squeeze, we can cover anywhere between $4 and $950. So if if that margin starts to shrink between $9.50, we’re gonna pay the difference of, you know, $9.50 and the level that you’re actually receiving. Clear down to we can cover $4 that’s the coverage level, that’s the catastrophic level.

Amanda May: 12:09

And that’s free if you’re a historically underserved producer. Anything above that comes with a a slight premium. So that’s that’s an example of one price support program. But there are numerous programs under that heading also. And then the last one is disaster assistance safety net programs, and those are kind of self explanatory.

Amanda May: 12:33

But I will give you an example, of what we can potentially cover under that. One example is our tree assistance program that covers damages to orchards and, like, tree crops, basically. So, like, it covers the it covers actually the trees, not the not the fruit or whatever is harvested from the trees. But it does cover, maple trees if they’re if you’re producing maple sap and Christmas trees as well. So if a storm comes through and damages your orchard or your sugar bush, then we can cost share to replant and rehabilitate trees.

Amanda May: 13:17

Another example is our livestock indemnity program where if, a weather event causes losses to livestock, then we can provide some financial assistance to replace that livestock. And those are just a couple basic examples of disaster assistance programs that we offer. Go to farmers.gov to learn more. There is a really great disaster tool on there. So if you do have any type of weather event that damages your cropland or crops, anything, you can go on there and just type answer some basic questions, and it will point you in the direction of the disaster assistance program that might fit your needs.

Colt Knight: 13:57

And who all is eligible to work with FSA?

Amanda May: 14:02

So eligibility parameters for programs. Lucia will touch on loans a little bit after I wrap up my my spiel on programs. But, different programs have different requirements, but some of the basic ones are are an adjusted gross income provision requirement where you have to make 900,000 or less. It it’s and that’s average adjusted gross income. That’s a requirement for some programs.

Amanda May: 14:32

Some programs allow you to if you do make more than that, you can certify that, 75% of your income comes from farming or ranching. Another one is we have a highly erodible wetland compliance provision where you can’t be annually tilling highly erodible land and you can’t convert a wetland to make possible the production of agriculture. And and, yeah, that’s something you self certify to. And, if you think you might have a wetland, then we’ll send NRCS out to spot check and just kind of provide some guidance to you on not converting that wetland. Yeah, those are really kind of some basic ones.

Amanda May: 15:12

Also, you have to be farming.

Colt Knight: 15:13

Mhmm.

Amanda May: 15:14

And so there’s a form that we have you fill out that basically answers some basic questions about, you know, are you actually farming type of thing.

Colt Knight: 15:20

Isn’t and is that farming as a business? Or do hobby farms or small scale producers count in

Amanda May: 15:28

that? Definitely, they do. Yes. Okay. Yep.

Lucia Brown: 15:31

Right. The size of the business isn’t necessarily you could have a small business and still receive assistance from us. It doesn’t have to be your sole source of income.

Colt Knight: 15:41

Okay. Great. Mhmm.

Lucia Brown: 15:43

I think as I was listening to you, I was so glad that you brought up about our locations all over the state. And I want to encourage people, if you aren’t currently participating with Farm Service Agency and you’re wondering what we’re all about, to do just what Amanda said, either go to farmers.gov, figure out where your local office is, make an appointment, come in, talk to us. We are the agency that’s known as boots on the ground. We’re public facing. Somebody’s in our offices five days a week.

Lucia Brown: 16:10

We’re there to help you. There’s a huge amount of information on farmers.gov, and it’s wonderful. Our website has come miles and leaps and bounds over the last few years in terms of being user friendly and having a lot of information there. Mhmm. But a relationship with your county office goes a long way.

Lucia Brown: 16:29

And this is whatever state that you’re in, I would recommend that you do that if you have not. Go in, fill out some basic paperwork, show us where your farm is. You know, we’ll get you set up in our computer system, identify the location of your farm on our maps. You can tell us a little bit about what you do. You can sign up for gov delivery, which is our email newsletter system.

Lucia Brown: 16:55

You can get updates on your phone. I like to tell everybody that my husband was never so happy as when he signed up for that. He loves to tell me about information that he receives in his news bulletins. I thought that was fun to see it from the other side though, you know? And, so there’s a lot of ways to receive information from us.

Lucia Brown: 17:14

So even if you’re not actively participating in a program right off the bat, you can be getting information. And if you tell us that you are a sheep farmer, you might then you’re gonna be on the list for the office. So if we have a program that comes out or something the office thinks you ought to know about, they will reach out to you and say, hey. I have some information for you. We really are all about connecting our programs with our customers that are eligible for them.

Lucia Brown: 17:39

And, also, by doing that, Amanda touched on our sister agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service. I know we’re not here to focus on them exclusively today, but they rely on us to do a lot of, the start up paperwork. And so when a producer comes in and signs up with us, it also opens the door to start working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service because some of the paperwork that Amanda talked about, you know, talking about are you what are you doing for farming? You know, who’s part of your farming operation? Things like that.

Lucia Brown: 18:12

We do that for them, and then they can start to work with you on other conservation planning practices that are outside of what we do, and that can come along with financial and technical assistance from them. We love our partnership with them, and we think that together, we bring a lot of good things for farmers.

Colt Knight: 18:30

Very good. And we actually have the NRCS scheduled to come and do a podcast episode either this week or next week. So we’ll probably be releasing these in close order to each other.

Lucia Brown: 18:41

So

Colt Knight: 18:42

they will definitely get to learn more about NRCS. One of the other things that FSA does are loans, and I’d love to hear more about the loan assistance offered through FSA.

Lucia Brown: 18:54

Absolutely. I think we have two major types of programs. We have direct loans, and those are where a person comes into our office and applies for a loan that they receive directly from the farm service agency. And then we have guaranteed loans, and those loans are where you might go as a producer and apply to farm credit for a loan. And farm credit would come to the farm service agency and ask us to put a guarantee or like an insurance policy on that loan.

Lucia Brown: 19:22

Both are ways that we are trying to ensure that farmers can receive the credit they need to operate their farming operations. So farmers that are able to get credit from a commercial lender, like a farm credit, we want them to work with that commercial lender, you know, support the economy that way, and and that’s the place that they should be. But sometimes that commercial lender needs a little bit more assurance, and that’s where we come in with that. Now if they’re not quite credit ready to go out to that firm credit, maybe their business is really new, they’ve been through a financial struggle, there’s a lot of different factors that could lead them into our direct loan program. But usually, a commercial lender says, I don’t think you’re quite ready for us yet.

Lucia Brown: 20:04

You might wanna work with the firm service agency to help get started. And and when we find ourselves in that place, we can make loans for operating purposes, and that’s pretty much anything you need to run your farm. Your annual inputs, like your seed, your annual feed needs, your fertilizer, all the things like that, to purchasing foundation livestock, equipment that you need to run your operation, building improvements that are more short term. Like, you know, I need to do some repairs to the siding on my barn or I was really just looking at putting a small addition on things we finance, a washpack shed, something small like that can all be done through our operating loans. In those loans, the repayment terms are generally seven years or less, and the maximum amount that a entity or a person can borrow from us for that purpose is $400,000.

Lucia Brown: 21:01

Mhmm. And then we also have loans for real estate purposes to acquire or improve real estate. So that’d be for, like, major improvements like constructing a goat dairy or a new hay storage barn. And we have other programs that can do commodity storage too, which I think we’ll circle back to after this because it’s an important thing to talk about. But, you know, a new dairy parlor, things like that, we could finance with our farm ownership loans as well as the purchase of an initial farm.

Lucia Brown: 21:29

Like Amanda said, there’s a lot of little variations and little pieces and parts to that. So if you’re thinking about our farm lending programs, there’s a loan assistance tool on farmers.gov that is wonderful. It allows you to self explore eligibility as well as all of our loan types. But I should say since I said the maximum amount that you could, borrow for operating loans, the maximum amount for farm ownership loans is 600,000. It’s a good amount of money, but I think we all know that it takes more and more to acquire farms Mhmm.

Lucia Brown: 22:00

These days, and we can partner with other lenders too. So we could put our 600,000 with somebody else’s money if you’re eligible for our programs and, you know, combine assistance to finance the purchase of a farm if needed. We really are working with family sized farms. That doesn’t mean, that you need to it’s interesting as you talk to people sometimes misconceptions that people have. They either think they had to grow up on a family farm.

Lucia Brown: 22:26

You don’t have to do that. You could be a first generation farmer to access our programs. Everybody that works for your farm doesn’t need to be in the member of a family. But what we’re not lending to are big corporate owned farms labor. We’re looking for folks that are actively involved in their own operations, providing their own management and labor, and then they can hire other label labor they might need to supplement their own.

Lucia Brown: 22:56

But that’s what we mean when we talk about, you know, family sized farm. So I think that gives you an idea of what we can lend for. You have any other things that you’re thinking you

Colt Knight: 23:09

need to start? A a farmer or a producer that’s deciding that that you’re wanting maybe to get a loan for an upgrade or something, what what is the process for them to get the ball rolling on that?

Lucia Brown: 23:22

That’s a great question. First, I would say that you wanna be sure you have a business plan. When you’re gonna come and apply for financing, you wanna have thought through, you know, what you’re planning on doing. If you have your own historical records, you should have a summary of between one and three years of what you’ve done in the past. Be prepared to provide some financial information to us.

Lucia Brown: 23:47

And I would also recommend reaching out to your loan officer, which, again, your Amanda said we would mention farmers.gov law. If you’re not sure where your current county office is, you know, that’s what you wanna do is find out who are your county office is, get in touch with them, and find out who the loan staff is that works with customers in your area. And I would recommend that people set up an appointment. But I would say that, you know, having a business plan is gonna be just one of the biggest things that you can do to help yourself when you come in and apply for financing, through the Farm Service Agency or any other ag lender for that matter. So being sort of prepared to talk about what your goals are, what your business is, what your markets are for your products, and all the sorts of things like that.

Lucia Brown: 24:32

We recently I say recently. It’s within the last couple of years now. Simplified our application process. So we used to have a number of different forms, and we consolidated all of those down into one application that still has a good number of pages. But when you work all the way through it, you’ve pretty much satisfied all of the information requirements to file that application.

Lucia Brown: 25:00

And you can find that online, or you can call your local office and ask them to send you a copy of it. You can file applications online now, although that hasn’t been a really, widely utilized tool here in the state of Maine. But people can file applications online if that’s what they would like to do. They can submit applications by email if that’s what they would like to do.

Colt Knight: 25:26

What would you say the the typical consumer would look like walking into the FSA office? Or are are they folks wanting to buy farms or folks looking for operational loans or looking for the the disaster relief programs? Or

Lucia Brown: 25:44

I think it really depends. For our farm loan customers, we cover a pretty wide range of things. Depending on the area of the state that you’re in, you might see a lot of farmers who are more like beginning farmers getting annual operating loans for annual crop production in certain parts of the state. We do business with a lot of, organic, diversified vegetable farmers, diversified livestock operations. I mean, but any kind of agriculture you can think of, we really touch it.

Lucia Brown: 26:15

Beef, dairy, like I said, vegetables, fruit growers, Christmas tree growers. We’ve had some maple syrup customers, depending I’m talking about loans, but, you know, so just the whole variety. If you’re farming and you’re producing what we call an agricultural commodity, something for food, fiber, human consumption, pretty much that we see the whole range of things.

Amanda May: 26:45

And on the program end of things, it really is dependent on the season, the weather, and honestly, what programs we’re implementing at that time. Some of our programs are consistent and available all the time. However, over the past few years, the national office has handed us ad hoc programs here and there as they saw needed. We just wrapped up a sign up for the marketing assistance for specialty crop growers program, that was geared to producers of specialty crops. We had them apply providing either twenty twenty three’s revenue or twenty twenty four’s revenue.

Amanda May: 27:23

And then we just made them a direct payment based on that to facilitate their marketing of their crop for 2025, which leads me to, again, stressing the importance of signing up for our gov delivery bulletins and newsletters because that is how we’re gonna get that information to you. If a program applies to you, you’ll see it in the gov delivery bulletin. And I mentioned weather also. Twenty twenty three, many of you remember, it started out with, like, a extremely cold day in February. We had a late frost in May, to wet weather and then it it wrapped up on December 18 with that major rain and windstorm.

Amanda May: 28:07

That was just a horrendous year weather wise. And so we saw so many people come through our door applying for disaster assistance type programs that year. So like farming, so much is dependent on the weather and what’s coming at you when for the program side of things.

Colt Knight: 28:29

So I’m really curious. What is your favorite part of working with FSA?

Amanda May: 28:35

I, you know, I really like problem solving.

Lucia Brown: 28:38

Mhmm.

Amanda May: 28:39

And every day, there’s different challenges. I like the fact that, we get these programs designed to fit the entire nation, which that includes, you know, so many different parts of our country. A lot of them I feel like are designed to fit the grain belt, and really aren’t designed to fit producers in Maine. So I like taking those rules and finding gray area and making them work for the people that we serve here in Maine. Yeah.

Amanda May: 29:12

I like, you know, taking something complex and simplifying it and making it easier and making it work. And I also like the thought of, like, with the MASC program, trying to get as many people as we can enrolled in our programs because that’s taking federal dollars, putting them in the hands of Maine farmers who are people that I really care about and appreciate, and then they spend that dollar locally. So it just kind of spreads and affects local communities. So

Lucia Brown: 29:43

yeah. I second that and I guess I was glad you answered first because it gave me a minute to think about my two favorite things. One, I love learning about all different kinds of farming. So I love the opportunity to work with all different types of producers. You’ve emailed me a few times about some

Colt Knight: 30:01

of the more alternative farms from Buffalo to.

Lucia Brown: 30:05

But it’s so fun to learn about what people do and how they do it differently and how they’ve specialized things to make it successful for themselves maybe in a way that I haven’t heard of somebody else doing. So I love that. I always loved when I when I used to work in county office as a loan officer. I loved working with customers and helping them with their business planning. And very rewarding, recently to meet a couple of farmers who we funded their initial farm purchase.

Lucia Brown: 30:35

And a number of years later, they’re still in business. They’re thriving. They’re meeting their business goals. And just to hear the impact that we had on their lives, a couple of them actually said, I don’t think anybody else would have ever made us alone to do this. I think anybody was probably crazy to lend us money to buy a farm.

Lucia Brown: 30:54

Now we weren’t clearly because here they are a number of years later. They’re part of their local economy. They’re producing food. Their farms are successful. And like I said, so to be able to be part of somebody’s story like that

Colt Knight: 31:07

Mhmm.

Lucia Brown: 31:08

Is just really it it’s why we do what we do. And then, again, like Amanda said, you know, the opportunity to affect our local communities to really, you know, add value. The taxpayers, entrust us with their dollars, you know, through the process, and we’re, you know, able to put them back out into farming communities and rural communities. And and I think that’s really important, about what we do too and and very, a good part of our jobs.

Colt Knight: 31:38

Yep. That’s awesome to hear. Are there any upcoming events that people might be able to see the FSA in person?

Amanda May: 31:48

February 15, we’ll have representation at the Blueberry meeting in Ellsworth. Mhmm. And then I believe we will be present at the dairy meeting Yes. In Augusta.

Lucia Brown: 32:02

Yes. It’s gonna be the Augusta Civic Center. Correct? The dairy the annual dairy meeting. Mhmm.

Lucia Brown: 32:09

Yes. So those are our two most, I guess, immediate upcoming events. And to be honest with you, we didn’t bring a whole calendar of events with us. So we have a whole system that we keep all that in, but that wasn’t what I thought to pick up today.

Amanda May: 32:23

Same. But but pretty much any event, we are open to attending. I mean, if there’s someone listening and they’re hosting an event and they would like us to attend, definitely reach out to us. We we would be more than happy to come and contribute as whatever we can.

Lucia Brown: 32:40

And it will also be at the Northern Maine Community College. We’re gonna have some folks there talking to potential, you know, future graduates about what we can offer for folks that may wanna go into farming.

Amanda May: 32:50

And then maybe a career fair right here on campus.

Lucia Brown: 32:53

Career fair

Amanda May: 32:54

here at

Lucia Brown: 32:54

University of Maine. Yes. These are all ones we’ve talked about recently. It’s coming back to me now.

Colt Knight: 33:00

Well, Lucia, Amanda, it was great to have you on the podcast, and we look forward to seeing you out there in the real world at at in person events and fairs and shows and everything. And, I’d like to remind the listeners, if they have questions, comments, concerns, suggested episodes, you can send us an email at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.

In complying with the letter and spirit of applicable laws and pursuing its own goals of diversity, the University of Maine System does not discriminate on the grounds of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, transgender status, gender, gender identity or expression, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship status, familial status, ancestry, age, disability physical or mental, genetic information, or veterans or military status in employment, education, and all other programs and activities.  The University provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities upon request. The following person has been designated to handle inquiries regarding non-discrimination policies: Director of Equal Opportunity and Title IX Services, 5713 Chadbourne Hall, Room 412, University of Maine, Orono, ME  04469-5713, 207.581.1226, TTY 711 (Maine Relay System).