Donna Coffin: 00:01

I don’t work here anymore.

Glenda Pereira: 00:04

That’s what we’re gonna talk about. Donna, what are you doing?

Colt Knight: 00:07

Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am one of your cohost, Dr. Colt Knight, joined by colleague, Dr. Glenda Pereira.

Glenda Pereira: 00:16

And Raymond. Raymond’s a cohost today.

Colt Knight: 00:19

Okay. Well, we are officially giving Raymond dog Donna Coffin’s black lab that she packs around everywhere. He gets to be an official co host the podcast. We’ll have to put him in the credits.

Glenda Pereira: 00:34

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 00:37

Well

Donna Coffin: 00:38

Well, thanks for having me.

Colt Knight: 00:39

Thanks for coming, Donna. We appreciate you coming out here. Right before Donna walks into the building, the power went out to the entire island, and we didn’t know if we were gonna even be able to record this podcast or not. But then as we came in, it magically appeared again. And I was reminiscing with the other dairy specialists while the power was out about ten years ago.

Colt Knight: 01:06

Squirrels kept getting into the transformers and killing the power on the island all the time. And I was wondering if if the squirrels were the cause of this one as well or if it was a accident or the wind or

Glenda Pereira: 01:19

And they’ve been doing a lot of construction on on the building.

Colt Knight: 01:23

Well, Donna was saying that it was out of the traffic lights. So it wasn’t just a campus outage. Yeah.

Donna Coffin: 01:28

There were a few trees that were down.

Glenda Pereira: 01:30

Yeah.

Donna Coffin: 01:31

I came across Hudson there, and there was a tree right down on the road and they had cones around it. It’s like, oh.

Colt Knight: 01:39

Growing up in the country in West Virginia, it’s so wooded. Every time the wind blew, the power went out.

Donna Coffin: 01:45

Well, I can’t believe you’re a driveway. I imagine you had to take a chainsaw with you every time there’s a

Colt Knight: 01:51

Yeah. Well, folks talk about winter driving in Maine and and different states. And I’m like, well, in West Virginia, the road is cut into the side of the mountain. So if if if you slide to the left, it’s no big deal because you just hit hit the hillside. But if you slide to the right, you just careen into the holler and there’s no telling when you’ll stop whether it’s 100 feet or or a thousand.

Colt Knight: 02:14

So we’re a little bit more cautious winter drivers, I would suspect.

Donna Coffin: 02:20

Yeah. Not bad.

Colt Knight: 02:21

When I lived out west, people would talk about how slippery the roads are and this and that. Was like, big deal. If you just slide off into the flat ground, know, you’re inconvenienced for a little while. You’re not gonna die. It’s not not a very big deal.

Glenda Pereira: 02:35

Yeah. So you are danger adrenaline chaser slash you thrive in that environment because I couldn’t live that way. I’d be scared.

Colt Knight: 02:48

When I worked in the coal mines, I worked on the draglines and shovels. And for the folks that aren’t familiar with that equipment, a big dragline weighs about 12 million pounds. It looks like a giant crane with a big bucket on it. The bucket is the size of a room. The biggest dragline ever made was Big Musky in Ohio.

Colt Knight: 03:08

It had a 220 cubic yard bucket.

Glenda Pereira: 03:11

Oh my God.

Colt Knight: 03:12

That means every scoop of dirt was literally the size of a small school bus. I’ve got pictures of an entire marching band standing in the bucket of that thing. But anyway, you know, they’d be 203 foot tall. And, and back when I first started working on that equipment, we didn’t have safety harnesses and all that fancy stuff, you

Glenda Pereira: 03:33

know, we

Colt Knight: 03:34

would just climb up top and work. And I can remember just welding on like a six inch piece of metal on the side of the boom for something to stand on while we swung over and grease something or fix this or that because the first thing to come off are the catwalks. Oh. Because the catwalks are surrounding all the pins and lines and everything. So you gotta take those off to be able to remove everything out.

Colt Knight: 03:58

And, of course, as we progress through my career in the mines, safety became more and more important. We had to start wearing harnesses. You know, it started out we would wear a harness, but no one actually clicked it on anything because couldn’t move around. Steps.

Donna Coffin: 04:14

Well, you get stuck.

Colt Knight: 04:15

Yeah. You couldn’t move around, so nobody would click it. Well, then you had to click it onto something. So that means that somebody had to go up there and weld on a d ring so that you could click on your harness to something. And then over time that progressed, you had to have two lanyards on your harness.

Colt Knight: 04:32

Because if you were traveling, you could only go, like, three or four foot because that’s how long your lanyard was. We had to have two. That way, you could walk over three foot, click your second harness on, remove the other one, so on and so forth. And it just, I don’t know. That’s probably one of the main reasons I quit working in the mines.

Glenda Pereira: 04:51

Safety.

Colt Knight: 04:52

Is the safety aspect. And it’s a horrible thing to say that.

Glenda Pereira: 04:55

But I meanColt Knight: 04:56

it became a whole lot less fun.

Glenda Pereira: 04:58

It was advantageous for us because we got to have you here in Maine. So I think

Colt Knight: 05:04

It was plus

Donna Coffin: 05:04

for us.

Glenda Pereira: 05:05

Challenge for you was a yeah. A plus for Maine. Absolutely.

Colt Knight: 05:09

Alright. We had so much fun working in the coal mines before, you know, the safety aspect took over. The practical jokes were next level. You know, you would never shut a door on a porta potty in a coal mine, ever. Because if you did, someone would come up and put a welding rod in the clasp and lock you in there.

Colt Knight: 05:29

And there is just you can’t imagine the terrible things that would happen to you if you’re locked in a porta potty in that situation. I mean, best case scenario, they’re just gonna throw rocks at it. And the acoustics in one of those things, it’ll blow your eardrums out. I mean, that that’s best case scenario. You know, slightly worst is they’re gonna rocket and the blue water starts slashing around, you know.

Colt Knight: 05:53

That’s that’s not very fun. Worst case scenario is they actually pick it up with a fork truck or a crane and set the porta potty on something. And so yeah. You you never would shut the door at one of those. Never ever ever ever.

Glenda Pereira: 06:12

And You’re always learning something new from Colton.

Colt Knight: 06:14

Mhmm. And

Donna Coffin: 06:16

and his idea of fun and practical jokes. It’s like, oh my god.

Colt Knight: 06:20

And fire extinguishers were another practical joke. If you ever been doused with a fire extinguisher, it’s a different experience.

Glenda Pereira: 06:26

Can’t say I have.

Colt Knight: 06:27

It probably contains all those good cancer causing PFAS chemicals we were just just mentioning.

Glenda Pereira: 06:32

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 06:33

You know, back in those days, we didn’t have work trucks didn’t really have air conditioning. So you drive with your windows down and then, you know, we had the back window that that slid open. And if you would pull the pin out of a fire extinguisher and put it in the rib of a truck bed, when you went downhill, the fire extinguisher would slide forward and push the handle on the fire extinguisher and flood your truck. And you would think that you you just drove through a brush fire. It would be so thick and and everything.

Colt Knight: 07:06

And you couldn’t breathe, so you’d have to, like, stop and bail out whenever it happened.

Glenda Pereira: 07:11

So dangerous adrenaline, all things that Cole thrives in, it sounds like, because that doesn’t sound like a good driving experience.

Colt Knight: 07:20

God, you got used to it. I could remember the fog being so thick on some of those mountains that one person would get out with a lantern and walk 10 feet in front of the truck and guide you, which was important because the big rock trucks, they haul 360 tons of rock. They’re so tall, the tires are 13 foot tall. There’s two flights of steps to get to the operator’s cab. Because of the extreme height of those operator cabs, the operator can’t see the first eighty to 100 feet in front.

Colt Knight: 07:54

Yeah. So you have to make sure to stay well out of their way because they could run over a regular pickup truck like a tin can. Mhmm. We we got to witness it one time. It’s it was pretty morbid, but the operator said he didn’t even feel it when he ran over that f three fifty.

Donna Coffin: 08:10

Oh, jeez.

Colt Knight: 08:11

So there’s always things to be cautious of when you worked in the coal mines. Yeah. And I guess if you didn’t have a sense of humor about it, it would drive you crazy. Well,

Donna Coffin: 08:21

glad you survived that. I’m glad you came to Maine. Glad you studied animal science and all that

Glenda Pereira: 08:26

stuff. Changed career paths.

Colt Knight: 08:28

It was quite a different career path.

Glenda Pereira: 08:31

Which brings us, to our topic at hand today. So we have Donna Coffin in the studio. In the studio. Donna, why don’t you introduce yourself to the listeners? However, I’m sure many of you many of our listeners know of you already, but introduce yourself.

Colt Knight: 08:51

Needs no introduction.

Donna Coffin: 08:52

Right. Well, I’m Donna Coffin and I am, retired. I think it’s been two years now. And I worked for a Cooperative Extension in Piscataquis and Penobscot Counties. Worked with farmers and gardeners.

Donna Coffin: 09:06

I did have a short period of time that I was doing statewide beef work before we got colt. Yay. And I used to do some horsework, but primarily it was like business management. We had a program we call So You Want to Farm in Maine. It was started by the infamous Dick Brzozowski.

Donna Coffin: 09:27

And I also did gardening programs like the One Tomato program where we gave out tomatoes for people to start. And the thought was, if they’ve never gardened before, just start with one, put it in a bucket, and you can grow it. And we ended up giving out like 3,300 tomatoes. I sent surveys to people and we estimated that they produced like $9 worth of cherry tomatoes.

Glenda Pereira: 09:56

Nice.

Donna Coffin: 09:57

That was a good program.

Glenda Pereira: 09:58

Yeah. My son loves cherry tomatoes and they’re so easy to grow. So that’s a great vegetable.

Donna Coffin: 10:05

Well, I remember we were down on

Glenda Pereira: 10:07

the Is it a vegetable or a fruit?

Donna Coffin: 10:09

Well, it depends who you are.

Glenda Pereira: 10:11

Oh. Yes.

Donna Coffin: 10:13

Botanically, is a fruit.

Glenda Pereira: 10:14

Yes. I thought so.

Donna Coffin: 10:15

Was gonna

Colt Knight: 10:15

say by definition, it’s

Donna Coffin: 10:17

a fruit. Culinary. It’s it’s a vegetable. But I can remember we were down on the Bangor Waterfront for some event and I had my tomatoes in the pots there. Course, we had a lot of young families come through and this one mother said, Oh, my kids, they hate tomatoes.

Donna Coffin: 10:36

And it was a golden one. And I said, oh, you wanna try this? And so the little boy tried it and he goes, oh, this is very good. And the mother’s going, oh gosh.

Glenda Pereira: 10:45

There’s just something different too about growing your own fruit and picking it. So maybe, as you, you know, handed out those tomatoes and and gave the those families those experiences, they then were able to change their behavior about how they consume a fruit, which I think kids kids now I realize this kids wanna be really independent. And I think we’ve always treated them as, you know, kids. But my son loves to eat on his own. And if you try to feed him, he doesn’t want it.

Glenda Pereira: 11:18

But if he has the spoon or the fork on his own, he wants to eat it. So maybe that’s some of it too is empowering kids to choose whatever they wanna eat.

Colt Knight: 11:28

Yeah. Growing up in a house full of brothers, it was more like survival.

Donna Coffin: 11:33

Just whatever food was

Colt Knight: 11:34

left in the You had get what was there right away.

Glenda Pereira: 11:37

Yeah. Everyone

Colt Knight: 11:39

makes fun of me because how fast I eat, but I I just remember growing up, it was like, oh,

Glenda Pereira: 11:44

wack wack.

Colt Knight: 11:44

Yeah. We gotta grab that pork chop before the other one gets it.

Donna Coffin: 11:47

Yeah. If you wanted a pork chop, you had to get it. Mhmm. Be the first.

Glenda Pereira: 11:52

And so, Donna, you’re actually in the studio today on our one year podcastiversary.

Colt Knight: 11:58

Oh. Podcastiversary.

Glenda Pereira: 12:00

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 12:00

Did you just make that up? Or were you thinking about it for a while?

Glenda Pereira: 12:02

I’ve been thinking about it for a while because so we’ve been recording and publishing content for one year now.

Colt Knight: 12:09

We’ve been publishing for a year. I’ve actually been recording a little bit longer because we started gathering episodes before we released. Yep. We never wanted to run out of episodes. Yeah.

Colt Knight: 12:20

We always wanted to have a weekly release.

Glenda Pereira: 12:22

Yep. So, we invited Donna out because when Colt and I were talking, we’re like, what are we gonna do for podcastiversary? And I said, well, we haven’t had Donna. And, Donna is somebody who’s still a resource. Even though she’s retired, she’s still the resource for us folks in extension.

Glenda Pereira: 12:40

And just before we started recording, she was helping me with my reappointment packet. So she’s just a wealth of knowledge for folks here in Maine. And so I wanted to invite her, on the podcast for this one year special featured episode, to kind of, talk about, you know, what extension looks like now and and kind of changes over the years. I mean, some of it will tie back to your programs. But you have a lot of historical knowledge that, I don’t have.

Glenda Pereira: 13:13

And and Colt’s been here a little bit longer than I have. But, we think it’d be good to just kind of talk about your perspective and share some about your programming as well. So without further ado, you talked about so you want a farm in Maine. What what did that program entail and how did it come into development?

Donna Coffin: 13:35

Well, there was another group of us in Central Maine that started a beginning farmer course. It was like back in Oh, it must have been in 1980s. And the idea was to give farmers some information on bookkeeping and crop health, animal health, and resources that are available in the community, like the different government agencies. And so we did that for a few years. And then Dick came up with this more encompassing idea and call it So You Want a Farm in Maine?

Donna Coffin: 14:16

Because we’re getting a lot of people that they like the mystique of coming to Maine and they like the idea of having a farm but had no clue what it meant. And we used to get people that would say, Oh, I want a farm, but I don’t wanna make any money. And it’s like, that’s not gonna last long. Are you sure your spouse understands that they’re gonna be pouring money into this enterprise and not getting anything back? And when you say you don’t want to make money, do you want to make at least your taxes?

Donna Coffin: 14:53

And so we tried to get people to think about those things. And a lot of times people decided, well, they guessed they didn’t really want to farm. They just wanted to live in the country. And it’s like, well, that’s okay. Whatever you decide is okay, but understand the implications of it.

Donna Coffin: 15:10

And so it was probably we had as many people decide not to farm as we had decide to farm.

Colt Knight: 15:17

Yeah, whenever I do my programming, I’m always hammering home the business aspect of farming because a lot of folks put farming in a separate category than a business. And it’s just a business that’s running an agrarian way in the country. And if you do not treat it as a business, it won’t last.

Donna Coffin: 15:39

And we also talked about if we had a lot of people that wanted to sell direct and it’s like, Well, do you like to communicate with people? And they go, Oh, I hate people. And it’s like, Well, do you have somebody in your family that can interact with people? Like when you go to a farmer’s market, they say, Oh, hate going to a farmer’s market. It’s like, Well, somebody is gonna have to do that if you’re gonna sell direct.

Donna Coffin: 16:04

And then they’ll decide, Well, maybe they wanna do wholesaling. And that fits their niche. They fit into that niche.

Colt Knight: 16:12

And then you have to discuss, you have to be so large to be able to wholesale and your little backyard production probably won’t fit into that model.

Donna Coffin: 16:23

And then we talked about people that wanted to raise livestock. They thought that they could just raise an animal, slaughter it and sell the cuts of meat. So we had to go through that whole process. And it’s for food safety, so you’re producing a safe food. And yes, you may know how to do this.

Donna Coffin: 16:42

And Colt does the meat cutting classes, but you still have to have that independent inspector to say, Yes, this is a quality animal. And a lot of people are like, Oh, that’s what we need to do.

Colt Knight: 16:58

I get this question a lot. I bet. It’s like, I have a hard time finding a meat processing appointment. I have some skills. I would like to start my own meat processing facility, either just to process my own animals to sell or to to process other people’s animals for sale.

Colt Knight: 17:18

I have a folding table in a garage. How do I get started? And you know, it’s like, do you have a million dollars? Do you have a million and a half dollars? No.

Colt Knight: 17:30

Well, you’re probably not going to get started. Well, I have a hard I can make this work.

Donna Coffin: 17:36

They have a hard time understanding that. And you try to go through the numbers with them. And I’m sure you’ve dealt with a number of people. I had to, too. And I get you in on some of those.

Donna Coffin: 17:49

And it’s like they don’t comprehend it. And then they say, Well, it’s all this regulation. It’s like, It’s not the regulation. It’s like the whole business aspect of it. You can’t just do it just one animal at a time.

Colt Knight: 18:05

I had that conversation with some folks one time And I asked them, how many animals do you need to make this this work? And they said, well, just one a day. And I was like, you have not done your due diligence.

Donna Coffin: 18:19

And they plan to hire people to help?

Colt Knight: 18:21

Yeah, that’s the other thing. It’s like, you have a big family? Do you plan on living at the meat processing facility twenty four hours a day? No, I’m just gonna hire people. And the answer to that is there’s no one to hire.

Colt Knight: 18:35

That’s a big issue.

Donna Coffin: 18:36

But we have seen people that have made it work and have thought about it and done the background work and appear to be successful now. I hope we’re not discouraging people, but it takes a lot of work. It’s business.

Glenda Pereira: 18:55

And so I’m curious, what were some of the things that led to a successful program about So You Want a Farm in Maine from your perspective as an extension educator?

Donna Coffin: 19:11

Think it was involving my colleagues, not only my extension colleagues, but other government agencies, getting the Maine Department of Agriculture involved, the Swim and Water Conservation District, Farm Service Agency, getting everybody involved, NRCS, so that you could plan a program that farmers could do like a one stop shop. And they’d be able to find out regulations that they needed, how to interact with people, how to get their crops and their livestock growing efficiently and whatever method that they chose, but had to understand the whole breadth of farming enterprise.

Glenda Pereira: 19:56

Nice.

Colt Knight: 19:56

I’m curious. You were an extension for a long time.

Donna Coffin: 20:01

I was.

Colt Knight: 20:02

How many years were you an extension agent?

Donna Coffin: 20:04

I I’m from Maine originally, but my first extension appointment was in Ohio, Geauga County, first woman agriculture agent out there. And I started in 1977. And I’m from Maine so it’s like I tried to come back to Maine a couple of times. One time they decided to hire me and I decided that wasn’t the situation that I wanted. And I came back again and they decided they didn’t want me.

Donna Coffin: 20:36

And then I came back, same county, Piscataquis County. And the second time they said, Yeah, we’d like to hire you. And that was in 1980. And so I’ve been in Piscataquis County since 1980, so it’s forty three years.

Glenda Pereira: 20:51

The first woman extension agent in Ohio.

Donna Coffin: 20:54

Yep.

Glenda Pereira: 20:55

What was that like?

Donna Coffin: 20:57

Well, the county I was in had a woman veterinarian and a woman that did the dairy rations. So it was like the farmers in that county seemed to be more accepting. Also, half of the county was urban and half was rural. And that half that was rural had a large Amish community. So I had a lot of dairy farms, Amish farmers, they did pigs.

Donna Coffin: 21:28

They helped with the feeder pig sale. But they seemed to be more accepting of it. The people that weren’t accepting were the administration. And I didn’t know until I left that the supervisor that came for the interviews, and they had all of us in the same place at the same time, so you kind of met everybody. And there was another man that they interviewed that had the same educational background as me, but didn’t have any agriculture experience.

Donna Coffin: 21:59

At that time, I was milking 300 cows for a farm in New Hampshire. And it was one of the dairy farmers that was on the hiring committee said, Well, but she’s got experience. The guy from the university did not want to hire me because I was a woman. That was his reason. And it was the dairy farmers on the hiring committee that convinced them, yes, we want her.

Donna Coffin: 22:27

And it was like, I didn’t know that

Glenda Pereira: 22:29

Right.

Donna Coffin: 22:29

Until I left. And it

Colt Knight: 22:30

was like, Eddie, that whole deal flip. When I first started in animal science and agriculture, it was majority male, but there were females involved. My girlfriend, when I was an undergraduate, her mom was the first person to get an animal science degree. And she had to fight to be accepted into the program because you had to take a meat cutting course. And they didn’t think that was right for women to take meat cutting courses at that time.

Colt Knight: 22:58

And but throughout my career, it it went from majority male to about fifty fifty, and now it’s overwhelmingly female. Mhmm. And it’s mostly driven by urban students coming in wanting to be veterinarians. The other flip that I saw was that the program ceased being more of a rural students coming from a farming background to more of a urban students coming into an agricultural field.

Glenda Pereira: 23:32

Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 23:33

And so we’re no longer teaching the farmers’ kids how to be better farmers, so to speak. It’s it’s more we’re teaching folks that are completely naive at the college level. So

Donna Coffin: 23:44

That are coming in not knowing what, what farm life is like.

Colt Knight: 23:49

Or what end of the cow is which.

Glenda Pereira: 23:53

And I would say that at UMaine, we give them that experience. The kids that come to this program, we’ve talked about it before, they actually get to, do a lot of things out at the farm and they kind of learn. They they get their hands dirty per se. But I’m curious. So what what were some of those, you know, obstacles that you overcame during that time that help you be so successful?

Glenda Pereira: 24:24

Because for folks who haven’t met Donna, she was really successful here in the state of Maine working with and and contributed to the improvement of a lot of agricultural industries, as she mentioned, not only, livestock, but gardening as well and companion animals too.

Colt Knight: 24:40

And she helps train an entire generation of new extension agents here.

Donna Coffin: 24:45

Yeah. Well, as we were talking, I’m not sure people realize I did not grow up on a farm. I was one of those actually, it was a rural area that I grew up in. My father was a mechanic. My mother sewed shoes at the shoe shop.

Donna Coffin: 25:02

And I was the first in my family to go to college. And it was like my grandmother was devastated that I was going to leave the hometown, my grandmother. She pumped gas. And it’s like, so I’m from a family that did not typical things for your gender. And I wanted to be a veterinarian, that’s why I came.

Donna Coffin: 25:28

I actually went to Cornell to interview to improve my chances for getting in. And they said, Well, we don’t want women in the vet school. We don’t want to spend our time training you and having you get married and have babies. So that’s how I turned to Extension. So it’s like you’re given a block, and it’s like, but how can you achieve something of what you want?

Donna Coffin: 26:01

Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to, but they work out.

Colt Knight: 26:05

Donna’s had such a long career. We could sit here and talk for three weeks about all the amazing programs that she’s done. But one of the things that I wanted to ask her about is how she’s spending her time now that she’s retired. We always see her at spinning clubs and knitting. I thought that was a good segue because we can talk a little bit about fiber production too.

Donna Coffin: 26:30

Right. I don’t have any livestock right now. But as you heard, I have my dog, Raymond, and I also have a cat at home, Monty. Monty’s like Raymond’s little brother. And so I started getting involved.

Donna Coffin: 26:45

And it’s an international back to back wool challenge group. I always spun. I had a spinning wheel back in the 90s. And I put it away for like twenty years. And so in retirement, it’s like, what are you gonna do?

Donna Coffin: 26:58

So we had a spinning group right in Dover. So I thought a while ago, it was like a statewide meeting. And at that meeting, a woman got up and said, Well, we wanna have this team, but we have to have eight people. And I spun and I knit and I crocheted. It’s like, Yeah, I’ll help.

Donna Coffin: 27:15

And it’s been so much fun. And yes, it’s international. And last year we came in third place.

Glenda Pereira: 27:21

Oh my gosh, congratulations. And what

Donna Coffin: 27:22

it is, we take a sheep and we have one of the members shears a sheep with hand shears, so clippers. And the rest of us spin, ply and knit a sweater. And last year it took us ten and a half hours. And Australia has already done their event and their fastest time was eleven hours and forty minutes. So it’s like,

Glenda Pereira: 27:45

yes. Wow.

Donna Coffin: 27:47

We can do it.

Colt Knight: 27:47

Rocking on that deal.

Donna Coffin: 27:49

Yeah, we can beat them this year. But the world champion time is like, it’s less than five hours. It’s like, we don’t know how they do it. With hand shear? Hand shear the sheep, spin the wool, spin it in grease, and then you ply it and then you knit it.

Donna Coffin: 28:08

And you don’t prepare the wool at all. It’s like a raw wool sweater.

Colt Knight: 28:12

And wool production was such a critical aspect of of life

Donna Coffin: 28:20

Oh, yeah.

Colt Knight: 28:21

For thousands of years.

Donna Coffin: 28:23

Well, this started, I think it was the sixteen hundreds in England. Somebody said, well, they wanted to have make a sweater from the back of the sheep. They don’t call sweaters sweaters. And they said they’d give so many gold coin or whatever. And that went away for a while.

Donna Coffin: 28:45

And then it started up again in well, it was almost twenty five years ago. They started this international competition to see if you could do it. And our team also does fundraising for Sarah’s house. So during the year, we have practice sessions. And we have the sweater that we made in the competition that we sell raffle tickets on for Sarah’s house.

Donna Coffin: 29:08

And then we also do a practice sweater that people can buy. We do socks and mittens and toys and vests and fingerless gloves. That’s a big thing right now. Shawls and that type of thing. We have them online.

Donna Coffin: 29:28

If people go on Facebook and they can see our Facebook page, mainly spinners, and can bid on them there. And then May 17 is the event. It’s going to be at the Bangor Extension office. The shears will start at eight So if you want to see the sheep being shorn, it takes about half an hour. And then we’ll be there the rest of the day.

Donna Coffin: 29:49

And we have all of our items that are for sale. We have a suggested price, but you can give more if you want because it’s for the benefit of Sarah’s house. But last year, we had Channel five came and the reporter stayed almost all day. Wow. And she learned to spin.

Donna Coffin: 30:07

She was so thrilled. And so we have people that talk to each other. But the team are the only people that can touch the wool. So if you want to touch wool, we have other fleece that you can touch, but you can’t touch the one that we’re making into a sweater. And sheep’s wool

Colt Knight: 30:25

is so uniquely characterized that we can use it for spinning and weaving. If you’ve never looked at wool fiber under a microscope, it looks like dragon scales almost. And the spinning and the process of making felt, you know, for hats or what have you, it’s all the same process. It’s almost like Velcro. The scales on those fibers interlock with each other.

Colt Knight: 30:52

And the more you work it, the tighter it gets. It’s almost, it’s like an arrow, you know, the barb on the arrow prevents it from backing out so you can push it tighter and tighter. And so when they spin those fibers, that’s essentially what they’re doing, is they’re winding it into thread, but also the spinning motion is like making it tighter and tighter. That’s I mean, that’s the way we do felt too. Instead of making it a string, you’re making it into a flat piece.

Colt Knight: 31:23

And it’s the same thing. They work it. That’s also why your wool clothing shrinks

Donna Coffin: 31:29

when you put we found out different sheep have different qualities of their fleece and some fleece doesn’t shrink as much. And the other thing we found out, some breeds have more lanolin in them, and that makes it very, very sticky. The one that we used last year didn’t have as much. It was just perfect. But when we have too much lanolin, we use cornstarch to make it a little bit easier to spin and knit.

Colt Knight: 31:59

Now, when you grade wool, you’re looking at a couple different characteristics. Color. Pure white is the most sought after because you can dye it any color that you want. If you’ve got brown or

Donna Coffin: 32:12

darkest That’s in the commercial side of it, Colt. Because now in the hand spun side, it’s like people are looking for the natural colors now.

Colt Knight: 32:19

And then the length of the fiber. So of course, if it’s longer, it’s easier to spin or felt. And then how fine it is. And, you know, that’s basically how the diameter of the wool fiber and how scaly it is. And so the rougher stuff is the itchy wool that folks don’t like.

Colt Knight: 32:41

And then the finer wool that has a smaller diameter and and it’s not as scaly, that’s the the more high end stuff that you see.

Donna Coffin: 32:48

We just had a fleece. We just had a practice, I think it was last week, and we had a fleece that had some longer fibers in it. And I mentioned, well, think that’s medulated. And of course, all the other spinners are going, Medulated? What does that mean?

Donna Coffin: 33:04

I said, Well, I think I remembered that correctly. And it means it has a center to the fiber. And it makes it more like a dog like fiber. So it’s itchy, it doesn’t have any crimp.

Colt Knight: 33:20

We also learned the crimps on that fiber. That’s the waviness. The more crimp it has, the more it will hold itself together.

Donna Coffin: 33:30

Some breeds have really crimpy like Reno, and then some have more wavy like Romney. I used to raise Romney sheep.

Colt Knight: 33:39

And

Donna Coffin: 33:40

I still have some of that fiber that I sent away to be cleaned and I still have these big bags of it, so I’m still working at it.

Colt Knight: 33:49

Yeah. And then some of your other species that we use for fiber, your alpacas and whatnot, they’re not as good when it comes to the weaving aspect. It doesn’t have this as scaly as nature and it’s more coarse. Has its uses.

Donna Coffin: 34:06

But it’s alpaca is actually softer. And what we found out, someone gave us a bunch of free alpaca fleece. They’re camelid and they tend to roll in the dust. And so here we were doing sheep’s wool, raw sheep’s wool. So I figured, well, I’ll just do that.

Donna Coffin: 34:25

Well, comes with a lot of dust in it, but that helps when you’re spinning. It will hold it together. Otherwise, it slips. And last year, I had an alpaca scarf that I think sold for like $50 And the woman still shows me. But it has a different feel, a very different feel than sheep’s wool.

Donna Coffin: 34:48

See all that stuff you have to wash afterwards? And people ask, Well, what do you use? And a lot of folks think, Well, Woolite or something like that. It’s like, I learned just use Dawn dishwashing liquid and hot water.

Glenda Pereira: 35:05

So many uses.

Donna Coffin: 35:06

Yeah, Dawn has many uses. And you can use hot water on a fleece, but you don’t want to change the temperature quickly. You put it in a cold rinse, otherwise it will crimp up. And so I told people that hot, and you can rinse it in hot, and that helps get the grease out of it too.

Colt Knight: 35:28

Yeah. Because Dawn is a degreasing agent. That’s why they use it on the ducks. Yes. I I I have an entire class, period, in in my introduction to animal science that’s devoted to wool and felt and stuff.

Colt Knight: 35:46

And I love talking about cowboy hats as an example because it’s a uniquely American deal. John b Stetson invented the cowboy hat, and his family were hatters from England. And he lived in New Jersey, and he decided that he was gonna go out west to the frontier. And he started trapping, and he used his skills as a that he learned from his parents to create a wide brim hat to keep himself out of the weather out there on the frontier. And he was using the belly portions of the animals they were skinning because they didn’t want those for the skins.

Colt Knight: 36:30

And and back then, a lot of those beaver pelts that we were harvesting were actually going to make the fancy top hats and stuff in England. And they were but they were really fuzzy. If you’ve ever seen an actual top hat up close, it’s really fuzzy because they’re not felted very tightly together, so they don’t hold up well in the weather. Mhmm. And so Americans that were living outside and on the frontier and stuff, the early cowboys were not wearing what we would traditionally call it cowboy hat.

Colt Knight: 36:59

They were wearing, like, derbies and bowler hats and stuff. And then when John B. Stetson made that wide brim hat, everyone got jealous, and he was selling them. And he decided to make a go of it, And he came back to New Jersey and started making hats. A lot of the early sombreros were made in New Jersey and shipped to Mexico.

Colt Knight: 37:24

The felt ones, at least, not the straw ones, but eventually, it moved to Missouri. So most of the hat production was in Missouri. And they used beaver and rabbit. The original ones were rabbit fur, and then they they switched over to to beaver fur. And if you’ve ever had a cowboy hat, they’ve got x’s on the inside.

Colt Knight: 37:43

And the meaning has really lost its definition over time. But back in the day, when it was a four x hat, that means that it had four beaver pelts in it, or four or beaver bellies to make Beaver bellies. Took the felt for that hat. So the more x’s you had, the more felt was in it. So that means it was the more denser, tighter, durable hat.

Colt Knight: 38:05

And if you flip your cowboy hat over, if you’ve got a Stetson, it’s got a picture of a cowboy giving his horse water in the cowboy hat. And that was an advertising deal saying that our hats are so waterproof, you can dip water with them. Not that people would really do that, but that was

Donna Coffin: 38:26

I didn’t realize that. You are a fountain of knowledge.

Colt Knight: 38:31

You wanna talk about inane topics. I’m the person. But it’s really fun to use something as fun as like that cowboy hat example too. Because then we can talk about the different fibers, the felting process, the spinning processes, how that all works, the different things that you can make out of different fibers and whatnot. It all culminates into something that they that they understand and can relate with because not very many folks are wearing wool these days.

Colt Knight: 38:59

Yeah. But everyone’s seen a cowboy movie or hopefully, if they’re in the animal science program, a lot of them have interacted with actual cowboy hats, maybe. Mhmm. Yeah.

Glenda Pereira: 39:10

So what is then, I guess, the fiber production industry like in the state of Maine? Because we haven’t covered that yet on the farmcast before. And can you enlighten us, Donna?

Donna Coffin: 39:24

I think a lot of it is the dealing directly with farms and with spinners and knitters and people that aspire to do more natural fiber types of items.

Colt Knight: 39:42

We don’t really have a commercial wool industry in Maine.

Donna Coffin: 39:45

No, there are some, or I’m not sure if they’re up and running right now. We do have several people that will clean and prepare the fiber for spinning. Actually, there’s one in Milford.

Colt Knight: 39:58

And we still have one fully functional woolen mill in Maine. Oh, Bartlett yarns. Bartlett

Donna Coffin: 40:04

yarns. They’re more of the commercial where if you had that white fleece that, you know, a commercial flock that you wanted to sell a bunch of fleeces, they’d be the place to go.

Colt Knight: 40:18

He did purchase a small scouring plant out of New Mexico so that he could do small batches of yarn for folks.

Donna Coffin: 40:27

Mhmm.

Colt Knight: 40:27

Like if you had your own flock of sheep. Yep. And you wanted, you know, yarn from your specific animal that he could start doing that.

Donna Coffin: 40:34

Yep. Well, that’s good. But of course, where I’m involved with the spinning groups, a lot of them, they have vendors come to a lot of the meetings. And a lot of times it will be the farmer that has had their fleeces processed and they’ll have the name of the ewe or the ram on that fleece so you can go back and buy that same animal’s fleece year after year.

Glenda Pereira: 41:00

That’s so cool.

Donna Coffin: 41:01

And there’s the fiber festival that they have down in Windsor that there are a gazillion fleeces there. But a lot of people are coming back and they’re looking for a specific fleece from a specific animal, of course, from that specific farmer.

Colt Knight: 41:18

When I was working on my master’s degree in Texas, the school mascot was a ram. It was a Rambouleh ram. His name was Dominic, and we kept him around because he had big, huge horns. And every year when he was shorn, the president of the university, his wife would collect that wool and and make a a blanket or a sweater and then auction it off for the alumni association.

Donna Coffin: 41:44

Wow.

Glenda Pereira: 41:44

And when is that Windsor Fair that you were talking about?

Donna Coffin: 41:48

It’s in June. You guys are gonna look that up and you’ll post it with the podcast, I’m sure.

Glenda Pereira: 41:55

It’s called?

Donna Coffin: 41:57

Fiber Festival.

Glenda Pereira: 41:58

The Fiber Festival. Okay. I’ve never been so much curious. Yeah. Yeah.

Glenda Pereira: 42:02

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 42:04

Yeah. And then oftentimes at some of these these fiber events, some wool buyers will be there. So producers have some wool they’d fleeces they’d like to sell, they can.

Donna Coffin: 42:14

And they have a used equipment tent. So if people have equipment that they want to get rid of or that they want to sell and if people are starting anew or need something new, I’ve heard you need to go the first day if you really want to get something because I volunteered to help at the equipment tent on the last day and it was like, Oh, it wasn’t much. They had a big old barn loom that I hadn’t seen and it was like these great big it looked like telephone poles for the posts and just this big and it’s like whoever wanted to buy it, you had to have a big truck to transport it. Even my half ton truck wouldn’t have transported

Colt Knight: 42:57

It’s so amazing because Maine, you know, a few hundred years ago was one of the main fiber producers in The United States. And Maine was full of woolen mills because we had all the streams to to power the water wheels, and it was mostly wool mills in the state of Maine. And then over time, it it shifted into factories, and then it shifted more into the pulp industry. And now we don’t have very many mills left, but it

Donna Coffin: 43:27

Well, it’s supply and demand. Not many people are wearing wool and fabric.

Colt Knight: 43:31

Mhmm. And I have an entire other lecture of why that came about Uh-huh. In my my animal science class. But the long and the short of it is is during World War two, there were a lot of supply shortages from sourcing around the world. And so in about the nineteen fifties, the government made it mandatory that the military products were sourced here in The United States.

Colt Knight: 43:57

And one of the big products that we needed was wool, not just for uniforms, but blankets, tents, cots. And you might not think of this, but insulation for airplanes. Imagine flying in a tin can thirty, forty thousand feet above. That’s why those old bombers, they have those those sheep shirling leather jackets. It’s for warmth because those were not heated airplanes back in those days.

Colt Knight: 44:24

And there would be they’d put insulated blankets up on the wall to help with that and, you know, every other thing that they still used. And so it was mandatory that that was produced here in The United States. Because of that, we actually had a wool subsidy. So the government would subsidize sheet production in The United States. Well, in the early nineties, that went away during the Clinton administration.

Colt Knight: 44:49

And ever since then, sheep production in The United States has been on a steep decline. We went from the sheep producer of the world to there’s hardly any sheep in here compared to some of the other countries. And nowadays, there’s not much market for wool because there’s so many synthetic fibers that have been created and the military is still the largest purchaser of wool in The United States because we still make all of our dress uniforms out of wool, and they still make the blankets out of wool. But and the fancy hats, the berets and things are all wool still.

Donna Coffin: 45:27

Well, years ago, my father used to work in or was in the CCC camps. And he stayed at my grandmother’s boarding home. Yeah, boarding house. And when they left, they had their government issued blankets. And my grandmother being the frugal woman she was, she kept them and I still have one of those.

Donna Coffin: 45:51

And it’s like, it’s kind of crispy. And I’m not sure I’m sure it’s still warm, but I don’t hey. That’s Raymond you hear.

Glenda Pereira: 46:01

He’s ready to wrap this episode

Donna Coffin: 46:02

up. He’s ready to wrap it up.

Glenda Pereira: 46:05

As a co host, he gets

Colt Knight: 46:06

to do

Donna Coffin: 46:07

is just something that, you know, you have from the past that, you know, links to your family. Raymond.

Glenda Pereira: 46:15

Last thing I wanted to ask you, Donna, is what is your favorite memory in your time or in your role as an extension educator, an agent, and specialist?

Donna Coffin: 46:30

Well, I think the the favorite time are the things that you don’t hear about, like when you’re applying for your When I applied for a full professor, you have to ask some of your constituents to write letters of

Glenda Pereira: 46:48

support. And

Donna Coffin: 46:50

for me, it was hard to do. The letters, this is very specific outline that they have to use. But the letters that the farmers wrote back, it was like, because of what I did, they were able to keep farming. And it was like, I didn’t know that. You know?

Donna Coffin: 47:12

And to hear those types of things and you never will hear it. They’ll never come up and say it to you. But if you need something, you know, a letter of support like that, and you find out these things that you never knew.

Colt Knight: 47:26

Yeah. I have Donna was actually on my committee as a voting member when I went up for tenure. Yep. And that’s one of the things that she told me. She said, you need to take these read these letters and send them to your parents.

Colt Knight: 47:42

Because when you go up for these things, you ask people for the letters, but you don’t get to read them beforehand. Sent directly to the administration. So I never even thought about reading them until Donna mentioned that and I sent them to my mom.

Donna Coffin: 47:55

Oh, yeah.

Colt Knight: 47:56

And she went over the moon.

Donna Coffin: 47:58

She bawled

Colt Knight: 47:59

over the

Donna Coffin: 47:59

Oh, my son has done so well.

Colt Knight: 48:04

But I’ve learned so much from Donna over the years. We love Donna.

Donna Coffin: 48:09

Yeah. Well, and it also helps me that I’ve been able to help people be successful. And just so you know, not everybody is cut out to be an extension person. I have seen people come and go. But Glenda and and Colt are, they’re golden.

Donna Coffin: 48:29

I’m glad that you’re here. I’m glad I had a little part to to do in in keeping you going. Appreciate it.

Glenda Pereira: 48:37

Certainly. And I always look to you for a lot of things because you’re still somebody who I just really liked how the the processes that you had in place when we overlapped for a little bit. And I just learned so much from you. The last thing I wanted to mention was that for this Podcastiversary, kind of the theme of it, was, you know, learning and adapting and, kind of serving our client and our target audience. And so I think you did a really good job, Donna, mentioning that, throughout the episode.

Glenda Pereira: 49:13

Like, who is our target audience and how can we, really help them? And so you said that when you read those letters, you you saw how much your work benefited the community that you were interacting with.

Donna Coffin: 49:28

Right. Thanks.

Glenda Pereira: 49:30

Yeah. So we’re thankful for you, Donna. And, my hope listeners understood a little bit more about our work here in Extension and that we can continue to do it for years to come.

Colt Knight: 49:41

And if you have questions, comments, concerns, or old war stories that involve Donna and Coffin, we would love to hear from you. Oh, no. At extension.farmcast@main.edu.

Glenda Pereira: 49:57

Alright, Raymond. Are you ready to go? Raymond’s ready.