Glenda Pereira: 00:07
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an assistant professor at the University of Maine and the dairy specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. We have an awesome conversation today. Brett, I’m gonna have you introduce yourself to folks who haven’t had the chance of meeting you, and we’re gonna talk about so many things today.
Glenda Pereira: 00:29
So I’m happy to have you on the Maine Farmcast.
Brett Johnson: 00:32
Yeah. Thank you for having me today, Glenda. I’m Brett Johnson, an assistant extension professor and sustainable agriculture and farm business management educator with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. In my role, I develop, deliver, and evaluate educational programming for the sustainable agriculture audience and farming community in Midcoast, Maine. So Midcoast is the way that we describe it in Extension, and it’s made up of the counties of Waldo, Knox, and Lincoln.
Brett Johnson: 01:07
In addition to the production agriculture-related programming, I also develop, deliver, and evaluate farm business management programming on a statewide level with a small team with Extension.
Glenda Pereira: 01:20
And so you said you grew up in the Stillwater, Oklahoma area. That’s where a lot of your expertise comes from, but it obviously overlaps and ties into your work today. Specifically, you mentioned there was a lot of pecan production in that area.
Brett Johnson: 01:37
Yeah. The department that I trained in was the Horticultural Science and Landscape Architecture Department. In the College of Ag at OSU, I had a professor as an undergrad who was the tree fruit specialist. The major tree fruit crop in Oklahoma, and nut crop, would be peaches and pecans, respectively. I got to know a little bit about pecan production and the role that integrating livestock into pecan production has in helping producers in that part of the world maximize the value and return from the land, and sort of integrating those two crops into a silvopasture system. Being interested in specialty crop production, I tended to gravitate a lot toward the direct-to-consumer, sort of farmers market segment of the ag economy.
Brett Johnson: 02:31
And I was fortunate enough to, after completing my undergrad in horticultural science, but more broadly in agricultural sciences and natural resources, I actually decided to move to Maine to take a job with Johnny’s Selected Seeds. I had an interest in breeding and variety development as an undergrad and chased an opportunity. When I drove across New Hampshire into Maine, it was just sheets of fog everywhere. I couldn’t see anything. It was pretty cool.
Brett Johnson: 03:06
Like, I was entering a new world in a way. And, yeah, my wife will tell you, and really will, you know, we would both say that we fell in love with Maine the moment we got here. But, you know, I really enjoyed my time at Johnny’s. After a few years, I decided I wanted to continue my education. I was really interested in applied research, and specifically in production-related agricultural research.
Brett Johnson: 03:33
And so I took an opportunity to return to my alma mater for a few years and studied under Dr. John Damicone, a longtime vegetable plant pathologist in the state. He was approaching the last years of his career at the time and had had some industry research funding from the local processing company in Eastern Oklahoma that processed canned leafy green products. He decided to use that funding to study foliar diseases of tomato. In Oklahoma, the tomato season there is really two seasons that are separated by the oppressive heat in August.
Brett Johnson: 04:16
It gets so hot that the blooms drop from the plants. The nighttime temps can be above 90 for weeks on end, and that causes flower abortion in the tomato plants. But folks will pretty much just grow indeterminate varieties there because they’re able to plant them in April. And then they’re, you know, they’re harvesting off of them well into October or November. So it’s a very long season.
Brett Johnson: 04:47
Tomatoes, as they are in most parts of the country, really, you know, will bring people to a farmers market. And it’s a really important crop for the small farmer in Oklahoma.
Glenda Pereira: 04:58
Yep. So yeah. Well, all of that expertise, like you mentioned, brought you here to Maine again for the second time in your role as ours. So you have multiple roles. You have some statewide, but your predominant role is within the Waldo County area and the Midcoast Maine area.
Glenda Pereira: 05:19
And so something that we all have to do when we come into our role is to assess what the needs of our clients are, what the needs of our respective industries are, and use that understanding of their needs to then develop programming that will benefit that industry or that group that you’re working with. And so Midcoast Maine has a lot of unique opportunities and features. If folks have driven down in that area, there’s a lot of fog, like Brett mentioned, coming into Maine, right? It has some coastal weather patterns specific to that area. But tell us more about what you’ve learned in the past couple of years working with the folks in that region.
Brett Johnson: 06:03
Yeah, as you were describing, the way we think about Midcoast, just to set the stage as far as the landscape, we’re thinking about northwest of the Penobscot River as the upper northern bound. Thinking about Winterport as an outer suburb of Bangor. And then following the Penobscot River Estuary down into Prospect, Stockton Springs, Searsport, and Belfast areas, you have the smaller Belfast Bay there. And then from sort of moving, I guess, inland, you have the Dixmont Hills, the Camden Hills as you get further into Knox County. And then it basically gives way to a lot of peninsulas.
Brett Johnson: 06:50
And so one of the major features of the Midcoast is steep slopes, hilly terrain, and a lot of surface water. The landscape is punctuated by many different recreational opportunities in the landscapes.
Glenda Pereira: 07:06
And like you mentioned, something where it overlaps with the work you were doing at OSU, a lot of those folks, there’s really great markets. And like, for example, I know the Belfast Co-op as well. So there’s these unique opportunities for folks where they can sell their product to people who travel here in the summertime. I see always the pattern of, you know, we avoid Acadia and Bar Harbor, the Mainers, in the summertime because we just see many out-of-state folks coming in and spending summertime here. And so there’s a great opportunity in the niche market for the folks that you’re working with in that area.
Brett Johnson: 07:43
Absolutely. One of the primary features of the agricultural economy in the Midcoast is this need for diversified farm businesses. Some of that has to do with the soils and the landscape lending itself less to larger-scale farm operations and more toward smaller, intensively managed and operated farm businesses. What also plays into that is some of the aspects of the landscape that can make farming challenging are also what lend the region such incredible beauty. So having those really, you know, steep hillsides topped with blueberry barrens and all the beautiful lakes and the, of course, the coastline and the beautiful vistas, you know, standing up on top of the Camden Hills.
Brett Johnson: 08:33
So there’s a lot of opportunities for recreation.
Glenda Pereira: 08:36
Yeah.
Brett Johnson: 08:36
And folks come and they wanna be sort of immersed in what it is that makes the place special. And so there’s a lot of efforts by local producers to highlight the products that are being produced there. There’s really an incredible culture of cooperation between businesses that I’ve really been heartened by in a big way, to see how much farm businesses want to see each other succeed. And a lot of that comes through understanding that not every farm can do everything for everyone. So folks are reaching out to each other.
Brett Johnson: 09:16
They’re buying each other’s products. They’re helping the purchasing experience of their customers be more efficient and valuable by having so many excellent local products available in their farm stores. And then also, of course, these institutions like the Belfast Co-op and other cooperative grocery stores, Rising Tide Co-op and Good Tern Co-op in Rockland. These are all places that really showcase the farm economy at its best.
Glenda Pereira: 09:46
And there’s a brand too, Real Maine. Folks can look that up if there’s anybody listening who’s gonna be traveling to Maine and you wanna find out what products are made here in Maine. And there’s so many ways to find it, but Real Maine tries to showcase every product that’s made in Maine.
Brett Johnson: 10:02
Another unique aspect of the farming culture in Midcoast Maine is that a lot of these organizations and collective groups, specifically the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, MOFGA, they’re born out of this historical, I guess, period that people refer to as the back-to-the-land movement. So there was an ethos around environmental conservation and protection and self-reliance, living lightly on the land. And so one of the things too that’s been really helpful to see is how much community has been developed around organic farming. Maine is one of the top states for certified organic farm production. Even with Maine being so high on that list, the three counties that make up my area, what I prefer to as the Midcoast, Lincoln, Knox, Waldo Counties, all produce a higher percentage of organic farm products compared to the state average.
Brett Johnson: 11:09
They also sell more direct to consumers, as we discussed. There’s also a genuine interest in finding more environmentally sustainable practices to keep farm production viable and keep the environmental qualities that make the region outstanding intact. As you were mentioning, the opportunity to educate consumers about the way that food is produced in Midcoast Maine comes in the form of farm-to-table dinners that dozens of small farms across the region will host throughout the year. There’s a growing wedding event market and a lot of interest and growth right now in cut flower production, specifically for these types of events. And so essentially, I like to say about the Midcoast is that there isn’t any one industry that’s really dominant, but it’s sort of the tapestry, you know, of so many different farm enterprises and so many different products that really are what has attracted so many folks to the region and also keeps many farm businesses at all scales level over the years.
Glenda Pereira: 12:27
Like you mentioned, those farms are resources to each other. And, of course, you are a resource to them. They have resources surrounding them to continue to be viable, which is a critical component. Right? It’s not only that the community thrives in a union, you know, exists for the long term, but there are some processes in place that can potentially fortify what is already existing.
Glenda Pereira: 12:53
There was a niche market, the demand because of the people. But something you’ve helped folks in that region with is diversifying into potentially the potato market, and more specifically the fresh market. Because when people are traveling to this area, if we think about the clients that are coming here, they’re likely going to be using that product right away. Right? All of the farmers have probably tailored their product and storage to fit that need.
Glenda Pereira: 13:22
And so the potatoes, there’s a plethora of ways to grow and harvest and store potatoes, but you’ve created some programming for this fresh market. Before we talk about this fresh market program, I wanted to know, and we’re gonna come back on the potato talk. I just wanted to allude to the fact that your specific program has this need for the growers that you’re working with in the Midcoast Maine.
Brett Johnson: 13:54
One of the really exciting aspects of fresh market potato production, especially in recent years, has been the ability to create a diverse product offering around potato products. The program that I’ve been bringing online for the last few years since I started in September 2023, we call it the Growing and Marketing Specialty Potato Products program. And this is playing into a need to have more production information around what specific practices are required to produce a specialty potato product. And just to define like what we mean when we say specialty potato products. So that would be products that are unique in some respect, usually around the size of the tuber or the potato itself, the flesh and skin color combinations, also the use, the culinary uses of the potato.
Brett Johnson: 15:02
And so just to sort of step back a little, the national potato market, the majority of the sales of potatoes for the state of Maine are for the processing market, so fries and chips. When we think about potatoes, we kind of put them into these two categories, a waxy potato or a mealy or floury potato. So the waxy potatoes have relatively low starch and are higher moisture. So they tend to hold up really well in various cooking processes. They can be boiled for a nice potato salad in the summertime, like the new potato market, right, historically.
Brett Johnson: 15:47
The floury potatoes are higher in starch and usually lower in moisture. What that does is the higher starch content creates a more desirable frying quality. Think French fries. They’re crisp outside and airy in the center. If you’re listening to this on your lunch break, I’m sorry in advance because Brett’s now making us all drool over some really awesome French fries that, you know, everybody just with some salt on top. But just a side note, if you’re hungry, go get yourself a snack. We don’t want anybody, you know, hangry here on the podcast.
Brett Johnson: 16:28
Well, this is a perfect time to introduce and plug the Pinto Gold, which was, you know, a variety that was released by the Maine Potato Breeding Program. And I will say that I have not yet found a potato that has so many excellent uses in the kitchen. I mean, I created a potato au gratin dish using Pinto Gold, and it was the most excellent au gratin I’d ever had.
Glenda Pereira: 16:56
It’s just a very versatile variety. Yep. You would.
Brett Johnson: 17:01
Yeah. You can use it in potato salad. It just holds up really well through pretty much any cooking process. It can be roasted as well. And the pinto is kind of a perfect encapsulation, I think, of what we look for in a specialty potato product.
Brett Johnson: 17:19
So it’s, you know, very, very high eating quality. It’s convenient in that the tubers are smaller, and so they’re easier to prepare. They take less time in the cooking process in general. Uniquely, it’s a true bicolor. So it has a, it actually looks like a pinto bean.
Glenda Pereira: 17:39
Yep. The name.
Brett Johnson: 17:39
The name. Yeah. Yeah. Suggested by the name. So it’s a deep gold flesh potato with tan and red bicolor skin.
Brett Johnson: 17:51
The skin is relatively thin, so you can eat it skin-on. And there’s dietary benefits to eating the skin of the potato. It’s high in iron. And so essentially, kind of getting back to the industry. So when we think about potato production, it is dominated in Maine by russet potatoes.
Brett Johnson: 18:17
Also, plug the Caribou Russet variety that was recently developed by the University of Maine potato breeding program and is actually the number one in seed potato acreage right now in the state, and has been for some time. So also, I would say more of a dual-purpose type russet potato, an excellent product to try to find by name at the grocery store as well. Then we have the round white segment, which would be almost three quarters of the acreage in Maine. Round whites would be a little bit less than three quarters. And then what’s left over would fall into this category of specialty potato products.
Glenda Pereira: 18:59
And that’s where, like you were explaining the name in the marketing and in business programming you’ve been doing. Specialty potatoes is everything else that’s not russet and round white.
Brett Johnson: 19:11
Exactly. Yep. And even, I mean, there are examples where round whites could, I think, classify as a specialty potato, but it would be in the creamer-size potatoes. There’s a variety that Cornell developed called Upstate Abundance that produces, it’s a round white, and I guess in New York there’s salt potatoes, this kind of common product that you might see in the state at fairs or other events. So it was sort of, it was bred for that, I think, that market.
Brett Johnson: 19:45
But it essentially gives you these golf ball-sized, you know, perfectly round white potatoes. And so that might be included in a medley pack. That’s one of the market segments being tracked by the industry nationally. And that’s essentially, I like to use the example of the red, white, and blue medley pack for the Independence Day holiday. It’s having that diversity, but also that high quality.
Brett Johnson: 20:12
Typically, the smaller potatoes are more on the waxy side, so they have potentially more applications in the kitchen.
Glenda Pereira: 20:18
Something you just brought to mind is those medley packs and smaller potatoes. They’re just so convenient to cook with and tend to be uniform. And they’re really easy to, you know, just cook up quickly, add to, you know, your dish. And so those come in really conveniently. I love potatoes in any way, shape, or form.
Glenda Pereira: 20:41
When we buy those with some butter and salt, they’re just so tasty. You just brought that to mind.
Brett Johnson: 20:48
Yeah. Absolutely. And I’m really glad you picked up on that, Glenda, because that’s what the industry right now, they do a lot of consumer surveying. There’s a national industry group, Potatoes USA, that does consumer surveys at least once every other year. And that’s what continues to be highlighted in those surveys, the importance of convenience for folks and smaller package sizes.
Brett Johnson: 21:18
Demographically in Maine, those smaller package sizes are also really appealing because folks tend to be part of smaller households, and so less waste. Also, you know, kind of looping back into the idea of folks, a lot of folks who come here are looking for, you know, an experience and looking for food products that are really unique and tell a compelling story about the farm economy here in the state. I think potatoes are just such a classic Maine product, but this is sort of a new twist on such an important part of the economy here. When these consumers are coming, you know, many of them are coming from larger metropolitan areas. Maybe they’re a little more in tune to some of the national food trends.
Glenda Pereira: 22:14
Right.
Brett Johnson: 22:14
And when we think about how national can sometimes be local, folks that have had petite or baby potatoes at a restaurant and had a really excellent experience, you know, they’re more likely to pick up a small one-meal or two-meal-sized pack of medley or petite baby potatoes and make that, you know, a part of their diet on a regular basis. And so it’s a new take on marketing potatoes, and I think it also says so much about changing consumer preferences, not only in, you know, in Maine, but nationally. And it lends itself really well to the types of production systems that we have in the Midcoast.
Glenda Pereira: 22:58
Right. You mentioned previously it tends to be smaller-scale and direct market is something that folks focus on. Yeah.
Brett Johnson: 23:07
And what it does is, part of the benefit of having so much diversity in this sector is that it allows growers a lot more options in terms of planting date, crop scheduling, and then also a lot of these varieties, the size of the potato can be impacted by things like plant spacing. So there’s a lot of opportunities within the farm production system to optimize your farm business and farm production to achieve dozens of different products out of a single plant species, out of Solanum tuberosum. And so for diversified farms, that just means, you know, more, and for the general public, it just means more options. And, you know, it doesn’t sacrifice any quality attributes to provide that sort of product diversity to folks.
Glenda Pereira: 24:05
And now I’m guessing folks are imagining. So is Pinto Gold your favorite variety, would you say? What is your favorite potato variety?
Brett Johnson: 24:13
I do like Pinto Gold. I will say the other component of this is actually field variety trials that we’ve conducted for the last two years. It’s a USDA NIFA-funded project. We’ve had 15 different specialty potato varieties grown in randomized research plots at Rogers Farm here just off campus in Old Town. I do love Pinto Gold, but I will say we are trialing a comparison variety from the Maine Potato Breeding Program.
Brett Johnson: 24:45
In most respects, it is identical to Pinto. But what we’re finding in these early trial results is that it may actually be much earlier-maturing. So that’s kind of the one difficulty with Pinto Gold that folks sometimes run into, especially with organic farming. Every additional week that plant is out in the field, it’s subjected to Colorado potato beetle, potato leafhopper, early blight, late blight. Essentially, the faster-maturing these varieties can be, the less production expense there will be associated with those.
Brett Johnson: 25:23
It’s a different way to think about production because, sort of the larger processing markets historically, it’s been steered a lot toward that late maturity because the yield, the potential yield of late-maturing potato varieties is much higher. But in this case, with these highly diversified farm operations, the production system is more akin to any other type of mixed vegetable product. Having a variety that can mature in 60 or 65 days also helps the producer get that product to market during peak tourist season in Maine, peak summer season where there’s, you know, the population in the region is much higher. So
Glenda Pereira: 26:13
You’re taking advantage of that market. You want something that’s maybe being harvested earlier. You know, I don’t know how early in August you can harvest some of these varieties, but right in that, as closer to September time, right before everybody returns back from their summer schedule, I would say.
Brett Johnson: 26:35
Yeah. And in some parts of the Midcoast, we have the moderating effect of the ocean. So folks are able to get out into the field. And if they can prep their ground in the fall and then cover it, there’s a lot of use of things like tarping to help with weed control and also to help farmers that are really interested in being able to get that product to market as early as possible. They want to reduce the amount of farm operations in the spring when it could potentially be wet and difficult to get in.
Brett Johnson: 27:10
Typically, they’re doing some of that planting before the spring. As soon as that soil temp warms up, they’re out there planting and able to get that product to the markets in August.
Glenda Pereira: 27:20
To reiterate, this direct-to-consumer fresh market potato is really the highlight of the program. What can folks expect from this type of programming? Do you do one-on-one consultations? Do you offer webinars, workshops, etc.?
Brett Johnson: 27:34
Absolutely. Yep. So up to this point, we’ve been offering spring workshops that typically occur in March of each year. That’s an opportunity for us to report the findings of the previous field trial and to hear from producers about what they’re seeing in their markets. We typically survey at that time, but we also do site visits.
Brett Johnson: 27:58
We’re focused on helping growers identify any sort of production challenges. And that goes for any type of farm production. We support producers in soil nutrient management, integrated pest management, and organic ecological pest management. And so essentially, those spring webinars are a good opportunity to connect. We also do field tours every summer so that folks can look at the tubers as they’re coming out of the ground.
Glenda Pereira: 28:28
While we talked a lot about potatoes today, you also did a ton of work understanding what the needs are of the Midcoast Maine area. You’ve developed expertise areas to be a fantastic resource to your clients. You had an involvement with the Maine New and Beginning Farmer program where you provided farm business consulting, and still do, on a statewide capacity. We talked a lot about potatoes. Brett can help you also provide a recipe for some really good-tasting potatoes.
Glenda Pereira: 29:02
But there’s so much more, and folks can definitely reach out, email, or look Brett up and invite him out to potentially do a consult on that. And we’re all networked. So, you know, reach out to Colt and I, we’ll get you in contact with Brett and his team and the folks that he works with. But really the basis of your program, like I think you mentioned many times, is to capture more value per acre. Would you say that reflects most of the work you’re doing?
Brett Johnson: 29:30
Absolutely. Yeah. One of the other unique aspects of the statewide ag economy in Maine is that, as a percentage of overall producers, we have a very high percentage of new and beginning farmers. I think the last USDA data showed Maine as the third highest in terms of percentage of farm operators being new and beginning farmers. So that’s the way that USDA characterizes that, as farm operators with 10 years of experience farming.
Brett Johnson: 30:04
And actually in Waldo County, the last USDA data showed over 40%, which is like 10 points above the statewide average. So Midcoast Maine is definitely a hotbed of interest in new folks getting involved in farming. Part of the support that I’ve been able to provide since I started in this role a little over two years ago is developing content as a part of the business planning for producers team. And then last year, starting to coordinate that program as a lead coordinator. That program is built around the needs of the new and beginning farmer who is looking to develop their first comprehensive business plan.
Brett Johnson: 30:50
That’s the ultimate goal. The way we handle that is we go through every component of a business plan. We start with identifying values and a mission statement and then translating those into short-, medium-, and long-term goals for your business. We have two sessions on market research and marketing strategy. So we teach folks how to conduct their own market research for their farm and then also help them strategize, looking at the different components of marketing. In marketing nomenclature, you call that the four P’s of marketing: price, promotion, product, placement.
Brett Johnson: 31:32
We take them through this survey. We get through financial planning as well. We look at financial statements and pro forma cash flow statements, operations planning, developing a plan for your management team and personnel management. So it’s really a powerful, comprehensive program that we’ve been able to offer.
Glenda Pereira: 31:54
Yeah. We’re very lucky to have you. As folks have heard from the couple of episodes we’ve had you on within the Maine Farmcast, you’re a knowledgeable resource for them. So thank you so much, Brett. And we’re gonna share all of your details in the show notes, so folks can follow up with Brett on anything we talked about.
Glenda Pereira: 32:16
But if you have questions, comments, or would like to discuss future topic suggestions, be sure to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu. And with that, thanks Brett for being on the Maine Farmcast. It’s been a pleasure.
Brett Johnson: 32:33
Thanks, Glenda. It’s been a real pleasure.