Farms of the future | Ben Dobson President, Atlantic Organics and Locally Known, Bowdoinham Daniel Corey Owner, Daniel Corey Farms, Monticello
Photo/David A. Rodgers
Ben Dobson (left), president of Locally Known Foods, and business partner, Noah DeLorme, cover their Bowdoinham fields with plastic to extend the land's growing season
Photo/David A. Rodgers
Daniel Corey, owner of Daniel Corey Farms in Monticello, in his potato field
Maine’s agricultural industry contributes $1.2 billion to the state’s economy and has long been the foundation of many rural communities. But being a farmer here has never been easy. The industry has for decades been hammered by competition from sprawling West Coast farms and is beset with fresh problems, including skyrocketing costs for farming essentials such as diesel fuel and fertilizer.
Unwilling to stick to the status quo, farmers Ben Dobson in Midcoast Maine and Daniel Corey in northern Maine saw opportunities to make their farms competitive. Dobson, president of Atlantic Organics, a 170-acre organic farm in Bowdoinham and Dresden that sells its products under the Locally Known label, focuses on the burgeoning retail market for local salad greens, while Corey, owner of Daniel Corey Farms in Monticello, reaches across international borders to find new buyers for his Maine seed potatoes. Together, the two help redefine Maine’s agricultural landscape.
In 2007, when Dobson, 24, started Atlantic Organics, he sold salad greens on the commodity market, with the produce packaged in bulk for sale in grocery stores. At the same time, he watched the market for locally grown organic produce increase in Maine and in the rest of the Northeast. Dobson was struggling to compete for bulk sales against massive West Coast farms, and his farm, one of the largest in New England, was too big to survive on farmers’ markets, so he turned to a relatively untapped middle ground — buy-local retail, which places a premium on food grown or processed in the region in which it is sold. He secured a $250,000 loan from the Maine Department of Agriculture and found willing investors in Brooke and Noah DeLorme, of the DeLorme mapping family, to build a food processing plant. In April 2008, Dobson, the DeLorme siblings and two other partners in the endeavor, David Goldstein and Shimon Horowitz, launched Locally Known. All are under 30 years old.
This summer, Dobson began selling Locally Known salad greens to 60 Whole Foods stores and 40 Trader Joes stores in the Northeast — two accounts that at the moment swallow up most of his production. In the process, he’s created roughly 50 seasonal and year-round jobs. Next year, Dobson plans to farm the full 170 acres at Atlantic Organics’ two sites. Eventually, he wants to create a cooperative that will provide organic farmers in the Northeast a processing and packaging facility and a distribution network to allow them to sell into profitable buy-local retail markets.
Daniel Corey, who owns a 600-acre seed potato farm in Aroostook County, also relies on innovation to grow his business. Corey, 48, has watched the market dwindle for seed potatoes grown for propagation purposes, while costs of diesel fuel for tractors and fertilizer have increased significantly.
Last year the domestic market for seed potatoes was especially bad. Corey, whose only international exporting experience before last year was selling seed potatoes to Canada, is a member of the U.S. Potato Board’s export committee. Through his role on the committee, he discovered that countries like Uruguay and Brazil were looking for seed potato suppliers. The majority of seed potatoes grown in Maine are sold to states along the eastern seaboard like Florida and North Carolina. Corey decided to pitch the two countries on Maine seed potatoes.
It worked. Last year, Corey became the first seed potato farmer in the country to export seed potatoes to Brazil when he shipped 165 metric tons of the Atlantic variety of the spuds. He also became the first seed potato farmer in Maine to ship seed potatoes to Uruguay when he shipped 25 metric tons of the same variety to that country. Corey’s leap into untapped international markets turned a potentially tough year profitable: He makes $1,200 on the domestic market for an acre of Atlantics, but $3,500 for the same acre in Brazil or Uruguay. And demand from South America was so great last year that Corey had to get product from two other Aroostook County seed potato farmers. Recently, Corey sent sample shipments to Sri Lanka and the Dominican Republic. In the future, he’d like to help more Maine farmers tap into the international markets Corey has opened up to Maine seed potatoes. “Seed potato acres have been dropping because of a lack of demand,” Corey says.
Now, rather than cut his costs, Corey this year spent more than $1 million purchasing another 300 acres of tillable land and expanding his storage capacity. “In a declining industry, I’m expanding. That says something,” Corey says.
Whit Richardson
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