You do not have a farm without a farmer

Like most people from Maine, Nanne Kennedy grew up being deeply connected to the land.

“When I was very young, my father would send me out into the fields and I would wander around the farm exploring the forest and mapping out the old stone walls. I loved the farm house and I love the land I grew up on.”

Nanne is the owner-operator of Meadowcroft Farm in Washington, Maine where she raises sheep and lambs that produce high quality wool for apparel. When the animals are sheared, all the wool is spun by hand and dyed using an innovative solar dye process that is environmentally friendly.

As an entrepreneur, Nanne knew the high cost of running a farm and had to “figure out the puzzle” of how to keep the farm as a going concern. As a solution, Nanne turned to her artistic side and started designing sweaters and blankets, which are then produced by local artisans who work from their homes in this rural community. These final products, along with small batch yarns, are available at local markets and on her Seacolor Yarnery website.

Although Nanne admits that she “hasn’t made a ton of money or added a great deal to the gross national product,” she is clearly proud that as a farmer she has been able to provide for her family and her community. “I've put my kids through private school. I put them through college. We haven't suffered and we get to live in this beautiful place. And along the way, I've kept a lot of local people in business.”

As any farmer will tell you, running and managing a farm, the land and the animals, creating business opportunities is more than a full time job. “There’s been so many times that I feel so tired, so worn down. My body is breaking and I can’t move,” Nanne says with a slight weariness in her voice.

But farming and love of the land is in her blood. “I’m trying to preserve some of the pastoral integrity I knew growing up,” Nanne says. Raised in “a camping family” on a farm in Maine, Nanne’s ethic to preserve and protect the natural world started early. “You always left the campsite better than when you found it,” she remembers. “I knew I wanted to leave my people, my neighbourhood and my planet a little better than I found it.”

While earning a degree at Bowdoin College in agriculture and resource economics, Nanne saw Maine’s traditional resource industries – farming, fishing and forestry – slowly crumbling.

“I was part of the back to the land movement in the early 1970s,” Nanne says. “I chose to stay here, which was totally insane,” she laughs “but it made sense to me.”
Besides running her flock of more than 100 sheep with her border collies, Nanne also offers a residency for aspiring sheep farmers, apprenticeships during lambing season, and has an Airbnb on her property. She creates local jobs by subcontracting much of the knitting and crocheting of her designs to her small network of artisans.

As a farmer, Nanne is a committed advocate of sustainable agricultural practices that support both her business and the environment. Instead of relying on petroleum products and chemicals for the dyeing process, Nanne built a solar-powered dye system that utilizes seawater, eliminating chemical salts and acids.

The water that is captured during the process goes to irrigation. “What I do has to be environmentally appropriate,” says Nanne. “Clean water, clean air, and clean soil are our infrastructure. We should be creating solutions to help farmers protect and regenerate the land.”

Like many other businesses, the Covid-19 pandemic hit Nanne’s farm hard. In the first months of the crisis, Nanne says she lost most of the income she needed to get everything into production for the busy Christmas season.

“I usually sell at farmers’ markets and here at the farm,” says Nanne, but for now, her “face-to-face” business will have to go online. “I do everything for my customers, and they love me back with their purchases of our products,” Nanne says. “Writing an email or posting on Facebook isn’t the same as meeting and getting to know my customers but those are the strategies I am relying on in the short term.”

Looking to the future, Nanne remains a strong advocate for changing how agriculture and farmers are perceived and valued. “We only get paid for our products,” Nanne says “but we don’t get paid for being good stewards of the land. That is a public good and it is not valued.”

As a member of the New England Farmers Union, she has been invited to Washington DC to work on family farm issues. One of her ideas: keep farms as farmland by creating a pension system for farmers. “Instead of having to sell their farm when they retire and seeing it divided into housing lots, with a pension system, farmers wouldn’t have to sell.”

“People love the idea of agriculture and there is a lot of romance around it,” says Nanne. But she points out, you do not have a farm without a farmer. “I’m just the farmer today, I'm the steward who is on this land today,” she says. “In a thousand years I want someone on this land who loves it as much as I do, taking care of the whole cycle and the community.”
ILO Office for the United States · Nanne Kennedy, Sheep Farmer and Entrepreneur, Meadowcroft Farm, Washington, Maine