Lobster, dairy and grain cooperatives have long been present in Maine, but a new crop of farmers is bringing collaborative business models to flowers, medicinal plants, online markets, compost and even farms themselves.
Those involved in these types of businesses say they’ve seen an increased interest in many forms of group agricultural ventures as Maine’s farms get smaller but running them remains expensive and risky. Pooling resources gives farmers more time, saves them money and provides access to markets they couldn’t reach alone.
A cooperative is a legal incorporation whose members own the business and govern it together. Some Maine agricultural businesses are also operating as collaboratives, which are owned individually but share marketing, packaging, transportation, sales and recordkeeping.
One of those new collaboratives, Meeting House Farm in Scarborough, pools sales of herb and medicinal plants.
Within a year of starting to grow herbs, founder Emily Springer realized she couldn’t produce enough to meet demand. Twenty-plus growers, a shared online platform and five years later, Meeting House still sells out almost completely every year before the growing season even starts because so few people grow herbs in the United States, Springer said.
Meeting House has added a program to provide drying rooms, labeling, crop planning and education to new growers so they can eventually join the collaborative. Those services save each producer up to $6,000 a year, according to Springer.
Like other collaborating farmers, her business model is also intertwined with her values, she said. She takes home less money than in her former corporate finance career, but that work felt like preparation for this, she said. She believes her flower collaborative will be able to scale up nationwide.
Maine is a more challenging place to form cooperatives than the rest of New England, especially in the food system, according to Katherine Bessey from the Cooperative Development Institute. Because the state is so large and rural with population centers in the south, access to larger markets is limited, said Bessey, who is director of the cooperative business services program at the Massachusetts-based organization.
However, the organization has seen interest in some of its business planning services triple since 2020, particularly from existing Maine businesses who want to sell to their employees as owners retire.
Some of that interest followed the business challenges of the pandemic. Collaborations between farmers increased during that time and helped farms survive, according to a 2021 study by groups including the Maine Farmland Trust and Coastal Enterprises Inc.
The year before, Gov. Janet Mills’ climate plan set a goal for the amount of food consumed in Maine from local producers to increase from 10 percent to 30 percent by 2030. Changing the food system is one method the plan laid out to do so.
“The argument for cooperatives is very high, and it’s very dollars and cents,” said Rob Brown, director of business ownership solutions at the Cooperative Development Institute.
People with similar ideas feel safer going into business when they do it together, Brown said. Many younger farmers, especially those growing organically, have said they prefer having smaller operations because they feel it has less risk and better work-life balance.
“The younger generation is less interested in maximizing profits,” he said. “The higher priority for anybody I work with is sustainability.”
There are challenges to working with groups in the business world. Interpersonal conflicts happen, and some growers have left to become competitors. In cooperatives, when decisions are made by groups, things can also move more slowly.
These models aren’t just taking hold among growers. In Lewiston, a new community-owned food market is underway. Also in the city, four Somali farmers formed New Roots Cooperative Farm together and purchased 30 acres in 2022.
In Acton, the Diggers Cooperative has been creating compost, designing gardens and managing waste removal as a worker-owned business since 2020.
The Maine Flower Collective launched in April 2023 in Brunswick to supply wholesale cut flowers sourced from small growers. It is owned and run by its members, including both growers and buyers.
Farmers markets and online ordering ventures such as the Unity-based Daybreak Growers Alliance and the statewide FarmDrop share the costs of marketing, design, transportation, packaging and distribution.
On FarmDrop, members use one online platform to sell their products, similar to a grocery store ordering site, and share product transportation to regional distribution hubs. Founder Hannah Semler said the collaborative model — specifically how it shares the time and costs involved in business — benefits smaller producers who might not be able to reach larger markets otherwise.
With an online platform, farmers actually spend less time navigating interpersonal politics and relationships than they do selling individually at in-person markets, Semler said, but sharing a website means less competition because the space is unlimited and the customers are already visiting.
The sellers share a goal, and as the organization develops, so does the community connection to it, she said. Plus, the variety on the site draws new customers.
“It’s hard, but I think it’s the only way we’re going to survive as a series of local food systems across Maine,” Semler said.
