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When Cameron Barner worked on an oyster farm in Duxbury, Massachusetts, the farmers knew that the first spring flowers popping up on shore meant the oysters were about ready to come out of hibernation.
“I think it’s kind of the same here,” Barner said, squinting shoreward as the sun glinted off calm Casco Bay waters on a bright mid-April morning. “Once you start seeing new green and flowers, it’s about the same time you start getting algae growth in the water and they start feeding again.”
It’s not just fruit and vegetable farmers who begin their work in earnest in the spring. Oyster farmers bring their cages to the surface. For goat farmers, it’s kidding season, and the cheeses produced during this time of year have a specific flavor that only comes from spring pastures. The season of regrowth means work for many food producers when the weather starts to warm.
‘A tough winter’
Farmed oysters spend the winter resting in their cages on the sea floor, protected from ice and stormy weather. Come spring, as the water approaches 45 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s time to bring them back to the surface.
On a recent morning, Barner, co-owner of Love Point Oysters, set out shortly after 8 a.m. from Brewer South Freeport Marine with his partner, Ben Hamilton, and farm manager, Stuart Ryan, to raise some of their nearly 500 cages.
In past years, they had to contract a crane-rigged boat for the job, or sometimes another vessel with considerably less hauling strength. This year, Love Point bought the Lumpish — a 30-foot, flat-bottom work skiff equipped with a knuckle boom crane — for about $75,000. It’s worth every penny for how much easier it makes the two-week project, though this winter’s weather made their work all the harder.
“It was colder this winter than I’ve seen in the past decade on Casco Bay. A tough winter,” Barner said, as Ryan piloted the Lumpish between Bustins Island and tiny Sow and Pigs Island toward their 4-acre farm site off Pettingill Island. “We normally feel like we have until Christmas to get all the cages down safely. And that was not the case.”
‘Like an island coming at your farm’
A split polar vortex blew subzero temperatures into Maine in early December. Love Point had to hire a Portland lobster boat to help sink the last of its cages before an unusual amount of hazardous ice set in.
By January, the mouth of the Harraseeket River had frozen over. Then shallow Maquoit Bay froze and released massive ice floes that churned right through Love Point’s waters.
“Those things, it’s like an island coming at your farm,” Barner said. “No matter how secure your gear is, it can tear up anchors and break gear.” They didn’t lose any cages to the ice, but the floes tore away a few buoys that marked Love Point’s cage lines.
The coming of spring kept turning up fresh evidence of winter damage. At the Pettingill farm, Ryan leaned over the side of the boat and grabbed an orange buoy that looked off to him. He found the double knot had nearly untied.
“We tie a lot of these knots and they don’t come undone,” Ryan said. “We tied a backup knot in these, too. But the ice locked up on a few of these buoys, and it tears everything apart.”
“Nothing is stronger than the ice,” Barner said.
Calculated risks
At nearby Nauti Sisters Sea Farm in Yarmouth, ice floes uprooted robust cage anchor systems designed to withstand more than 13,000 pounds of pull. Some cages were dragged 1,000 feet across their cove in the mouth of the Royal River, spun and strangled by their own rope lines.
Nauti Sisters’ circumstances were problematic leading into the winter. They couldn’t harvest from last May until December because of mandated closures and site reclassifications in their farm area. “We found ourselves with a lot of product we hadn’t been able to sell,” Nauti Sisters owner Alicia Gaiero said.
In December, Gaiero decided to keep about 30% of her oysters at the surface in their floating cages and bags, so she could sell them and make up for the lost time. Her chief concern in late April was whether the ice pushed the oysters out of the water, exposing them to deadly freezing temperatures.
“It’s been a very unique winter, and it’s not exclusive to us,” said Gaiero, who feared Nauti Sisters might have lost about a quarter of its oysters. “But it truly is the nature of farming. You make calculated risks based on the information you have at the time. Sometimes they pay off, and sometimes it’s a big learning experience.”
Anchors aweigh
Ryan positioned the Lumpish so the cage lines were on the skiff’s port side. The lines were festooned with tunicates, biofouling sea squirts that cling to the ropes like nubbed, slimy tassels.
Ryan maneuvered the crane, while Barner and Hamilton attached lines to the winch that hauled the 300-pound cages out of the water. The black pontoons on each cage are left uncapped at both ends over the winter so they fill with water and remain submerged.
As Hamilton sticks a red hose in the pontoons to flush out the accumulated muck, a sulfurous low tide stink wafts over the boat. They recap the drained pontoons and set the cage to float in formation at the surface.
The process is fitful at first, as the team learns the ins and outs of its new knuckle boom crane. They settle into a rhythm, but soon make a troubling discovery: One of the anchors that hold the cage lines tautly in place had been uprooted by the winter’s chaos.
The team hauls a 6-foot screw anchor into the boat, covered in mud it had once been firmly augered into. “All the ice this winter was sort of an unprecedented force on all these anchors. But it’s a little nerve-wracking,” Barner said with an anxious chuckle. “How many others are like that?”
Barner and Ryan will don scuba gear the following week so they can screw the unmoored anchor back into the sea floor by hand. They’ll also take the time to ensure the other 51 anchors on their 12 total acres are secure.
“It’s a joy,” Barner sighed. Then he smiled. “This really is a labor of love.”
Just kidding
About 35 miles inland at Abraham’s Goat Farm & Creamery in Newport, Kaili Wardwell is surrounded by dozens of her kids.
“I’m their mom, because I’ve taken care of them, raised them,” Wardwell said, kneeling in the barn’s hay-lined, gamey-smelling training pen on a damp April afternoon. The baby goats leap up at her, jockeying and bleating for attention. “Sometimes I tell people I’ve had over 100 kids this year, and they’re like, ‘Wow, you look great!” I’m like, ‘Thank you. And I’m 50.’”
Spring is kidding time, making it high-labor season at Abraham’s in more ways than one. As co-owner of the farm, Wardwell is working up to 15 hours a day. By mid-April this year, she’d already seen about 30 of her 44 does through labor, birthing 70 kids since March.
“I look like a zombie on the weeks when we’re kidding. There’ve been times I’ve been up all night.” Like on March 21, Wardwell’s birthday: Four does gave birth, all of them triplets. “They just started popping out — all night long.”
It was well below freezing that night, so to guard against frostbite and hypothermia, Wardwell blowdried each roughly 8-pound newborn for half an hour in the milking parlor. About 10 minutes after they’re born, the kids can stand on their own, though they’re wobbly as Jell-O.
Wardwell has raised goats for 20 years, yet still sometimes finds herself pacing nervously during kidding season, like the clichéd image of an expectant father in the hospital waiting room. There can be complications. Sometimes a pregnant doe will suffer ketosis, a life-threatening toxemia. She has to force-feed them with mash and induce birth.
Next to the goat pen is a table with her birthing kit, stocked with paper towels, OB lube and shoulder-length pink latex gloves. About 1 in 10 kids get stuck in the uterus, so Wardwell has to reach in and gently rearrange them.
“We’ve got to make sure all kids survive. For any farm operation, birthing is the highest stress. Usually, that’s why people retire, because it’s just too much.” Wardwell smiled down at the kids nuzzling into her chest. “But at this point, you look at this and you’re like, ‘I was there for each one of their births.’ And it’s happy.”
Sweet spring milk
Wardwell starts breeding her goats at the end of October. From January until March, she puts the does on bed rest. “It’s a backward form of human maternity leave,” she said. “They get to rest for two months. They don’t have to milk, they just have to eat good hay and grain, chew their cud, and be very pregnant.”
As kidding begins in late March, milking resumes for the year, too. The newborns need their mothers’ milk — and its nourishing, immunity-boosting colostrum — right away. As they grow, the kids learn to feed at times off the training pen’s Lac-Tek machine, an automated milk replacement dispenser available to them 24/7.
After birthing, each doe supplies as much as a gallon of milk a day. Abraham’s herd yields about 10,000 gallons annually, which they use to make fresh chèvre, feta, yogurt, kefir and aged cheeses like tomme. Their fresh raw goat milk had been off shelves for a few months by April, but they’d soon have enough to restock.
Goat milk from Abraham’s tastes grassy and sweet this time of year, because their spring pasture is rich in birdsfoot trefoil, timothy and mixed native grass. But goats are natural browsers, not grazers, meaning they prefer to eat leaves, twigs and vines at eye level or higher.
So later in the year, Wardwell’s goat does roam the nine wooded acres beyond the pasture, nibbling wild raspberry brambles and maple and pine saplings, which add their own subtle flavors to the milk.
“That’s the fun part of local artisanal cheese, compared to factory cheese making,” she said. “You can taste those notes.”
Abraham’s raises two breeds of dairy goats: white Saanens, and brown, gray and black-colored Alpines, both hardy Swiss breeds known for their milk production.
This afternoon, most of the adult does rest on the barn floor as the kids scamper around. Some younger goats use the large rocks behind the barn like a parkour course, springing from stone to stone.
“It’s important to raise them with care and love,” said Wardwell, who has named all her does — Sally, Sidney, Callie, Chloe, Charlotte and Eloise among them — and knows each by face. “If you milk them, you even know them by udder.”
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Tim Cebula can be reached at [email protected].
