GREENE – Esperanza Echeveria could tell as she walked toward her plot that something wasn’t right. She bent down and picked up a broken root.

“No good. It’s finished. Los pajaros, it was los pajaros,” she said, looking to the sky.

The birds had been nipping away at her corn crop. Fortunately, her broccoli, peas, radishes, carrots and cilantro looked good.

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll come back tomorrow and plant some more.”

Echeveria is one of about a dozen local immigrants taking part in a community farming program called the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project.

Using skills

The program was started last year by Coastal Enterprises Inc. to give local Latino and Somali immigrants a place where they could use the farming skills many of them learned as young children in their native countries.

Modeled after a similar project for Cambodian farmers in Lowell, Mass., the program aims to eventually provide the immigrants with a source of income. Another goal is to preserve farmland and to keep farming as a business alive in Maine.

“Half of the farms and nearly half of the farmland in Maine is owned by people who are 60 or older,” said Jim Hanna, a consultant for Coastal Enterprises who manages the program.

Hanna and the farmers know that it may take some time before they turn a profit. For now, the simple fact that they have a place to work outdoors and grow their own herbs and vegetables is enough.

Hard work

A local couple is letting the immigrants use 16 acres in Clark Mountain Sanctuary in Greene. The plot isn’t ideal. Since there is no source of irrigation, the farmers have to haul water from a nearby stream or the Androscoggin River.

They don’t seem to mind.

“All of my family worked this way,” said Aweis Omar, a Somali man who recently moved to Lewiston.

The father of nine children, Omar got involved with the program this year after learning about it from a friend. Before moving to Lewiston, he lived in Tennessee for five years and worked as a school janitor.

Cleaning classrooms wasn’t awful, but he would have much rather been outside, getting his hands dirty. His father taught him how to grown corn, mangos, bananas and other produce when he was 6 years old.

These days, Omar and his friend drive to Greene every morning and work on their plots until early afternoon.

“It’s nice,” Omar said, as he yanked the cord to the garden tiller. “It’s a good job.”

Government grant

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently gave the program a $300,000 grant. The money, which will be handed out over three years, has allowed Hanna to hire Rosendo Romero, a former employee of DeCoster Egg Farm with years of experience, as the farm manager.

It also will help get the second phase of the project started. Hanna plans to develop a curriculum to teach the immigrants how to raise chickens and goats for meat and egg production, how to sell and market produce and how to develop a viable enterprise.

If all goes as planned, classes will be offered to the farmers in the fall.

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