SABATTUS – Lois Wagner refuses to fill her Thanksgiving table with food bought at a big-box grocery store. She finds other ways.

She picks her own cranberries in a Down East bog. She buys her bread from a baker she’s known for years. And the rest of the fixings, including her turkey, come from a 35-acre farm on Route 9 in Sabattus.

“I know where my turkey comes from,” Wagner said. “I know it doesn’t have a bunch of junk in it.”

Willow Pond Farm, which uses organic growing techniques, is a cooperative of sorts. At the beginning of every season, people buy shares in the farm’s produce.

The cost is determined on a sliding scale, topping out at $570 for a family share.

From May to October, the shares buy a weekly sack of groceries including greens, roots, tomatoes, peppers, melons and herbs. During the rest of the year, people can buy winter shares, which supply monthly packages of food including onions, carrots, squash, beans and cabbage. The farm also raises organic turkeys, lambs, pigs and chickens.

Last Thursday, Wagner picked up her first share of the winter. It was destined to overflow her Thanksgiving table.

Her share filled three bags, including a grain-style sack overflowing with a variety of squash.

The Lewiston woman filled the back of her SUV with food, shares for herself and a friend.

In all, more than 100 families from around the region will be feasting Thursday on produce and meat from the farm, located less than a mile south of the new Maine Turnpike interchange.

In a back room of her farm stand, owner Jill Agnew stores hundreds of fabric grocery bags, each custom-filled for the shareholders who would be arriving from as far away as Portland.

“It’s really satisfying,” said Agnew, who has run the shareholder program for the past 16 years. The shareholders are more than customers. Some lend a hand at the farm, doing chores or picking fruit in the 12-acre orchard.

Amy Baxter of Lewiston went last week with her three children. The family share she and her husband buy isn’t enough to fill her table every day, but it does a lot. She’s been a member for nine years.

Part of her motivation is helping someone local. Many large supermarkets buy fruits and vegetables from farms outside Maine and outside the country. That’s fine if a food cannot be grown here or is not in season, she said.

“Why not buy local if you can, especially if it’s just as good or even better?” she said. But there’s another motive.

“It’s very, very important to me that the food is organic,” Baxter said. She worries about foods that are grown with the help of pesticides and other chemicals.

So does Wagner. A shareholder for 14 years, she supplements the food she buys at this farm with goods from other farms.

“I had to buy a bigger freezer,” she said.

All of that organic food may be why she’s healthy at 70 years old. And even if it were not healthier, the food tastes better, she said.

“The turkey is always the best,” Wagner said. “And it never dries out.”