Doris, “You should really understand that Toby and I are always up for an adventure. And we were like, ‘Hey, let’s try this for a year. Let’s see what happens.’”

Perhaps it was their mutual spirit of adventure that drew Toby Alves and his wife Doris Santoro, both living in Portland, Maine at the time, together 16 years ago. That spontaneity combined with some casual conversations, and it wasn’t long in their relationship before they came up north.

Toby, “Yeah, it doesn’t take long to be in conversation with a friend in the Portland region and say, ‘What about Rangeley?’, and they say “Oh, it’s amazing- ‘Saddleback Mountain’ or, you know, ‘The fishing is great.”, or ‘You can hike on all these different beautiful trails.’”

Doris, “We love the landscape here. We love the mountains. We enjoy hiking, quite a bit, paddling. So, the region had so much that we’re interested in in terms of spending time outdoors.”

Toby- “Yeah, since Nat (their daughter Natalie) was about one. We started out at Rangeley Lake State Park. Then we rented on Rangeley Lake and then we rented on Loon Lake for several years, with always an occasional stop here and there at The Rangeley Inn.”

Doris added, “We’d come and ski at Saddleback while it was open.”

So, they had been visiting the area for about ten years or so when the Covid pandemic hit.

It was at that point that Toby came across an old internet listing for the property on Rte. 4 known as Grasshopper Hill. It was worth looking into. Fortunately, the timing was right. Doris, a professor of education at Bowdoin College for the past 16 years was able to work it into her schedule and Toby had to work remotely anyway.

Doris, “We moved here during the pandemic, and it was also my sabbatical. And so, we had a year where I could be anywhere and because it was during the pandemic, Toby’s Job had gone totally remote. So, we decided to try it out for a year and then make decisions about what was going to come next. And basically, within, I’d say by December, it was clear that we were going to be staying here long term, and we started making plans for engaging in some serious farming.”

Doris, “Yeah. And it was pretty interesting for us to meet everyone with masks because we only met people with masks. And then, you know, when the masks came off, we didn’t recognize our neighbors. And so, it was a strange time. But the really great thing was that the farm was this instant way for us to connect with a lot of people as we were selling vegetables and, being able to meet them outside and it was a way for us to get connected to the community right away even during the pandemic.”

Toby recalled, “I thought we’d spend a few months here and see how it went, and we never left. We jumped right in, and the first chickens arrived, I think late summer of 2020, and as you know it sort of evolved from there.”

Doris, “We also loved the community here and all that. You know, the sense that there was a real, clear community feeling. We had made friends here, friends who were part of the reason why we moved here. And so that was it, too.”

Doris, “But you know, partly our daughter Natalie’s experience in the local school convinced us that this was the place for us to settle. And we quickly started acquiring animals and started out with a small cold frame of vegetables, and now we have a quarter or a third of an acre in vegetable production now. And we’re processing around 300 to 400, meat birds a year. We currently have 20 hogs on premises. We probably have about 100 laying hens right now. So, I guess Toby and I don’t do anything small.” Toby laughed.

Toby, “I think it’s also important to say a lot of traditional work doesn’t support living in Rangeley. This was a window where we said, hey, we really enjoy that region and this is our opportunity with the sabbatical and I wasn’t gonna be going anywhere for my work, because I travel. And so it gave us the opportunity to come up here and try it. So I don’t want it to sound like, oh, we’re pandemic refugees or something, because I think if it hadn’t happened, we probably would be getting ready for our week in Rangeley, you know, thinking to come up and we’re gonna rent on Loon Lake- one of our favorite places in the world. But yeah, as the story goes, now we’re operating our farm here.”

Both Toby and Doris had grown up enjoying gardening so they were pretty sure they would enjoy farming as well.

Toby, “Well, my degrees in horticulture and agronomy, so I had that background educationally. And I worked in the golf business for many years. And then for the past 15 years or so, I’ve worked in the compost industry, which had me through my work life, I was involved in farming. I was actively involved in agriculture and just really always loved the thought of growing food for other people. And watching these people doing it was inspiring. Yeah, so in the back of my mind, it was there.”

Doris, “My paternal grandfather, was a lettuce and onion farmer. And my father worked on the farm until he went to college, and so I learned a lot about growing vegetables from him.” She paused, and then, “Funny that what I was just laughing about is that I just received a message, the waitlist for a community garden plot in Portland is really long. I just found out I was still on the waitlist. So, this was a much quicker way to be able to grow our own vegetables, to just buy a farm in Rangeley.” She said she must have applied for that at least five years ago, and chuckled.

But to continue, her father’s farming experience was in Oswego, NY which is on Lake Ontario.

Doris, “That whole side of my family were farmers and they actually used to drive a truck with vegetables down to New York City to sell their vegetables.”

She recalled some of her earliest memories from on the farm.

Doris, “I remember very distinctly, I grew up in a very rural place. Where I grew up was probably more remote than where we’re living right now, but the town was bigger. I don’t know how to explain that. But I remember very much like walking along the side of the road and picking up garbage people had thrown from their cars, and wondering why we needed to do that if we weren’t the ones who threw out the garbage. But that was like something that I was taught that we do. And I remember very much weeding flowerbeds. I remember riding on the tractor with my father and my grandfather and I remember a lot of like work ethic comes from them. My grandfather was a farmer, who was paralyzed in one of his arms from polio. So, the fact that he was able to be an incredibly successful farmer with one arm was a pretty big deal.”

Besides both having very strong work ethics, they are both very serious about ethical farming.

Doris, “So the first thing I think it’s important to say is that we use regenerative agricultural practices, which means that we’re always looking to improve the quality of the soil and leave things better than we came to it. And so in practice, what that looks like is we don’t use any synthetic fertilizers at all. We use a lot of compost. We try to disturb the soil as little as possible. But it’s been hard because we’ve had to start from fields that nothing had grown on for quite some time to move into it. So anyway, we offer a whole host of greens like kale. chard, we offer a lot of varieties of at least five I think varieties of lettuces. We offer radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli,…”

Toby added, “Peppers, eggplant, snap peas…”

Doris, “Normally, we’re able to put things in the ground around June 1, and that means we start to have vegetables around July, you know, July 1 Less specially starting with the lettuces and radishes and greens. But this year, we started putting things in our hoop house. Which a hoop house is just a greenhouse that doesn’t have any additional heat source besides solar, just the sun that beats on it. We started that a month earlier. So we’re actually hoping to have lettuces and radishes by June 1, around the beginning of June this year. And then our season goes until it depends on when the frost hits. But oh and we also offer like zucchini and squash and things like that. But it depends on when the frost hits, but we tend to go until at least October. And eggs, and we offer pork and chicken and turkey- poultry.”

Speaking of eggs.

Doris, “One of the things that happens is, you know, the demand increases significantly for our eggs in the summer. And so we wanted to make sure that we were meeting the needs of our community. So we offer year round egg, CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, where at a bit of a discount, and it helps us and, and it ensures that it helps us in the sort of leaner times, but also, our customers are able to have eggs year round, guaranteed eggs year-round without fighting the summer crowds.”

Both Doris and Toby are juggling two jobs, so I wondered aloud if either of their jobs helped their farming practices.

Doris, “I definitely think so. I think that one of my jobs here is to educate customers about what we do. And it’s about educating customers about how to enjoy the vegetables that we grow. I like to offer folks recipes, whether that’s if I have them printed out or posting them on our social media, or just having a conversation with people about what they know, because everything we’re growing, we’re eating. And so I’m happy to tell folks how I’m using our vegetables and our products. I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t eat the meat products, but Toby is a master at sharing recommendations with the poultry and the pork. AndI think that there’s an incredible amount of organization that happens in planning a garden and utilizing a relatively small amount of space efficiently, and especially accounting for the incredibly short growing season we have, so I really enjoy utilizing any kind of project management tools that I have with that. The work I do in my other job is really intellectual and there’s something I love about doing manual labor and being connected with the land in the way that I am in this job. So, for me, it also gives me something that I’m not able to access in my in my other work.”

Toby, “Yes, certainly. I mean, I am also extremely fortunate that I really enjoy what I do. The focus of the work that I do is recycling food scraps and turning that into compost. And so, like I said, I get to work around a lot of farms. A lot of folks that I get to educate on food scraps as a valuable resource. So, it ties into what we’re doing here. And I think the other thing I just wanted to say is like, people have different hobbies, and ours just happens to be, we’re a working farm. We like to think we provide a lot of nutritious food for our community, but it’s also what we enjoy doing when we’re not leading our professional lives.”

Doris, “I’d say the other thing, too, that’s connected to my work is my commitment and our collective commitment to making really healthy food available to everyone. And for that reason, we have from the very beginning, pursued offering, accepting and welcoming SNAP benefits. This year, we’re also adding harvest bucks, which doubles people’s SNAP benefits on vegetables. We now, starting this year, we’re able to accept WIC, Women, Infants and Children benefits. And we’re also hoping to add additional benefits for senior citizens visiting farm stands. So we’re very committed to making healthy, fresh food available to everyone in our community.”

Doris, “I think that for me, one of the things that I teach is the incredible importance for a high-quality public education available to everyone. And, and we look at the many kinds of laws and policies in the United States and Maine that make that possible, and what the barriers are to that. And so for me, that’s the connection with making healthy, fresh food available to everyone, as well. And it’s also the reason why having a really high-quality public school here is another reason why I’m so excited about being a part of this community.”

This is high praise coming from Doris whose specialty in education is as a philosopher of education. She has even written a book on the topic, co-authored another, is currently working on one more, and had even been asked to give the commencement address at this most recent University of Maine at Farmington graduation.

However, both she and Toby have intimate knowledge of Rangeley Lakes Regional School as they both spent time as substitute teachers there. Doris volunteered there during her sabbatical, and Toby not long after that.

Their love of the community grew even stronger right from the beginning and continued into some rough times.

Doris, “The number of people who have reached out to us to offer their support, whether it’s buying a dozen eggs, coming over and showing us how to…you know (Mike) Koob literally driving a tractor over here to help us because he watched us hauling 40 yards of compost up the hill with wheelbarrows. I mean, so the number of people who have also come and introduced themselves to us, the extraordinary generosity of people in this community is really, really outstanding.”

Speaking of community support, something happened last year which required them needing a bit more help.

Doris, “It was just at the prime moment in the season when we’re about get going with doing everything in the fields. Toby had a very serious automobile collision and broke his back and was not able to do any physical labor all summer. Again, what is just extraordinary is that that Lindsay Richards at the school, within a few days reached out to us and asked if she could bring the 9th and 10th grade physical education classes, who they needed to do a community service project, if she could bring them over. And they were so helpful for us in terms of helping us get things ready to move some of the pigs, they helped us prepare a bunch of the fields, and, I’m not going to lie, it was exhausting. I think it was mental anguish for Toby in addition to physical pain for Toby. It was physically exhausting for me, but it was also just so gratifying to be able to do this work that has so much meaning of being able to…, we haven’t bought vegetables, except for salad greens. We haven’t bought vegetables. We were able to put everything away and feed ourselves up until now. We were able to feed so many families in Rangeley and in nearby communities in Oquossoc. So you know we’re excited, Toby and I. We were both in the field planting yesterday, and so excited to both be out there together. You know also a bunch of friends came by and volunteered their time at different moments. It was so unbelievably kind the way the community came together to support us and as Toby says, this was a real moment. It could have been a time where we said, ‘Forget it, we’re not going to do this.”, but we decided to find a way forward. We had a really, really successful season last year and we’re looking forward to an even better one this year.”

Toby, “It was important for me to recognize that I could still help people learn things, and they might actually have to do the physical work, but I might have even been more effective by being able to teach people how to plan, teach people how to prepare a bed. It was inspiring that the community showed up and I also enjoyed the learning experience myself that we get a lot more done together.”

Doris, “I think the only other thing that I’d want to say too is we recognize that this farmhouse and this land has a lot of. historical significance to the community and one of the things that we’ve really felt committed to is rejuvenating this place as a place that can be for the community and to find ways to be stewards of this special piece of property and land slowly working on renovating the house, the farmhouse., we’re hoping to be able to do some work on preserving the barn. So it was important to us to engage in some conservation work, not just come in and make it whatever we wanted it to be.

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