BETHEL — When a restaurant sources its ingredients from local farms it is called Farm to Table, but what about Table to Farm? Several local businesses add another step to the chain by sending food waste, or the byproduct of the food they produce, back to the farm.

Calling it Table to Farm doesn’t even cover Bethel where Farm to Vat, Brewery to Farm, and Table to Automobile are part of the landscape, too.

CPS to Great Brook Farm

Call it ‘scrap to slop’ at Crescent Park School where 280 students separate their leftover lunch into either a trash barrel or a compost bucket each day. In between lunches, Michelle Mador and other cafeteria workers dump the compost into a five-gallon bucket outside the back door. Farmer Patrick Moore comes every day to get the scrap.

“One pig needs eight pounds a day to grow,” Moore, the owner of Great Brook Farm in Newry, said. The students’ leftovers provide one meal a day for his pigs.

Ryan “Chef” Kimball, Maine School Administrative District 44 food service director, said, “It would kill me to just throw that in the trash each day. I just don’t like wasting. They say 40% of the food in this country is wasted.”

Brewery to Gould 

Gould Academy Farm and Forest Manager Jeremy Nellis feeds their Belted Galloway cows a byproduct of the brewing process from Steam Mill Brewing.

“We pick up one or two large trash cans per week, depending on how much beer they are brewing,” he said. “The cows eat a five-gallon pail of grain most days. Our sheep also love it when they get some. We give them a couple large scoops on a regular basis.

“We use it like a snack, all summer the cows were rotated among a couple of fields so they could graze and we didn’t have to buy hay,” Nellis said. “The crew at Steam Mill have been great to work with, the relationship is a win for both of us.”

Local Hub to Vigilante Farm

“It’s nice to turn all that into something positive,” said a patron at The Local Hub where owner Dara Behan of Bethel, saves their weekly food waste for farmers Kathleen DeVore and Scott Hynek.

On Thursdays, Behan and the other food preparers at The Hub fill three five-gallon buckets. On the other days a little less, she said.  She saves only vegetables and coffee grinds, no meat, for the chickens and pigs on the East Bethel farm.

Turns out that Hynek picks up from The Hub and from the Holidae House, Watershed Kitchen, and Gracenote Inn, all in Bethel. “We don’t waste much of anything,” he said during a tour of the farm.

Any trash that burns we burn in the woodstove … I have a whole barn set aside for compost,” Hynek said.

He notes that DeVore uses the pig poop in her garden as compost. He cuts a fallen apple from one of his trees into quarters for his chickens.

A Farm to Table philosophy fills the shelves at The Local Hub where local farms’ products are for sale. Mountain Meadow’s honey, jams, jellies, dried mushrooms and chaga; Greenwood Bean coffee;  Abbott Farm’s tomatoes and maple syrup;  and Back to Roots popcorn and elderberry syrup fill the shelves. Behan welcomes local eggs and in-season mushrooms, too.

Jessie Stevens to Village Blues 

Call it Farm to Vat when Jessie Stevens of Newry, a fruit grower, gives rotten pears to indigo artist Rebecca Zicarelli. She peels and cooks them then plops several at a time into her indigo vats. Fructose reduces the liquid in the vat, removing the oxygen from the water.

“I have a freezer full of knuckly pears that will help keep my vat happy for the long winter,” she said.

Zicarelli said Valentine Farm volunteers grew two beds of Japanese indigo for her last summer and Beth Clark of La Ferme in Albany Township will grow a bed of indigo for her next summer. She is hoping to find a farmer who will grow a test field crop of indigo next summer.

“With quantity, we would be able to compost the indigo into sukumo, one of the best methods of processing indigo for vat dyeing,” Zicarelli said. “While there is demand for sukumo in the U.S., nobody produces it for sale, and I would love to see if we can do that here in Maine.”

Butcher Burger to that car guy

Butcher Burger kitchen manager Isaiah Lambert of Bryant Pond village said the company they used to collect their fryolator oil hadn’t been picking up when a man stopped by and asked if he could have it to run his car. The car owner took everything Lambert had: 30 to 50 gallons of grease. Other locals remember the mysterious man asking for fryolator grease, too, but no one remembers his name.

The Good Food Store

The Good Food Store is looking for a local farmer to compost their five to 15 gallons of daily scrap. They have composted with various local farmers over the past 29 years. Like other locals they worked with Dean Richmond who had a composting business in Bethel.

The Good Food Store sources many products from Maine and New England businesses and sells many products from nearby farmers such as Dunham Farm, Back to Roots, Morning Glory Farm, Woodstock Asparagus, Kangas Farms, Moon Dance Farm, Born Yesterday Bakery, and Gamut Goods

Heather Nivus, co-owner with her husband, David, said, “Back in the mid-to-late ’90s, we would drive to Portland and Southern Maine once a week to pick up many of the Maine products before companies realized that Bethel was worth adding to their delivery routes.”

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