Today I'm talking with Samantha at Runamuk Acres Conservation Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Samantha at Runamuck Acres Conservation Farm. Good morning, Samantha, how are you? I'm very good, thank you, good morning. I'm in Minnesota, you're in Maine, and everybody who's listening to the podcast already knows this, but I grew up in Steep Falls, Maine. 00:30 Oh wow, that's cool. Which is like half an hour or northwest of Portland, Maine. So I know what Maine's like and I think it's beautiful and I can't afford to move back because it's gotten so much more expensive to live there. So I'm really happy that you get to live in Maine. I think that's fantastic. Tell me about yourself and what you do. Let's see, so I'm a farmer, writer and conservationist. 00:59 I own a 53 acre farm and ecological reserve in New Portland, Maine, which is nowhere near the city of Portland. It is about two hours north near the Western Mountains. Okay. Yeah. All right. So what do you do at your place? We raise chickens for eggs. We have a one acre market garden. We have maybe... 01:26 an acre or so fruit trees that we've put in since we got here. And I raise a small flock of sheep, which we rotationally graze on our 10 acre pasture out back. Awesome. So why is it why is it conservation farm? How does that play in? Yeah. So I built my business on bees with a bent for bee friendly farming. And it's kind of morphed along the way and become more 01:55 geared towards beneficial insects and soil microbial life. And so that's what we are working to conserve. We're working to conserve wildlife through the wellbeing of pollinators and beneficial insects and soil life to benefit the whole ecosystem. Fantastic. Last night as I was heading up to read, because I read before I go to sleep, my husband texted me a photo of a queen bumblebee. 02:25 that had landed on one of the logs or the logs that they were cutting up for our wood burning boiler. And I was like, is it a honeybee? Because I couldn't tell from the picture. I knew it was a bee. I just didn't know what it was. And he was like, no, it's a queen bumblebee. And she just happened to land there. And he was like, I'm going to stop and take a photo because this doesn't happen very often. Right. Yeah. She must have emerged from her family nest and be going off to start her own. 02:54 Yeah, I don't know. Usually it's earlier in the season. So I don't know why she blessed him with a visit. But it was pretty cool to get a photo. I'm going to post it on Facebook later today. So, okay. So you before we started recording, you said it's your sixth anniversary at being at the place you're at now? Yeah, we call it our farm-aversary. We've been here for six years officially today. Okay, tell me the story. Tell me how you how you ended up where you are. 03:23 It was very long and arduous. I was a landless farmer for these eight years. I had gotten divorced and I really just refused to give up on farming. It was kind of the way, the only way I felt that I could become a homeowner and provide a home for my family. So I used the skills that I had and it took a long time to build my income from agriculture. 03:51 I raised bees because everybody will have a hive on their property if they don't have to manage them. So I had apiaries all over the area and that allowed me to build my income to the point where I could justify to a financial institution investment in real estate. So and then at that point we weren't able to qualify with a traditional 04:16 financial institution. So I ended up going to the USDA as a beginning farmer and the farm service agency classifies a beginning farmer as someone who has been farming for less than 10 years. So at that point I was at eight years or so and I was like, oh geez, if I'm going to do this, I better do it now. So I didn't want to go that way, but because nothing else was lining up, I was like, okay, this is my last chance. I'm going to give it a shot and then I may have to give up farming. 04:46 Mm-hmm. So we did we went we were able to qualify it took 270 days to close on a property I went after this other property first and so we were in Closing process with that one for six months before we finally found out that the house wasn't going to pass an inspection and to save my loan I 05:10 I had to scramble and look for another property in the area that might qualify, and I ended up here. Okay. For those who don't know, Samantha has a Facebook page, and I started watching or, I don't know, following her Facebook page. ...
