In Maine, this farmer is growing more than food
"Everyone can get a taste of this farm"
Nineteen years ago, I was biking along a dirt road on Chebeague Island, Maine, when I saw a handwritten sign nailed to a tree that read: “Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got ‘til it's gone, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
It was my introduction to Chuck Varney, a logger, who’d decided he could no longer in good conscience continue the work of clearing the land just behind the sign. I wouldn’t actually meet him for another six years, after he’d found a way to stop the housing development that inspired the sign and, in its place, start Second Wind Farm.
For me, Chuck’s farm is part of the draw of Chebeague, along with the small market that lets you keep a tab, the newspage everyone reads to keep up with local concerts, the arrival of the piping plovers, and other goings on, and the tradition of people waving to each other on their way around the island.
His farm is the only place on the island where you can buy a variety of fresh produce, and everyone who visits is greeted by Chuck, who somehow finds time to grow 35 crops organically. He also manages a museum that showcases the old farm tools he has collected and restored over the course of 47 years.
I discovered Second Wind Farm after almost biking past a farm stand built near the spot where I’d once run across Joni Mitchell’s famous lament. I remember how gratifying it was to walk into the stand and see stacks of wooden boxes holding beets, carrots, and other early season crops. After several summers on Chebeague, I’d learned that buying vegetables when you’re on an island with a small store and no car on the mainland takes next-level planning. I also noted the unattended cash box and pad of paper scribbled with IOUs (1 bag garlic scapes - IOU $2 - Anne), signs of an honor system.
The farm itself was easy to find—I followed a dirt path behind the farm stand through a growth of skinny pines and spruces that opened onto a clearing. There, I saw row after row of freshly sprouted crops, pocket-sized fields of white-tufted, pale green buckwheat and golden winter rye, a lopsided scarecrow, and a scattering of old farming implements. All of it was ringed by a deep Maine-green forest, and somewhere near the middle was Chuck, who got up from his weeding to come over and introduce himself.
This vision, or something close to it, is what inspired Chuck when he decided one day, in a dramatic turn, to become a farmer. It also helped him keep going. ”I don’t want this journey to seem like a rosy ride,” he says.
Chuck, 63, is an 8th-generation islander who moved with his family to Chebeague at age nine. He grew up the oldest of four children and spent much of his childhood helping out his dad who fished for lobster in the summer and for scallops, crab, and mussels in the winter. He says his mother was one of the kindest people he’s ever known.
Chebeague Island, measuring about 1½ miles wide and 5 miles long, with a year-round population of about 400 and a much larger and harder-to-quantify summer population, is the biggest of the hundreds of islands in Casco Bay, just off Portland. In the 19th century, it was the center of the stone sloop industry, which made it the wealthiest town in Cumberland County. Most of the boats were built or owned on Chebeague Island and carried rock and stone from Maine to ports and construction sites. Chuck’s forebears, the Hamiltons, were among the captains.
With the arrival of concrete and steel beam construction, which reduced the demand for large blocks of stone, and the rise of the railroad and more efficient steam vessels, the business dried up. People either left the island or turned to occupations like fishing or tourism.
Rarely did anyone give commercial farming a shot. Though most of the island was cleared of trees for farming in the late 18th century, there was just too little land with too many rocks to make it work—plus it was cheaper and easier to farm out West. But for practical reasons, many families kept vegetable gardens along with chickens and maybe a horse or some oxen, and often grew a little hay, too. Chuck believes that the land he now farms was one of those small family farms.
Chuck first learned of the land when the owner reached out to him in 1996 to see if he’d like to buy the 15 acres, along with her farmhouse, for $70,000. He turned her down without even looking at it—he didn’t have the money. Ten years later, when he found himself clearing the land for a developer with plans to build a housing subdivision, he struggled to complete the job. He’d had no idea how beautiful it was.
Three days into carving out an 800-foot road, he parked his tractor to go chip some wood. In the 20 minutes he was gone, someone had written “this is sad” in the condensation on his tractor windshield. He stopped what he was doing. “I thought, yes, it is sad,” he says. “I also realized that it sucks to be clearing the land for a housing development.”
The land and house were expensive—over 10 years the price for both had blown up to $420,000. But in that moment he felt he’d been given a chance to save the land, which he knew would only get more costly, and to share it with other people. He wanted to help preserve the Chebeague he’d grown up with. “It was like a light switched on,” he says. “I told myself I’d somehow find a way to pay for it, or at least it was important to try.”
He took the money he’d made from building the road and gave it to the developer as a down payment on 8.3 acres, and continued clearing it. (The developer sold the rest of the land and the house separately.) For the first three years the loan was owner-financed. When a balloon payment became due, Chuck raised funds from a few generous friends on the island and borrowed more money from a bank.
The decision to buy farmland represented a major shift from where he’d been heading up to that point. In 1981, when he was 19, he bought five acres on the island. After living there in a car, a tent, and a chicken coop—albeit one with a screened-in porch and an outdoor shower he’d rigged up—he built his own house at age 27. He’d spent 25 years establishing a busy logging business, including buying a sawmill. Divorced, he doted on his young son, Jeremy. He hates debt so much he doesn't own a credit card. But to this day he believes he was called to farm that land, and he quickly got to work.
That first year he removed tree stumps, started a small garden, and planted winter rye, a cover crop he sows in the fall, plows under in the spring, and calls “green manure.” He read lots of books on farming. And he asked the island’s elders for advice on how to coax vegetables from poor soil full of rocks and pine needles.
They’d been helping him out for years already. Mabel Doughty gave him her pressure canner and taught him how to preserve vegetables. Roy Jackson passed along his trick for saving tomato plants from the frost by tying them upside down on rafters in a shed. And Melba and Ellsworth Miller made sure to give Chuck and his family a bag of green beans from their freezer, or a pie, whenever they visited. “We didn't have much money, but that island spirit of generosity made a big impression on me,” he says.
He put what he learned to work and has turned his junk dirt into soil that’s rich in organic matter and healthy microorganisms. I’ve watched Chuck drive his tractor, slowly, past our house carrying massive amounts of seaweed—in his best year he says he logged 60 loads or about 90 tons. He mixes it with an equal amount of wood chips and lets it decompose for about a year before spreading it on his soil. “You get worms upon worms,” he says.
Chuck buys barrels of dead fish and mixes one gallon of “fish gravy” to 10 gallons of water before drizzling it on the ground in the spring. Every year he plants more cover crops, including winter rye, oats and peas, and buckwheat, to fertilize the soil and help it retain moisture. He has also managed to clear about four acres of the forest that has grown up all over the island in the last hundred years or so.
Early on, Chuck decided to practice organic farming which, in just one example of the lengths he goes to, often means picking bugs off vegetables by hand. “But I'd rather see the plants be beaten to death by bugs than poison the land,” he says. Thanks to his nutrient-rich soil his vegetables have some natural resistance to pests and disease.
He says he loves his work but the hours are long and the pay is terrible. With the exception of a few scattered volunteers, he is the only one out there building up the soil and planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting the potatoes, squash, and corn. Until recently, he worked as a logger to finance his work and help pay off his loan, which continues to weigh on him. The proceeds from a growing season that ranges from 100 to 160 days can be pretty slim. In one very bad year he took home only $4,500.
To get by, he lives frugally—heating his house with wood and forgoing WiFi, a cell phone, and dental appointments. He has no car on the mainland, where islanders do the bulk of their shopping. He says he lives by an old New England adage: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. “As in, when your pants have a hole in only one leg, you can still wear your pants,” he says.
And he has taught himself how to do most things, like replacing the engine in his tractor because the mechanics from Portland are so expensive, and fixing up old and discarded farm tools because he can’t afford new ones.
He never set out to be a collector of antique agricultural tools—he just wanted to use them. But when his neighbors caught wind of his interest, they started dropping off ones they’d inherited or found in their yards. The farm tools were a game-changer, enabling him to take on the tilling, seeding, and weeding he needed to get done as a farmer. He also found that the more he worked with tools that had been used on now-gone farms on Chebeague, the more respect he had for them. “Old stuff is made well,” he says.
In 2019, he formed a nonprofit and set up the Chebeague Island Living History Farm at Second Wind Farm, which includes a museum. And in 2022, he moved his sizable collection of antique farm tools, all of which he’s made sure are in working order, into the museum’s new timber frame barn, which was financed by supporters. “I’m here because of the grace and interest of this community,” he says. "There was no business plan."
Over the past few years, life has become a little easier. Electricity is now hooked up to the farm, and five years ago Chuck dug a well. Before that he had to haul in jugs of water gathered from around the island to water his plants and wash his vegetables. "I still ask myself, how did I do that?” he says. “It is such a joy to turn on a faucet and out comes cold water." Forming the nonprofit has allowed him to focus entirely on the farm and the museum. And Jeremy, 32, is a cloud engineer who just bought a house in Corning, New York. “I’m happy,” his dad says, “because he’s happy.”
Chuck is the guy who brings over his tractor if your car slides into a ditch. He offered his vegetables for free during the pandemic to anyone struggling to find something to eat. Every summer he hosts close to 50 kids in Farm Camp, where they learn how to plant food, take care of tools, and understand the importance of eating whole food. (“Do you know what junk food does to your health?!”)
Busy as he is, he makes time for everyone who shows up at his farm. “Welcoming people is part of what I’m sharing,” he says. “I tell people to come, pay a visit. Everyone can get a taste of this farm.”
He continues to find inspiration in his past. One of Chuck’s favorite memories took place on a long-ago day in December when the thermometer topped out at 10 degrees. A boat had tipped over and become stuck in the flats off one of the beaches. Around 60 islanders showed up to help free it, a number of them carrying coffee and hot food. Together, they managed to right the boat, secure it, and float it ashore with the incoming tide so it could be fixed.
“We might bicker with each other now and then, but when someone really needs help on this island, people show up,” he says. “There's a sense of belonging here, a sense of being part of something that's bigger than you.”
When I stopped by to see him last week, he was giving a couple of visitors a tour of the museum. He pointed out an elegant-looking cider press an 80-year-old friend had dropped off that produced 60 gallons on its first run. He dropped rocks into a machine that crushed them into a thick mineral paste he can use to feed his soil. He tells visitors, Farm Camp kids, and everyone who will listen what these old tools can do so we will want to preserve them, too.
“I’m lucky to have grown up here, with people who taught me how to get by and to appreciate having a roof over your head,” he says. “I get to have connections with kids and be part of a community where people know you. I feel so much joy to be doing what I’m doing. See?” He turns to me, and holds out his arms. Goosebumps.
CHUCK’S ADVICE IF YOU WANT TO START AN ORGANIC FARM
Stay on top of your weeding. You know the saying, ‘One weed seeding makes seven years of weeding?’ Remember it.
Do not farm with the intention of making money. Do it because it's important to you and—also important—make sure you have additional income.
Be prepared for how humbling it is to grow food. It takes an enormous amount of time and labor—I don’t think I realized how much.
Don't try to take on too much.
Bear in mind that when you farm, you’re married to it. I don't go anywhere or take any vacations during the growing season because the farm never waits—you don't want to leave tomatoes on the vine so the crows can get it.
Don't depend on the weather.
Don't let your home fall apart while you're 20 years farming.
Don't assume that the Colorado Potato Beetle won't find you.
The modern world needs more Chuck Varneys.
The memories of my time on Chuck’s farm, and the smell of fish gravy, will stay with me forever. Beautifully written peace!