Thanks to Mark Bittman and the New York Times, I came across this piece by Jane Black about land trusts in Maine and how they are connecting farmers with land. Even in Maine, land is terribly expensive for new farmers who are not part of a family farm, and land trusts purchase land either to rent to farmers for a reasonable fee or to sell the land for less than the purchase price. (I love Maine Farmland Trust’s philosophy, which is to “buy high and sell low.”)

Also, here is a rather shocking statistic from Black’s piece: “In Maine…75 percent of farmland has vanished since 1950. What’s left is often worth more as future house lots than as a farm…”

So let’s hear it for the various Maine land trusts that are working so hard to buy land that in turn will go to the next generation of farmers. With the price of oil going up (and not likely to come down), we need local farmers and the food they produce more than ever.

As I am fond of pointing out, Maine, in the 1800s, used to be the bread basket of New England. While the soil along some of our coastline can be thin, there are plenty of places both inland and by the coast where the soil is rich and deep.

Perhaps sometime in the not so distant future Maine can go back to being the bread basket of New England.