Celebrating 16 Years!
Greenhorns has reached an important milestone with our 16 year anniversary in 2023! Thanks to many of you, we’ve persisted and evolved as a young agrarian institution, with an outstanding list of achievements, a beautiful archive of films and publications, a large national and international network, and a lovely campus in the historic coastal village of Pembroke, Maine. Thank you for your support over the years, and here's to a bright future ahead for Greenhorns everywhere.
Help us continue this work
Your tax-deductible donation to Greenhorns will help us support ongoing programs, expand our reach, and continue our work towards agrarian reform and a healthy future for all.
Welcoming 2024
2024 is Greenhorns' seventh season here in Downeast Maine. With a new baby and a hugely diverse set of projects underway, we're dedicating this year to intensification, focus, and depth. This means fewer weekend workshops, and more residency-based programs.
Throughout the spring we'll get our site updated with our latest project updates. Here is where we're putting our focus this year.
- We'll host the Third Annual Pennamaquan Alewife Festival on May 24+25, alongside the Pennamaquan River in "downtown" Pembroke. Thank you to Maine Office of Tourism and Downeast Salmon Federation for supporting this event!
- We'll continue expanding the Smithereen Farmstore and the shared-use Minke Kitchen, to feature and sell locally-grown produce and value-added products. This is a collaboration between Greenhorns and Smithereen Farm and is funded by a grant from the USDA Local Food Promotion Program.
- Greenhorns is producing the new "Local Food Map" promoting Washington County farm producers and products, based on the precedent-setting map done by WCOG's Judy East, ten years ago.
- We're hosting our seventh season of seaweed harvest and learning, and we'll release our seaweed episode of Earthlife.tv!
- We'll install interpretive trail signage along the Pennamaquan River View Trail, built by volunteers and our Americorps VISTA for public access.
- We'll support Sue van Hook's continuing MycoBuoys program, which is working on an alternative to plastic in aquaculture. We'll help especially with outreach, distribution, and media documentation. This project was incubated in the shed behind Grey Lodge, which it has now outgrown! It's supported by a Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant.
- We'll create and install a FarmHack studio, in the outbuilding behind Grey Lodge, showcasing Don Blair's water quality and greenhouse sensors as an exhibit. He'll be back for a workshop, as will renaissance "tinker" Lu Yoder, all organized by our wonderful FarmHack Fellow, Elizabeth Baumhoff.
- We'll hold increased public open hours at the Reversing Hall Agrarian Library. Librarian in Residence Lou Judge will host open days, improving public access and facilitating "Activist Scholar-in-Residence" programs. We'll also give attention to renovations and safety upgrades at Reversing Hall, thanks to the Steven and Tabitha King Foundation.
- We'll welcome back ARRT (Artist Rapid Response Team), for an art retreat working with Sipayik School and local youth to create public art at Pleasant Point.
- We'll welcome back artist Rosy Keyser, to renew the Minke Whale and Alewife signage. We'll have a few other artists coming for week-long residencies, details TBA.
- We’ll host more visiting chefs to work with Washington County's abuntant native plants including wild blueberries, chokecherries, sweet fern, sweet bay, and lesser-used seaweeds that are easy to process with our shared drying infrastrucure—with the intention of bringing these ingredients to more regionally common culinary use.
- We'll continue our collaborative work on the Maine Civic Halls Initiative, supporting and advocating for the restoration and continued use of civic hall infrastructure statewide. Join the list to get notifications about grant committee meetings, in-person gatherings, and pop-up exhibits. Write us at [email protected].
- We'll work on the next volume of the New Farmers Almanac, volume 7, theme "Premonition." We'll finally print the "Habitat Everywhere" Guide.
There's always a lot going on at Greenhorns HQ! Join us in 2024 as we deepen our focus and facilitate a shared exploration and celebration of this Downeast ecosystem we call home.
The GREENHORNS believe we humans must reform agriculture to survive on this planet. Our mission is to create a welcoming cultural space and a practical professional resource for those new to ecological farming. We make books, films, radio, parties, symposia, workshops, networking and online curriculum. We are based in rural Maine where we farm and host campers, researchers, media producers, artists and collaborators. Our community is the international movement of LA VIA CAMPESINA. Our activism helps us express our solidarity with future generations and the non-human world. Come! We can do it together.
New here? Check out THE BLOG, THE GUIDEBOOKS, THE RESOURCES MAP, and our sister organizations: AGRARIAN TRUST, NATIONAL YOUNG FARMERS COALITION...
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Cider Camp with Angus Dieghan of Rocky Ground Cider
October 12 2024 - October 13 2024
A late-season excuse for an apple workshop and group work in the sunshine.
Join us one last time this fall to learn from one of Maine's foremost artisan cidermakers. Angus Deighan of Rocky Ground Cider (@rockygroundcider) will reflect on topics of interest to participants, drawing on his experience in the craft cider scene in Maine, including: the logistics of his operation, relevant regulatory information and small business ecosystem, knowing what kind of apples to harvest from feral trees, and how to plant new orchards with the varieties and flavors that will achieve the right blends needed for optimal dry cider making.
Saturday
- Fruit exploring: learning the flavor profiles, tasting crab apples and more about historic orchards led by Angus
- Gathering apples, pressing juice, drinking juice at Smithereen Farm
Sunday
- Carry on pressing
- Check the juice: sugar content, pH, flavor
- Fermentation basics: containers, airlocks, racking and sulfite calculations
- Participatory supper-making and feasting and drinking of hard cider by the campfire in Smithereen Farm's timber-frame kitchen.
Be ready to help out with meal prep/clean-up in a shared space and bring warm clothes!
Monday
- Stick around for Sean Turley's talk at Reversing Hall! 7:30pm, 4 Leighton Point Road. Sean Turley, fruit explorer and apple historian, will give a talk downstairs in the Hall on MONDAY at 7.30 pm on how to identify heirloom apples. He will present on his new book, Practical Pomology: A Field Guide, which will be for sale starting on October 15th. Go to pomereaderpress.com for more information, or visit his Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therighteousrusset
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Cost
Workshop fee: $40 per person
- Camping at Smithereen Farm or Blueberry Land is included in your workshop fee. (See below for more details)
- Indoor rooms are available at Fox, Elver, or the Grey Lodge for $60 per room, per night. Single and double occupancy available (private bedroom, use of shared kitchen and bathroom). You may opt to stay one or two nights!
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Hard cider can be pre-ordered by the case and Angus will bring it up Downeast for you to pick up. Cider is $185/case of 750ml bottles, $115/case of 375ml bottles. Cases will be mixed, highlighting different blends and styles!
You can also buy bulk FROZEN organic wild blueberries or cranberries from Smithereen Farm — in which case, bring a cooler!
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Sean Turley: Fruit Explorer and Apple Historian, a talk at Reversing Hall
October 14 2024 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
4 Leighton Point Rd, Pembroke, ME 04666, USASean Turley, fruit explorer and apple historian, will give a talk downstairs in the Hall on MONDAY at 7.30 pm on how to identify heirloom apples. He will present on his new book, Practical Pomology: A Field Guide, which will be for sale starting on October 15th. Go to pomereaderpress.com for more information. Visit Sean's instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therighteousrusset/
A Digital Magazine & Podcast For The Intrepid Young Farmer
Check out our series EARTHLIFE. Our first episode is ALEWIVES, exploring the landscape, looking upstream, downriver and out to sea to discover the destiny of our home region. See our episodes on BERRIES, CIVIC HALLS, and SEAWEED. Alongside our films, we've created a multimedia learning-experience with audio interviews, articles, out-links, archival and contemporary materials that inform an approach to ecological farming, rural enterprise and coalition building.
THE New Farmers Almanac
Order Volume VI: Adjustments and Accommodations today!
This latest volume seeks to recognize our own collective agency in the face of sizable uncertainties. The morphing climate, ongoing culture of land dispossession, continuing global pandemic, shifting and intensifying weather patterns, and migrations of all species—spurned by political and environmental upheaval—are considered within. There is adaptability in each bloom of algae; tiny particles of inspiration can enliven lives and farm systems; the natural currents and connected sentience of the living earth moves genetic material. Dynamic flux and rapid change remain possible.
→ SUBMISSION PERIOD NOW OPEN FOR New Farmers Almanac VOLUME 7
As a literary journal powered by farmers, for farmers, with farmers—in daily relation with the living world. Vol. 7 is called PREMONITION. Literature, as in dreamworld allows our human psyches to sort, unfold and reorganize memories and meaning. Evolutionary life, learning from extremity, unfolds with inspiration, trembles towards survival. We are earth-bound beings tuned to a world wide web of soil, it is a response to narratives of inevitability and selfishness taught by these machines. This Almanac challenges us to share our premonitions: what transmissions we are receiving from the living world?
Email your abstracts ASAP (no later than February 28, 2024) to [email protected]
Maine Civic Halls Initiative
The Maine Civic Halls Initiative seeks to preserve, restore, and support the role of civic halls as critical rural community-building resources in Maine.
Drawing on the expertise of historians, government officials, community leaders, business owners, economists, and active grangers/Masons, and citing original research, Greenhorns and project partners Maine Preservation and Friends of Liberty Hall produced a report on the current status of civic halls of Hancock and Washington counties.
seaweed Commons network
We are part of an international collective of seaweed growers, lifelong harvesters, scientists and advocates. We believe that the seaweed aquaculture industry should be developed with a precautionary approach: conservation minded, at an appropriate scale, and with local ownership and control. Farms should be small scale until knowledge gaps can be satisfactorily filled and the impact on wild coastal ecosystems and coastal communities is shown to be minimal.
Read our position paper: A Precautionary Approach to Seaweed Aquaculture in North America
Read our contribution to LUMA ARLES AR#1: Aquaculture
Read the ETC group's paper: The Seaweed Delusion