sail freight projects

maine sail freight

Maine Sail Freight is an ongoing project to support the trade of agricultural products, by sail. There are many people interested to re-kindle coastal sail freight, and many ways of going about it. In 2015 we undertook the first voyage of Maine Sail Freight in partnership with the Adventure Schooner out of Gloucester, in 2022 we sailed again with the schooner Roseway based in Christianstead, St. Croix.
The economics of sail-shipping with historic schoonercan work when there is also an educational ( sail trainees), celebrational (farm to table dinners) and curricular (semester at sea)focus on de-colonizing our trade relationships.

We have also supported multiple other sail freight projects, including Vermont Sail Freight and Caribbean Sail Freight.

Thanks to partners Crown of Maine Organic Cooperative, MOFGA and Maine Grain Alliance for their support.

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Watch Severine Fleming's talk at the College of the Atlantic

Sail Freight has put on several events throughout the years, some of their posters are above!

VERMONT SAIL FREIGHT PRESS

 

Food Matters | Fifteen Tons of Groceries, Sailing Down the Hudson

The New York Times Blog covers Vermont Sail Freight Journey to NYC

October 24, 2013

Seeking a more sustainable way to get his grain to market, the Vermont farmer Erik Andrus conceived the Vermont Sail Freight Project to find out if this model could work again today. In April, he raised more than $15,000 on Kickstarter to build a 39-foot-long plywood sail barge named Ceres (after the Roman goddess of agriculture). The Greenhorns, an Essex, N.Y.-based farmer advocacy group, and the Willowell Foundation, a nonprofit education organization, signed on as partners to raise additional funds, handle the project’s logistics and recruit farmers and volunteers.

“We’re at an inflection point,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the founder of the Greenhorns. “Can we, as farmers, collaborate on a distribution system that matches our values and preserves the craft economy?”

The boat, loaded with 15 tons of cargo from 30 farms, is about to complete its maiden voyage down the Hudson. The crew has been hosting daily dockside markets at port towns from Hudson to Yonkers, selling pantry staples, like wild birch syrup, heirloom beans and Atlantic-harvested seaweed, and fresh produce, like blue fingerling potatoes from Juniper Hill Farm in Wadhams, N.Y., and shiso from Grange Co-Packer Cooperative in Essex, N.Y., which von Tscharner Fleming co-founded.

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