For their first farm tour of the season on Saturday afternoon, June 25, the Blue Hill Heritage Trust presented Quill’s End Farm, run by Phil and Heather Retberg on 100 acres on Front Ridge Road in Penobscot. The farm is part of the “Farmland Forever” program, created by the Trust in 1998, that aims to protect farmland in the area by holding agricultural easements on certain properties deemed to have high quality, productive soil. Between their farm store, Farm Drop and the Deer Isle buying club, the couple sells raw milk, eggs, grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork and duck.

The Retbergs are well known in Maine for their support of food sovereignty issues, advocating for greater local control over food production and distribution. Visitors were greeted by the couple, who have run the farm since 2004 with their three children. The tour began with a lesson in soil building and carbon fixation, explaining a little about the family’s philosophy of pasture-based farming, about which they say, “all flesh is grass. All grass is soil.” The farm on Front Ridge Road in Penobscot is currently about 18 acres of open pasture and the rest woods, which the Retbergs are in the process of reclaiming.

The tour catered to children and adults, with those interested in the inner workings of a farm given a separate tour while children visited with the animals and glimpsed the daily farm chores. Children and their parents visited with the goats, one of which was heavily pregnant and gave birth to two doelings later that evening. The group then moved on to meet the youngest on the farm, a young calf and two clutches of chicks. The laying house was next, where the hens were let out for their daily romp on “chicken mountain,” a small pile of dirt and grass nearby, and where the Retberg’s daughter Carolyn collected colorful eggs in a wire basket.

Then it was on to visit the cows and pigs in the pasture and a lesson in turning cream to butter. At the end of the tour the two groups reconvened and were treated to homemade bread, cheese and golden yellow butter, along with ice cream churned by hand by the Retberg children.

The next farm tour will be Monday, July 11 at 2 p.m. at Horsepower Farm in Penobscot. See bluehillheritagetrust.org for more events.

This article originally appeared in the Castine Patriot, July 7, 2016
Read it here.