Karen and Paul Volckhausen have spent more than half their lives on the Happytown Road in Orland.
There, the couple built a home, grew vegetables and flowers, tapped maple trees and raised chickens, turkeys, sheep and pigs. They started as homesteaders during Maine’s 1970s back-to-the-land movement and grew their efforts into a commercial farm that’s now a local fixture.
At the end of the year, Karen, 83, and Paul, 73, are retiring. But they’ll still live there, and the farm will keep growing — an employee, 32-year-old Angelica Harwood, is taking it over.
Like other older Maine farmers, the Volckhausens faced years of uncertainty about the future of the land and business they’ve invested themselves into, and the painful possibility of their own separation from it. Like other younger farmers and homesteaders, Harwood faced high land prices and limited personal funds, not sure she’d ever own a farm.
While the farm’s past is a chapter in Maine’s homesteading revival and the growth of its organic movement, its new future shows how the next generation can carry on while adapting to a different climate. The dedication needed to preserve both shows how much work it can take to keep the state’s farmland in production through generational changes.
The Volckhausens wanted to find organic farming successors, but the process was lengthy and sometimes discouraging. Over the past five years, they got close to deals with three different couples.
After the third arrangement fell through last year, the Volckhausens were crushed and already felt past due to retire. Karen Volckhausen joked with Harwood that she’d have to take care of her as she aged. Then she wondered if Harwood was interested in taking over. She was.
On Jan. 1, 2025, Harwood, who lives in a cabin on the property, will lease the farm with a seven-year term that renews annually until she’s able to buy it.
Farms and homesteads in transition
Maine has the nation’s oldest population. A recent federal report found it also has the third highest percentage of new farmers with less than a decade of experience.
Still, the 2022 national agricultural census found that nearly 40 percent of Maine farmers were 65 or older, with an average age of 57.5. Like the Volckhausens, some don’t have children who want to take over.
From 2017 to 2022, the number of Maine farmers over age 75 increased by 27 percent and the number between 65 and 74 years old increased by 14 percent.
Farm organizations here have said this is a crucial time for connecting new and old farmers as generations change. Helping transitions happen, and keeping farmland in production instead of it being developed, has been a concern in Maine for decades for individuals and the state. When farmland is developed, it’s difficult to make it produce again, farming leaders say, and locally grown food is important for the state’s economic and supply chain stability.
High real estate costs and low farm wages, among other factors, have led young farmers in Maine to move between leases, share land or spend years working for other farms instead of owning their own.
Paul Volckhausen attended a multi-day workshop about planning for farm succession once the couple knew it was time to think about their farm changing hands. Throughout this year, the three farmers planned, researched extensively and relied on numerous nonprofits, including Land for Good, a local land trust and federal farm loan programs.
They spent months ironing out details and doing homework assignments for Land for Good, a New Hampshire-based group that helps farmers transfer their land to the next generation. Harwood worked this season to learn an in-depth checklist of the skills and knowledge it takes to run a farm, from planning crops to changing what’s planted so it stays profitable.
Because Harwood can’t buy the farm outright, they chose the renewing lease to let her earn enough to purchase. She has the first right to buy it, and they worked with the Maine Farmland Trust and the Great Pond Mountain Conservation Trust to put a farm conservation easement on the land, lowering the price.
The farm’s history
The Volckhausens started gardening in adulthood, then grew into homesteaders in the early 1970s at a rented farmhouse in Surry. They liked it so much that they decided to become farmers, buying an abandoned farm on the Happytown Road with two other couples in 1978. A group purchase made land ownership possible for them and meant there was no mortgage.
Soon the others moved away and the Volckhausens bought them out. They cleared overgrown fields, built a house with extra wood from Paul’s job as a forester and expanded their homestead.
“We scraped,” he said.
“We sure did, but it didn’t bother me,” Karen said. “We were happy.”
They were part of a community of young people flocking to Maine to homestead away from conventional society as part of the back-to-the-land movement. They held work parties to build hoop houses and barns, including the one where the Happy Town Farm chickens still live, and met monthly through a county chapter of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
“We learned so much from that, and from just being together as farmers who were learning something,” Paul Volckhausen said. “We had no idea what we were doing, but we all had a passion for it.”
Farm growth
Many farmers and homesteaders have outside jobs, and both the Volckhausens did. Paul was eventually able to farm full time while Karen worked as a nurse, then a nurse practitioner, returning to grow flowers after her first retirement.
“We made some giant mistakes and learned from them, but we really loved doing it,” Karen Volckhausen said. “You know, it was really exciting.”
She set up a table at the Ellsworth Farmers Market in 1981 and continued until this November. Through those decades, organic farming entered the mainstream and Happytown Farm added restaurant and farmshare customers.
“Our philosophy always was that if you put out a good quality product, people will want it, and they did,” Paul Volckhausen said. “And so we just kept expanding and expanding as the demand was there.”
They also helped MOFGA grow. He led the local chapter and organization board for years, serving as board treasurer, president and briefly acting executive director.
He’s proud of helping establish the Farmer to Farmer Conference, where farmers learn from each other. Both helped start the organization’s partnership with farmers in El Salvador.
They’ve been part of other efforts that shaped the area, including a grower’s co-op and a CSA program, which provides shares of a farm’s produce. That started in 2004 to feed laid off paper mill workers and has expanded across Hancock County.
Connections with customers are valuable through the sometimes isolating day-to-day farm work, they said. Their strong relationship and ability to work together has kept them going, too.
In 2019, they realized it was time to think about who would steward the farm next.
The next generation
Harwood has been a farmer for 12 years, eight in Maine and five for Happy Town. Though the work is hard, the days can be long and there are overwhelming moments, she never wants to be doing something else, she said.
“I can be out in the rain picking broccoli and it’s pouring on me, I’m soaking wet, and for some reason, I’m still happy,” she said. “I think I was bred for it.”
She looked at land before but couldn’t afford it as a single farmer without much equity.
By now, the farm also feels like home and the Volckhausens feel like family. She’s excited to host their children and grandchildren, and they’re looking forward to getting to know her mother and friends.
Harwood plans to transition to a no-till system, which builds the soil up instead of plowing it, and introduce permaculture practices such as planting insect-repellent plants between vegetable rows.
This should reduce labor, provide more nutrients and help the farm withstand weather events brought on by climate change, she said. Other farmers are making these changes in Maine for similar reasons.
To manage the workload, she’s adding perennial crops such as berries and giving up livestock, except for chickens. Harwood wants more volunteers or work-share members to join the farm’s existing programs and plans to expand educational opportunities, too.
“It’s been nice to feel the confidence. Because at first you’re kind of like, ‘What am I doing?’ It’s overwhelming, which it still is, in the best way possible,” she said.
It helps to have a strong foundation, along with the nonprofits that support farmers in Maine, she said. And she’s found her own community of young farmers.
The change is sad for the Volckhausens, but they know it’s time, and they’re happy the farm will continue.
“This land and this farm just are part of us. We’ve developed it, it’s developed us, and to be able to live here and continue to have the farm around us is what we wanted for our future,” Paul Volckhausen said.
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