See Yourself In Maine, In This Group Or One Just Like It. Maine small town living is unique, and nothing is stronger than the heart of a volunteer.
For a picture spread of what living in Maine is like, scope out this link.
Maine is less people, more recreational value, four seaons of living in the 4th lowest crime state without the pollution, time wasting delays and worries where you are now. And for video, click this Maine video link. Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers
Nothing runs like a Deere….except maybe a Farmall Super M?
You’ve heard the expression,
All Hat, No Cattle”? Well it means you can own the land, but making it pay for itself, sustain itself is the art, the gamble, survival art of farming. With one annual payment, no guarantees, you set out to raise beef, dairy cattle, christmas trees, vegetable growing or apple orchards. Putting something on that land, making it create something to pay the taxes the insurance, the overhead and extra to live on..barely.
The options in Maine depend on your age, ambition, size of the spread your wallet can handle and your wife’s attitude about the whole operation. If you married a lady who grew up on a farm, that is a rare special thing indeed. She knows the set backs of the weather, the market being good if there is a crop failure somewhere else. That’s farming. Here are things to think about with beef raising.
If you want to start a farm, I can help you with the setting, the low cost spread in Maine. But it’s up to you on the rest, what happens with the farm. Can you see little black and white holsteins or brown/white herefords roaming, grazing the green meadow clover grass? Growing bigger, having babies, the herd growing. Or planting a thousand to twelve hundred christmas trees to the acres by machine to groom, maintain and market to end up in the living room of homes many states away for Santa to put presents under. Farming in Maine…ready for the challenge? To climb on a tractor? Put hay in a barn, or to bail the 1200 pounders to get you thru the winters? See farms, the way of the area in Maine where you are hoping to land, to build a spread around you that your kids can enjoy, maybe take over, visit here. Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers –
The natural flowers of Maine are everywhere…not alot of people, property…just wildlife, woods, space.Maine…it’s more than lobster, lighthouses, potatoes and Mt Katahdin…
In a former life 30 years ago, I was a news director of a Bangor Maine radio station.
Every weekday morning, I would roll out of bed at 4 am in Orono Maine and zip thru the shower, brush the teeth, comb the hair and fire up the Pinto to head down interstate 95 to the Bangor ME Broadway exit and greet the overnight guy at Z-62. We were a rock station and I did weekend radio music shows. My name was Andy Powers because the program director Mighty John Marshall (Humble But None The Less Mighty John) thought changing my last name to the same as the President of Maine Broadcasting at the time made sense…for him.) My on air name changed to Andrew Powers when I switched hats from spinning records and giving away band t-shirts during call in contests and became serious, hard hitting dig for the news director again.
Other Maine radio stations in small markets had the regular shift announcer gather the teletype news off the AP machine and have at it. Usually the news was not up to date, had little or nothing to do with the local area and was a handful of rip and reads along with stale weather that did not match what was happening outside if you poked your head out the studio window to check if the tower lights were still blinking red.
The neat thing about our rock station, was folks tuned in for the news because we had Governor Joe Brennan, the local news makers put on the air saying what they thought about this or that…recorded audio of the person not paraphrased by the AP wire service. Senator Cohen, Mitchen when they were in town would drop in, or we did alot of phone interviews. Networking with sister station WCSH radio in Portland ME with Sue Bernard part of the day to day too.
Hearing a local car dealer during the oil embargo say this or that was powerful, local, close to home. And local listeners were used to getting any Bangor Maine news from the Bangor Daily newspaper..not from any radio station. So the quarter hour Arbitron listener ratings for our station went thru the roof. Higher ratings, higher per commercial ad costs we could charge for air time.
Part of the audience liked the rock music…tunes we record at 47 rpm, not 45 so it sounded better, not dragging or slow like something was wrong on every other station. We could also say “Z-62…we play more music”. Songs were shorter, could throw in an extra commercial or two, and one more song per hour so neat Drake format approach innovative for Maine, this far north.
I remember a scanner squawk one morning after I had done the 6:55 am newscast. As I listened setting down a stack of sound bite carts, my stack of the rewritten or new news paperwork, the Bangor fire department dispatcher outlined the call for more engines, manpower to a Main Street commercial building fire. Usually we called the Bangor Fire Chief, would get the sound bite over the phone and this was before cells. Instead, knowing another newscast is less than an hour away, jump in the Pinto with a tape recorder and mike and head to the fire.
The live sound of the fire engines running, sirens in the distance, fire fighters shouting, water spraying, ladders being raised and scraping metal sound in the back ground was huge. And then as I locate the fire chief and ask what happenen, when and any danger of spreading…he in short breath, nervous excitement recalls the cause, the plan to extinguise and how it compares to any other down town city fires in Bangor’s history.
Race back to the station, cut up the sound bites to make three or four different live audio approaches to the story and get it on the air. Barry Hobart, another Houlton Maine native was stuck in traffic on the Bangor – Brewer bridge and wondering what’s the hold up, where’s the smoke coming from. He is tuned to Z-62 as the sales manager listening as the news intro jingle sounds, and the opening story is Bangor Fire Chief Sparky saying “The blaze was caused by electrical overload, we were lucky to get seven apartments evacuated and two people had smoke inhalation including one fire fighter and blah blah blah.
Suddenly, Barry Hobart and other drive time motorists knew instantly the latest of a fire in their backyard. Other stations with the announcer reading the news as it tick tick ticked over the AP wire service would find out tomorrow about the blaze, after the nightly TV news guys and gals had beaten the story to death and moved on to other “this just in”.
People, radio listeners would tune in for the music that was faster, sound processed and with a few “image” songs of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen inserted to wow, make us distinctive, cool, sweet. And then another completely different crowd dialed into 620 AM to hear our news, as we were the early, only local CNN before CNN.
After my radio day ended, I would drive the Pinto over to Mt Hope Avenue and run the camera for channel two, WLBZ for the “Great Money Movie” with Eddie Driscoll and then the Channel two 6 pm newscast.
Broadcasting was fun, not like a job. But a Maine radio career to make money at requires you to leave Maine, working your way up the broadcast ladder if you are good enough and have a wife/kids with a sense of humor to flit, relocate as the career advances. Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers
Check this out. You’re in Maine now remember Toto.
Waterfront IS affordable, is available and you don’t have to donate a kidney to raise the cash to step up to the bar and order up a piece. Enjoy the video for this Spaulding Lake waterfront lot. You own the land, not leased and yes, under $20,000.
Not a misprint, nothing missing or any shell game.
Maine real estate is, always has been attractively priced and property moves thru any national economic climate because of it. We are in our own little world, protected, priced right for the average guy.info@mooersrealty.com 207.532.6573
Could you raise animals, crops, take care of yourself on a Maine farm?Winter peace on a Maine farm, awaiting spring’s rebirth, renewal.From your vantage point on the open side porch of your Maine farmhouse, you can see your wife talking low, softly to the arabian horse on the other end of the lunge line she is holding. You have a sense of peace, contentment that was missing ten years ago when you worked the concrete jungle, pounded the pavement in the financial district of Wall Street. You had the shiny cars, the boats, the vacation homes but never really had time to use them, enjoy them. The three kids grew up in a flash and now you are on a porch in late summer reflecting on your life, your family, your day on the farm ahead.
You are set financially as long as you don’t go overboard on buying any six digit farm equipment you don’t really need. Today’s job jar contains one mission to repair the fence in the hidden rear five acre pasture. Mr Maine Moose decided to be neighborly and visit the Arabian, the hereford and holstein cows grazing the rich clover bed of that pasture and two fence posts were sheered clean off in the visit from Bullwinkle.
This summer you are anxious to get to know two of your grandchildren better, to teach them some life skills, work ethic. To recall the same family stories your dad, his dad and mom told them to pass on to the new members of the family. The pair will spend the summer with you and the wife. And the grand daughter Echo will be riding shotgun with your wife to a dozen horse shows, jumping in green hunter competitions in Maine and over the border into New Brunswick Canada. You and Hercules will be tinkering on the antique tractor, shopping for a two cycle dirt bike and hopefully getting the big original barn on your spread coated with a fresh splash of red paint. Restoring the old John Deer B tractor and doing a motor job on the Farmall Super M that is as old as you are. Filling that freshly painted barn with hay. All on the to do list to check off one by one but all the jobs / plans very weather dependent.
You heat with wood, have a primary furnace in the cellar, and an old timer 1920’s cook stove using the same fuel from your own land in the kitchen. There is a summer kitchen to can and preserve everything from apples in the orchard to free brocolli from the farmer down the road. For fun instead of the theatre, the opera or a river cruise on the Hudson or Potomac, you feel a satisfaction from a visit to the feed store to purchase salt mineral blocks for the critters. The soil is silenium deficient and the salt licks mean no white muscle disease or vet visits to give them mineral supplements. You learn that trick the first summer when the cattle started losing weight, looking poorly and you did not know why. Then.
You plan to enlarge the quarter acre pond that was on the farm when you bought it but that trout will populate next summer when the grandchildren visit again. Feeding those fish released with the same grandchildren from large water filled plastic bags. Fish food broadcast nightly as the sunsets and watching the fish jump is your new nature channel cable television diversion. Your hands are calloused. You have a farmer’s tan, wear a Boston Red Sox or Bruins hat and have lost the tire of fat that circled you like a moon the last ten years of the fast paced life in the city.
Could you leave the urban life behind, move to Maine and stand listening to friends and neighbors where you live in the city wonder if you are off your rocker. And then the same people visiting and seeing how happy, how at peace you are on your Maine farm? Simple living, healthy four season Maine weather to serve as the backdrop for the next chaper of your life. Maine, It’s The Way Life Used To Be…Honest, Down To Earth, Friendly. Me Real Estate
Ready to get your hands dirty, grow something, raise something to eat?Being able to feed yourself, heating with wood from your own Maine property. What do you do first? Well if the property has more woods than fields, you may need a little more cleared land. If you go whole hog into growing a crop, rotation for every other year will mean more than an acre or two of land for the job.
Pasture and fields are not the same. A pasture is ideal for the four legged critters you are raising and giving names like Sirloin, Lambchop, London Broil but if you want to pull row equipment over it, ouch. Planters, plows, disc all have problems with ledge just under the surface. Ideally before you buy, dig some test holes, check with the local soil conservation office too.
Farming…hard work, not a glamous profession but you are never hungry. And you get lots of good old physical exercise hustling to get the chores done, the crops in before the thunderclouds open up. Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers
