BLUE HILL, Maine -- When Dan Brown quit his job driving trucks and began to work on his wife's family homestead about a decade ago, he was looking forward to a quiet life of farming. He began raising chickens and growing vegetables and watched happily as a calf named Sprocket thrived. The Browns built a farm stand and began selling unpasteurized milk and eventually other products, like jam and salsa.
With the addition of a few slick luxuries, like a hot rod and a flat-screen TV, they were pursuing a lifestyle that has attracted scores of people to this rocky peninsula. They are following in the footsteps of the back-to-the-landers who began flocking to Blue Hill decades ago and the 19th- and early 20th-century rusticators who came before them to seek a haven away from the industrial cities of the East. But a few years after the Browns began selling, state regulators saw a problem. It is legal to sell unpasteurized milk in Maine, but because Brown had never purchased a $25 milk distributors' license and had not properly labeled his milk, the state argued that his farm was breaking the rules and needed to be stopped.
Brown recently lost an appeal he had made to the state's highest court after he fought a lawsuit filed by the state in 2011. It was a blow to a small but vocal rebellion among farmers and consumers who say burdensome state regulations are keeping the most local form of food -- which, around there, has near-religious significance -- away from consumers. The case has pitted the state against some small-scale farmers and stirred a feud between new homesteaders and longtime family farmers.
"This isn't about Dan Brown or Farmer Brown anymore," Brown, 46, said on a recent morning. "They're telling you that you don't have the right to come get milk from a farmer."
Brown said he was told by a state official in 2006 that he would not need to be licensed or inspected if he sold from his farm and did not advertise. So when state regulators from the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry came calling a few years later, he said, he rebuffed them (colorfully, at times), unwilling to spend money on the upgrades he would need to qualify for a milk distributors' license.
"I don't need a $40,000 milk room to produce safe, healthy milk," said Brown, who asserts that the decision to buy his milk should be left to customers who know him, not to the state.
The state says the licenses are necessary because improperly handled milk can carry food-borne illnesses. "Our inspectors work closely with applicants to help them comply," said John Bott, the director of special projects and communications for Maine's Agriculture Department.
In 2011, the state and the commissioner of its Agriculture Department filed a lawsuit against Brown, alleging that he had sold unpasteurized milk without the proper license and labeling and operated a food establishment without the license to do so. Last year a judge agreed, ordering him to pay a fine of about $1,000 and to stop selling. Brown has since filed for bankruptcy.
"It was ridiculous, ludicrous and maddening," said Florence Reed, a neighbor who directs an organic farming nonprofit and was a customer of Brown's. "Dan's milk is what they choose to protect us from?"
In May, Brown went to the state's highest court, in Portland, for a hearing on his appeal, accompanied by a bevy of supporters who want farm-to-consumer sales to be free of state and federal regulation that, they say, is intended for supply chains that are much more complex than theirs.
In 2011, voters made nearby Sedgwick the first town in Maine to pass a so-called food sovereignty ordinance, which grants an exemption from food safety rules to farmers selling directly to consumers. Blue Hill soon followed. There are now 11 towns in Maine with such ordinances, and similar measures have popped up in states including California and Vermont. Pete Kennedy, the director of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, said this is the first litigation involving one of the ordinances, so advocates were watching closely.
"We've gotten them out of our bedrooms and our voting booths," said Betsy Garrold, the head of a group called Food for Maine's Future, before Brown's hearing. She then said they needed to get the state "out of our kitchens."
Mark Randlett, an assistant attorney general who was arguing the state's case, said Maine needed to be able to regulate food sales to protect public health. "The department really does support local food sales and these kinds of transactions between farmers and individuals," but not without rules, Randlett said in May.
Brown's lawyer, David Gary Cox, argued that the state could not change the rules on Brown, since officials had first told him he would not need a license, and invoked the Blue Hill ordinance in his defense. The judges said public health ramifications outweighed Brown's concerns with obtaining a license and that the ordinances are pre-empted by state and federal law. Advocates of the ordinances say that they expect towns will nevertheless continue to pass them and that they will seek to pass a state law that would create some regulatory flexibility for small-scale dairy farmers.
"We'll continue to work with the legislators who have supported us," said Heather Retberg, 40, a farmer from Penobscot who sells raw milk without a license to a private buying club. The latest ruling, she said, "puts us in an uncertain spot, again."
But other farmers were worried that relaxing food safety rules for small-scale farms could endanger the industry, and were frustrated by Brown's case and its supporters.
"It's a ragtag bunch of individuals who have come into the state of Maine from other places, who have this vision of a paradise where there's just no regulation and no law," said Joan Gibson of Tide Mill Organic Farm in Edmunds, which has been in her husband's family since 1837. "There needs to be some structure in place."
Kevin Poland, 61, has a farm in nearby Brooklin and said he was ejected from a local online food distribution program after he raised questions about some other farmers' lack of labels and licensing. "They're going to ruin the local food movement," he said.
Brown had been lobstering to make ends meet but stopped after his wife, Judy, fell ill the morning after their state Supreme Court hearing, so he could tend the farm. They will focus on homesteading for now, Brown said, but they will pare down and he will seek other ways of making money. They were planning to make pizza with mozzarella from their milk.
"The farm can change," Brown said. "We can survive. It'll just be more of a farmstead for our life, not our livelihood."
SundayMonday on 06/29/2014