Blog

With the Farm to Easel Invitational Art Auction just around the corner, we are blown away by the diversity of talent in the Wolfe’s Neck Center community. There has been an outpouring of artists that have chosen to participate in this fundraising event to support our mission of transforming our relationship with farming and food…

We are thrilled to welcome the Fruit & Vegetable Apprentices to the blog this month! They have been with us since mid-May, tending to our organic, no-till production plots in West Bay and in the greenhouses. Our Fruit & Vegetable Apprentices come from all over the country, and learn the ins and outs of organic,…

Hello! My name is Alex Gulachenski, and I am Wolfe’s Neck Center’s Farm Networks Coordinator. I am a recent addition to the Wolfe’s Neck Center staff, and I am excited to tell you all about the important work we are doing with Farmer Networks! As an ecologist by training, I view agriculture from a systems and…

This is a guest post from Ned Swain, owner and operator of Devenish Wines. Devenish Wines is a small, dedicated distributor of fine wines in the Greater Portland area. Devenish believes that wines should taste like where they come from –wines that in some way embody the unique climate and environment from which their grapes…

Wolfe’s Neck Center (WNC) is seeking to transform our relationship with food and farming for a healthier planet. To help achieve this, WNC is researching soil carbon sequestration as a way to reduce agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions and impact on our planet. Read on to learn more about soil carbon sequestration at WNC.  Carbon sequestration…

As the growing season winds down at Wolfe's Neck Center, we asked the apprentices in our Fruit and Vegetable Production Farmer Training Program to reflect on their experiences here. This six month, on-farm training program covers all aspects of organic fruit and vegetable crop production with a focus on regenerative agriculture techniques and includes classroom time and site visits to other farms. Educating and inspiring the next generation of leaders to shape our local and global food system is at the heart of our mission, and this year's crew is leaving here with renewed commitment, hands on experience and a passion for agriculture.

The staff at Wolfe’s Neck Center share a profound and meaningful commitment to our work, each other, and our community. On this day of Thanksgiving, we wanted to share with you our gratitude for being a part of this amazing place; looking at what brought us here and why being a member of the team is important to us.  

Over these past two weeks, COP26, or the Conference of the Parties, held its 26th annual meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. Also known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26 is where nations, indigenous peoples, organizations, and individuals meet to negotiate and discuss how to best mitigate climate change. Conversations such as these are critical to mitigating the ongoing climate crisis. As world leaders prepared to meet in Glasgow, the OpenTEAM Secretariat convened at Wolfe’s Neck Center to reflect on current collaborative approaches, discuss potential opportunities for increased training and certification in soil health tools, and begin to develop a strategy for scaling.

Earlier this year, our cows here at Wolfe’s Neck Center were part of a research initiative to fight climate change. Half of our milking herd were given a local seaweed variety in their diet to measure the impacts of that local seaweed on the amount of methane the cow produces. WNC and project partners will be continuing this work over the next 5 years!

Our cows got some new bling! The SenseHub Dairy activity monitors give our dairy team real-time updates and measurements, helping them to track both cow and herd health as closely as possible. The dairy team uses the monitors to record the herd’s daily movements across Wolfe’s Neck’s pastures, track their dairy production, notify best breeding time for each cow, monitor their digestion, and observe overall health measurements like respiration.