Welcome to Switchback Farm

Matt was a successful business owner in Massachusetts, and Maisie was a software analyst. Our family yearned for a life closer to the land, and to build a family business and way of life that would provide our children with access to as much green space as possible and we took the magnificent opportunity to move to Maine in 2017.   Our first year was full of research and experimentation. In the winter of 2018, we tapped our maple trees and eventually made six gallons of maple syrup. We started our apiary in May of 2018 with 5 packages of Italian bees from Rossman’s Apiary in Georgia sourced through David Spicer www.spicerbees.com in Whitefield. We had attempted beekeeping together in Massachusetts and even though Maisie grew up helping her dad keep bees, we had so much to learn! Maisie was incredibly fortunate to take the Knox Lincoln County “Bee School” in the spring of 2018 and was able to vastly improve our knowledge of how to be effective stewards for honeybees. We now have more hives than when we started and are hoping our winter hive preparations will be successful in bringing the bees through the frigid winter. In the spring of 2018, we planted green beans, squash, pumpkins, peppers, and spinach to see how well they would grow. We quickly found that the local wildlife including mostly woodchucks and deer love to eat our crops. In the next  year we will utilize some solar-powered electric fencing and see how that works out.  The farm has most recently produced an organic hay crop certified by MOFGA, and as we expand our plans for a market garden,  we hope to certify our vegetables and herbs as organic as well. Our farm’s tale is always evolving and here we want to share our enthusiastic love of this land and our stories and images of working here.