A Day in My Life

Sara Cannon lebt und arbeitet auf einer Farm in Maine. Sie sprach mit KARIN HOLLY über ihren Alltag – der von Schafen und dem Rhythmus der Jahreszeiten bestimmt wird.

Meet Sara Cannon, a young farmer from Maine, USA

My name is Sara Cannon. I’m a farmer in Springvale, Maine, and I’m 29 years old. Most days, I wake up at 5:30 a.m. because I like to read and drink my coffee before I start my day. It’s how I ground myself. I usually eat some oatmeal with flaxseed and brown sugar. I also like to add a little cream. At around 7 a.m., my sister Lana and I meet to begin the milking at my aunt’s sheep farm. We get about 10 gallons of sheep milk a day.

When we’ve taken care of the animals, we begin our farming work. We open the greenhouse once it gets warmer, water the plants, and do a little seeding. This is where we start our plants. The greenhouse is our plant’s nursery.

Once our vegetables are growing, we spend the whole day out in the field. On Mondays, we do the planting and weeding, as well as any tractor work that needs to be done. Lana will be making cheese. She makes feta and a Greek-style yogurt. While she does that, I’m on the tractor.

On Tuesday, it’s harvest day. We’ll be harvesting for our restaurant clients, and on Wednesday, we get our vegetables to the market. It’s in Portland. There, we sell fresh vegetables, herbs, flowers, frozen lamb meat, our cheeses, maple syrup, eggs, sheepskins, and wool.

We don’t like to start earlier than 7 a.m. because it’s a hard lifestyle. As the days get longer, we end up working longer. So, if we started at 5 a.m., we’d still be working until 8:30 p.m. Why kill ourselves? We’re trying to make this lifestyle a little more sustainable than it has been historically.

Whether I’m harvesting spinach or carrots or broccoli, I’m pretty much eating all the time. My favorite is pea season. I love fresh peas. But for lunch, I eat a lot of brown rice, hard-boiled eggs, and cold-cut meat. It has to be easy. You’d think that with all this wonderful food, I would love cooking, but I really don’t! I like eating raw vegetables. Call me lazy!

The Maine season is very short. But we get warm enough temperatures that we can grow most things. During the summer, we grow eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and squash. We really like cut greens such as spinach, baby lettuce, and Asian mustard greens. We can grow them in early spring, and we use our greenhouse to extend the season.

My sister and I weren’t raised with farming. We grew up near Portland. We didn’t plan on getting into agriculture. My aunt, however, has been raising organic sheep for the past 45 years. She just turned 70. She came to us with the proposition of us taking over her business over time. We still haven’t done that, but we lease land from her. We also started milking her sheep. So, she does the meat and the wool, and my sister and I do the cheese and the veggies. The goal is to transition the farm to the next generation.

Sometimes, I just sit down and don’t get up again because my body is so tired. For dinner, I usually have more rice and some fried eggs. I don’t cook very much meat. I have no appetite for it after raising the animals and falling in love with them. Even though I started out wanting to be an artist and went to school to study animation, being outside all day is right for me. I fell in love with this lifestyle. I’m glad I’m a farmer.