MY FARM-TO-TABLE

road trip was bookended by books. At the end of the week, I was surprised to find myself at an 8,000-volume library for agrarian scholars in Pembroke, which is nearly as far Down East as you can go before you reach Canada. Pembroke was a 19th-century industrial centre with shipyards, sawmills, an ironworks, and sardine canneries. These days the sardines are fished out and there are one-third as many residents as in 1870, the end of the sailing age. Even by Maine standards, land is dirt cheap.

Which is why the town’s remnants are of interest to a freethinking idealist born to a wealthy Swiss-Californian family. Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer, activist, and eco-firebrand who had founded four non-profits before she reached Pembroke in 2017.