BOWDOINHAM

Focus is on farming

Over the course of its three years in business, the Bowdoinham Community Development Initiative has handed out 11 low interest loans totaling approximately $58,000 to small businesses in town.

Most of those businesses have been farming ventures but the homegrown organization’s mission is to help any small business in town, said David Whittlesey, BCDI’s consulting manager.

BCDI originated from talks in 2011 about how to make the town of fewer than 3,000 residents “an even better place to live, with all of the assets it has,” said Whittlesey, a former board member who stepped down to help run things and be the “honcho.”

The organization has more than 100 members now, an eight-member board and a relatively slim annual budget of about $15,000. Approximately one-third of its budget is funded by the town, another third by membership fees and the remainder from interest it gets back from the low interest loans.

“I think having support from the town but not being controlled by the town,” Whittlesey said, “gives us flexibility, but it also allows the town to call on us to do things that the town can’t do.”

The process hasn’t been without bumps. The BCDI board decided about 18 months ago to approach the Maine Office of Securities to make sure they were doing everything legally. Whittlesey got a call from the director of the office ordering BCDI to stop what it was doing, because creating the loan as an investment opportunity was creating a security that had to be registered with the state and comply with state rules.

The administrator of the securities office understood BCDI’s goal and called with a solution the next business day — an exemption BCDI could apply for at no cost. Under this option, loans could be offered only to membership. BCDI has gone through this exemption process three times and it has become an efficient process. The last loan, from start to finish, took only two weeks.

“If we had had to register, it would have cost us $900 to register each loan, which would have made it prohibitive,” Whittlesey said.

There is still interest from the membership in investing in social capital.

“What’s been really interesting is that the demand for low interest loans has really diminished,” Whittlesey said. “I think the reason is a couple fold.”

One is the rise of online crowd funding, he surmised. But what crowd funding lacks, he said, is “direct community involvement of neighbors investing in neighbors and neighbors receiving support from neighbors.”

According to Whittlesey, Bowdoinham farmers are doing very well, in part, because they’re riskadverse and want to avoid debt. Many have found ways to buy equipment with their own capital.

There are between 10 and 15 local repeat investors and always new folks who want to invest, Whittlesey said. All the loans have been repaid and all but one early.

Some of these types of loans would never by approved by a bank at any interest rate, Whittlesey said.

The focus remains working with the farming community in town not only on the loan process but other issues, Whittlesey said, and there is “an ever-shifting scene in the use of the prime bottom land in Bowdoinham, of which there is a lot.”

BCDI has formed a group to work on developing an inventory of all the potential farmland in Bowdoinham, and that would serve as a model for other communities.

Once this work is done, the next step is to go to the current property owners and interview them about their intention regarding their land and gauge their willingness to have that land brought back into farm use.

BCDI has been looking at what’s going on in the area covered by the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust and Brunswick-Tospham Land Trust regarding food system access. The land trusts have a program called Local Farms — Local Food. They are also creating a food council for this area that BCDI has a seat on. It is looking at the local food and local farm issues in Bowdoinham, possibly linking the land trust to farmland.

Whittlesey said there has been discussion amongst many of the farmers about the sustainability of the model of CSAs, farmers markets and restaurants, “because it does have a ceiling to it. There are only so many high quality mixed vegetable farmers that can produce for those areas and make a living. And have we reached the limit there?”

That leads to the question about whether there is a wholesale market that local farmers should collectively or individually be looking at, Whittlesey said. What are the implications now that Portland was designated one of 12 manufacturing hubs in the U.S., with an agriculture, aggregation and distribution component. Could Bowdoinham farmers sell their products in a different kind of way, he asked.

The food system model is changing, Whittlesey said, and the question is “how can we accelerate that change and increase the amount of food that’s grown in Maine for Maine and engage institutions in Maine in buying that food which will also drive farmers to produce it? It’s a circular problem.”

On this front, BCDI serves as a link between the working farmers and the more broad and systemic issues going on.

Asked what has triggered the growing membership and local buyin into BCDI, Whittlesey said, “I think it’s reflective of a general attitude that reflects Bowdoinham, it being an eclectic place of people who are willing to commit some time to making it an even better place.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com