Our Story
Founding of a Maine Organic Farm
Replenova Farm, LLC was founded in Cumberland, Maine in July of 2015 by Gary Goodrich, biochemist, former biotechnology business owner, and lifelong organic gardener. His dream of developing and operating an organic farm model is an ongoing labor of love. Replenova grows high-quality produce and also develops and sells value-added farm products. Gary’s goal is to provide high wages and benefits for farmworker employees while operating and growing the farm in a sustainable manner.
Nathalie Forster joined Replenova Farm in Spring 2016. Combining her extensive scientific, organizational, and documentation knowledge with her enthusiasm for farming, Nathalie was an excellent fit for the business.
Annual Updates
2025
Our veggie production continues to improve. This will be our first full year with the new high tunnel. We hope to take advantage of this space by growing tomatoes, ginger, turmeric, lettuce, and celery. We hope to improve yields in the other tunnels by expanding our nutrition program and by having more precise control over our temperatures. Our farm market kitchen continues to create delicious dishes. Ben will be featuring from-scratch sandwiches and prepared foods into the main season. He will continue the Friday To-Go Meal that began last winter. The crafts fair will return with a vengeance this July and will include specialty food vendors. We will also be hosting three fundraisers in June, July, and August to include music, a farm supper, and drinks catered by Jackass Annies. We are also excited to be holding Culinary Food is Medicine classes with the hope of constructing an outdoor space in which to expand this offering.
2024
We expanded our community events by hosting three food truck charity events. We continued to host student groups weekly and also did our middle school garlic planting with great success. We launched our popular Friday To-Go meal program along with improved sandwich and pizza specials. We also added an online ordering system. On the growing side, we installed a new high tunnel in the summer and made some capital investments in field prep equipment. We also experimented with additional cover crops that add organic matter. Lastly, we continue to update our field fencing to keep the deer pressure down.
2023
The weather was not kind to us. The excessive rain ruined many of the outside crops and the reduced sun had an impact on some of the high tunnel crops as well as our solar production from the panels. Improvements were made to the storefront landscaping by adding a picnic area and hardscape. Considering droughts from previous years, we allocated resources to improving our irrigation in the field. We hosted our first food truck event with Grindstone BBQ and Jackass Annie’s as fundraisers for charitable organizations.
2022
This was our best growing season so far. The tomatoes, cukes, and peas were very happy. To mitigate the deer pressure, we installed fencing. We had school groups from Durham Community School, Freeport Middle School, and Freeport High School come and help with the harvests and transplanting. We hosted a craft fair event with great success. The farm market offerings continue to expand. We added additional refrigeration and displays to welcome people into the store.
2021
We continued to expand our Farm Market offerings to include more types of organic produce, throughout the entire year, including more greens and winter vegetables for the lean months of November and December. We also added more local vendors and provided a better variety of prepared foods and baked goods. We added a walk-in freezer which has enabled us to offer a wider selection of local meats. Our vegetable donations through the Good Shepard Foodbank the Merry Meeting Gleaners were increased to nearly 3,000 lbs. For three seasons, we worked to provide farm experiences for students from Freeport High School. Additionally, we produced 32Kw of electricity this year with our solar panel system, of which the farm and market used 28Kw.
2020
This year, otherwise known as the year of COVID-19, saw many changes here at the farm. This was our first full year in Durham, and it has proven to be a very positive one due mainly to our small, flexible staff and the strong support from the good folks of Durham. We started out having to add an online ordering system for our early spring organic vegetables. Later in May, we added a touchless payment system for our Farm Market, which opened late that month. During the summer, we added lunch items, including sandwiches and salads made from our farm-grown vegetables and local ingredients. Then in the fall, we added baked goods, including bread, pies, and cookies. We opened on Saturdays for breakfast and lunch sandwiches. At that time, the Farm Market brought in for sale over 20 local farms and food artesian vendors, including meats, cheeses, and other items.
Meanwhile, we continued adding infrastructure by reconstructing our drying house, refrigeration, and more outdoor growing beds. Major wholesale vegetables included Hakurei turnip, sugar snap peas, cherry and slicing tomatoes, and cucumbers. We expanded our Farm Market varieties to include sweet and regular potatoes, cabbage, summer and winter squashes, pumpkins, onions, more greens, kale, celery, eggplant, and herbs. Additionally, we grew and dried our own plum tomatoes. Our donations to Good Shepard Food Bank increased to over 1,500 lbs of vegetables, including rutabaga, tomatoes, sugar snap peas, lettuce, cucumbers, and summer squash.
2019
During the 2019 growing season, we continued to diversify our selection of organic vegetables, adding Hakurei turnips, radishes, fennel, broccoli raab, basil, and Chinese cabbage. Lemongrass was added to complement our ginger and turmeric crops. For a second year, we participated at the Yarmouth Farmers Market and added rutabaga to the Good Shepard donations. We continue to work with the gleaners.
Solar drier and solar hot water seed starter improvements continued.
Harmonized GAP certification from the USDA was awarded to Replenova in 2019. This certification is a testament to our continued dedication to enhancing our Good Agricultural Practices mission.
Finally, this was a watershed year for us. In October, our farm moved from Cumberland to Durham including the disassembling, moving, and reassembling of five high tunnels.
Meanwhile, on a 17-acre parcel in Durham, we built a barn with an attached, heated market. Now we have permanent buildings from which to run our farm business.
2018
During the 2018 growing season, we established other wholesale vegetable products, most notably sugar snap peas, cucumbers, peppers, and beans. Venturing into the direct-to-consumer market, we began participating in the Yarmouth Farmers Market. Donations to the Good Shepard Food Bank continued, and we began working with the Cumberland County gleaners for our end-of-crop tomatoes.
Solar drier improvements continued, as we narrowed down our variety of choices for dried tomatoes. Improvements were made in our solar hot water seed starter system, inside one of our three high tunnel growing houses.
2017
In our second growing year, we experimented with various vegetable varieties to optimize both early and late-season planting schedules, growing conditions, and harvesting methods. Sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, specialty cucumbers, and baby ginger and turmeric were well received in the marketplace. Our compostable packaging was introduced and found to have some applications. Meanwhile, we have made a commitment to using compostable or reusable containers for all our vegetables and products. We slowly expanded our market partners, and increased our farm scale. Importantly, we began our partnership with the Good Shepard Food Bank and made our first deliveries of cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, and cucumbers.
In addition, we continued to develop our large-scale solar drier by adding a wood furnace to assist the drying process at the farm. During the winter, food product development continued at the Fork Food Lab.
This growing season, we earned the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification from the USDA.
Replenova’s First Crops 2016
With the help of four part-time farm workers, the first year’s crops of cherry and husk tomatoes were produced on a half-acre of leased farmland, in Cumberland, Maine. Organically grown, fresh cherry tomatoes were sold to local markets during both the spring and fall seasons. Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) certification was awarded to Replenova in its first year.
During the mid-season, much of the crop was dried. We used a solar-assisted, sun-drying method to develop dried cherry tomato products for cooking, salads, and snacks. As an early member of the Fork Food Lab in Portland, we began to develop and test market dried, value-added products.