Emma Quinby

Spring Tide Farmstead is a small-scale family farm run by our family of four focused on farrow-to-finish heritage pigs and homegrown Katahdin sheep as well as ducks and chickens. Emma’s experience in farming ranges from organic vegetable farms and backyard gardens to livestock management. Trent has past experiences range from horse-powered farming to assistance with varied farming work. We started Spring Tide Farmstead 7 years ago as a homestead and expanded it into a small-farm business over the course of the last 3+ years. We offer whole/half forested raised animals and individual cuts as well as hand-raised piglets and lambs to local homesteaders and farms in the area. We are grateful to be members of Hancock county and the greater Maine community, and are dedicated to raising healthy, happy animals from birth to produce the best pork, lamb and eggs for our greater community.

We have started our business plan and are working on expanding it during our time in the MOFGA Journeyperson program. Our Farm: The number of farms farrowing pigs and raising sheep, especially in our area, has been dropping regularly over the last several years. We discovered this through a a difficulty of finding quality piglets to raise ourselves. We decided to begin farrowing our own litters 4 years ago and found much success and massive enjoyment. Our farrowing season is in Spring, Summer and Fall. In 2023, we successfully farrowed 94 piglets over the course of spring, summer and fall — 26 we processed ourselves and sold the remaining to local farms and homesteaders. Raising and keeping sows through the year is a vastly different endeavor than just raising feeders for 6+ months, and we have had many learning experiences. Our sows are the pride of our farm and we have an deep love and relationship with each of them. We have experimented with heritage breeds through the years and ended up centering on Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs — a breed that is on the Livestock Conservancy list as they almost died out back in the 1970s. The breed is known for their docile temperament, incredible mothering abilities and excellent meat quality. All our current sows are GOS and we typically AI’d to Berkshire or Hampshire boars, but we have recently added a registered GOS boar. With our sows and our new boar, we hope to offer well-raised piglets and continue to improve and propagate the GOS breed. A few years back, we began transitioning from dairy animals to trying out different sheep breeds, keeping Suffolks, Border Leicesters and Katahdins. The Katahdin breed has become our primary breed for their excellent mothering and mild meat flavor. Our current efforts are now in focusing our breeding on low parasite numbers and high resistance by working with our local NSIP coordinator for overall breed improvement. We are new members of the MOFGA Journeyperson program as of 2024 to better our farm business knowledge and gain further education/resources to improve Spring Tide. Additionally, we are looking to begin transitioning some of our products to organic over the next several years with expanded land access. Our Customers: Our primary focus is on local consumers. We currently sell individual cuts through FarmDrop as well as to local restaurants, in private sales and the upcoming MDI Farmers Market. We also offer seasonal half/whole pigs/lambs depending on numbers and interest. Additionally, we raise and sell duck and chicken eggs. Goals: As the number of farmers who raise pigs from birth continues to drop, we believe that, with being able to expand our farm, we could sustainably scale up our farrowing operations to help meet this need. We have had interest in our piglets statewide and while we do our best with current limitations, we have not been able to fulfill our waiting list once. With additional land, we would be able to expand our pork, lamb, duck and chicken offerings. If possible, we would also like to add beef and vegetables. Raising pigs requires careful land management and our focus will be on building a mix of silvopastures and established pasture for our livestock. Our overall goal is to continue our current offerings for our customer base we are consistently working to build, but expand into a meat CSA with seasonal vegetables and eggs as well as a roadside farm store. We would like to continue improving both our GOS and Katahdin lines to offer superior lambs and piglets; as well as pork and lamb to our community.