Farms for sale in Maine, why is buying properties loaded with lots of land acreage so so popular?
This real estate blog post helps quickly list the many reasons people buy a Maine farm.
The why you stumbled into this Maine farm property blog post is probably on the list. There is a reason you are reading this topic post. Tinkering on old farm tractors, love of the outdoors, growing what you eat. Something deep inside is driving your desire to know about about farms for sale in Maine. Here to help in the education.
I bet the idea did not just pop into your head. Has been rolling around for quite some time now. Wondering is Maine good for farming? What type of farming to pick and how much do they cost? What are the soils like if I want to be a dirt farmer in Maine?
Buying a farm in Maine, what to be on the look out for in the searching?
How to finance a farm? Will zoning interfere with my farm operation in rural Maine like it does down here in the urban city?
The real estate category “Maine farm properties” is heavily searched around the clock. Why?
The number one reason driving the the farm purchase is desire for space. Maine is a vast state with a sparse population. Elbow room, to breathe easier and hear yourself think drives the life decision to own a patch of dirt. Maine small town living is all over this attractive lifestyle choice. Nothing compares to what happens inside when lots of land acreage to farm.
Without mortgaging your soul, buying a farm is possible in Maine. Space and cheaply priced farm acreage combine to provide the cornerstone for the relocation, securing the investment puzzle piece. More on starting a micro farm in Maine, how much land do you need discussed in depth.
Real estate is always bought and sold to satisfy a changing need for space.
To fix where it hurts and is painful. Most of life’s big decisions are tied to real estate in some form or fashion. In Maine you find a big supply of farm land acreages in any amount that just don’t exist closer to population centers.
Sadly, eight out of ten of us live like it or not in an urban setting. The desire to live independently with more than a tiny lot surrounded by very high fences in a safe setting. That is where Maine comes in for many real estate farm property buyers.
Reason number two for buying a farm in Maine, why so many people do.
Availability of fertile soil to farm in Maine on any scale exists for little money. In my opinion, Maine farm land is under valued. When compared to other areas of the country relied on to feed the nation and beyond. A thousand dollars an acre or less for Maine farm land is a steal. Maine is a bread basket sleeping giant. With lots of water to give crops and critters a drink that is not the case out West.Obtaining and maintaining your own decent amount of personal living space in populated areas of the country. That is impossible or just too darn expensive and why Maine shines brightly.
For centuries folks around the World sought out their own patch of dirt for the family farmstead. They went west to find it during the land rush. Back before that across the pond they came in wooden boats powered by sails harnessing the wind. Headed to America in search of lots of their own land for a new start.
In the interior and out weest now, the growing conditions are bone dry, hot and burnt. Water is a big concern unlike here in Maine. The focus for farming for many now is what about Maine?
To feed their children, to have acreage for their family to continue the farming way of life style. That’s #1.
The number one reason why Maine farm land is so attractive? It is the abundance of affordable space the real estate listings offer to go into farming.
Maine is lots of acreage sizes to select from day and night. Your own farm property in Maine is a common dream of many out in the audience.
Number two reason for buying a farm in Maine is quality fertile rich soil.
Coupled with lots of water without the need for expensive irrigation. Regardless if you have farming experience, grew up wearing the blue corduroy FFA short jacket with the yellow emblem or not.
Brand new without a clue or trained by your grandfather during summer vacations. Farming experience is all over the place with the farm property in Maine buyers I have had the pleasure of working with over four decades.
The number three reason Maine farm properties gain so much attention is the low price.
Everyone loves Raymond, everyone is gaga over a bargain too. Not a soul does not know the old real estate axiom of.. well come on everybody, say it with me three times. Location, location, location.
But another little ditty gaining ground and overtaking the three important “L” stutter.
It’s “the higher the price, the thinner the real estate buyers for farm land listings”. More selection means better property buying decisions are made.
Farm properties for sale in Maine are not just limited to folks with a thick wallet or heavy purse. All price brackets on the Maine real estate multiple listing service showcase highly affordable farm properties. More on farmsteads, homesteading in Maine.
The number four reason Maine is selected for a farm property is ease of financing.
For hobby farmers that want to stay small, you can locate plenty of land listings that come with owner financing options. To have it your way like Burger King used to promise. Buy an old abandoned farm that has fields to clear and restore. Maybe the remains of an original farmstead buildings to salvage. To weave into your farming in Maine dream.
A small down payment, a monthly installment that fits your farm land buying budget.
You are in business quickly with a forty acre tract of Maine farm land purchased with owner financing help.
It means out of state just want out farm property buyers can ease into the relocation without a lot of delay or fuss. Using the land in Maine they buy with easy seller financing terms for vacations early on. But when the timing is right, and the real estate market is hot where they live down country. They plant a house for sale yard sign. They list and sell. Pack up and move North to Maine to begin the next chapter of their life tilling the dirt.
Fencing in the pasture, building the pens, carving out a farm home.
The house is not as important as the barn, the machine shed, the chicken house and stables. You invest in what brings a positive return. As the independent Maine farmer determined to build a successful self sustaining agriculture enterprise.
Preparing the soil for spring planting or fencing in the back forty for animals. Farming provides a noble and humbling way to make a living. You have a long mental list of what you plan to do today, tomorrow, the day after that.
If poor weather happens, it is not a day off. Just look down a little further on your list for just what you had in mind if the weather does not cooperate. Stay busy, work hard, stick with it.
The fifth reason real estate buyers Google, Bing search the term “farms for sale in Maine” is to provide a quality childhood for their family.
Every member of a family has duties and responsibilities living on a Maine farm. Younger children can be helping plant seedlings in a greenhouse or collecting farm fresh double yolk eggs or haying, graining, watering the livestock. Picking fruit, ripping off ears of corn or clipping squash and cucumber vines. Pulling up and shaking carrot clumps.
Carefully plucking tomatoes, picking peas and beans. Working side by side with your brothers, sisters, parents makes the family connection stronger. Sure you are working but communication happens back and forth. Herding them in or turning them loose.
Animals are therapeutic and responsibility youngsters need to replace laziness, negative attitudes and obesity. Learning skills early on help make life easier and happier for anyone in adulthood. Farming teaches your life skills like no other experience.
Standing in the middle of your Maine farm and enjoying the wide open space.
Do you know that experience feeling taking in the view or would you like to? Buying a farm in Maine, you’ve come to the right place.
Lots of Maine land that your family maintain and pass on make the farming deep and generational. Many buyers think of when they are gone, what they pass on. They figure my kids, their children will no doubt need an acre or two of Maine land.
Land that there is no way they will be able to afford where they live in over populated areas. Where there is too little and the price to buy it is just too steep.
Maybe you start with a few acres or an abandoned farm for sale in Maine that you bush hog sections of fields that brush takes over. Where young tree saplings are spreading into the open space.
Turn the goats or pigs or sheep loose in the scrub trash regions. To work their magic without your help to clear the trash land at an amazing speed.
While the goat are busy down front transforming the landscape, you are up back on the hardwood ridge. Like Edward Scissor Hands with the chainsaw working the wooded sections. Twitching out tree length logs to land in the yard for processing the timber.
To cut up the size your kitchen wood stove or cellar furnace like best. Maybe you use an outdoor wood boiler with all the heating material supplied from your sweat, no money supplied from your own Maine land. An acre of forest in my area of Maine if managed right will produce a cord of renewable wood to heat your home resource.
Wood land is your cookie jar to help subsidize the farm for sale in Maine you end up buying.
Tree farming is what woodlot management is all about to maximize the growth patterns and timber value. Managing the wood lands. Another day, more chores working on the farm for sale in Maine you decided to buy. Fast forward a few years. See yourself in the AG dream as it plays out. While you are on your knees picking strawberries, raking blueberries or picking potatoes or apples.
The tasks are many on the Maine farmstead. Building another greenhouse. Adding a hoop house. Or collecting hay bales in a field. Tossing them up onto a tractor cart or truck flatbed. Taking them to the barn for winter storage in the hay loft.
Running the farm tractor with the forks to hoist the round twelve hundred not forty pound square bails. All those daily farm operations provide a skill set to kids who are spending quality time with their parents working together for the common good. On a grading table sorting out the yellow eye, soldier, jacob’s cattle or pea beans raised on your Maine farm.
Watching your finances a constant. To pay property taxes, insurance bills and do property repairs.
To purchase seed, develop a market for your fall harvest. Always showing respect for the machinery when you have to make do with equipment you just can’t go out and replace.Farming teaches patience. Makes you appreciate when operations go right and shows you what hard work and dedication can achieve.
A Maine farmer is a bit of a carpenter, a mechanic, a scientist, a woodsmen and yes, a gambler. You can not depend on the weather or the market as a sure thing. Savings and preparation for dips in the road, the tough times. That builds resilience.
Starting a CSA to be the local farmer providing the locally sourced food for your friends and neighbors. Do you know who grew the food you pick up, toss in the basket? As you wheel the loaded wire cart to the check out register each week?
Have you ever gleaned a farm field of what a harvester left behind to put in your root cellar. To draw from over the winter months to avoid the grocery store reliance?
Kitchen grade produce where the squash or cabbage or turnip is just not as pretty as the market buyer demands. Often the problem is just a little too big or tad small that causes the farm produce market buyer rejection pink slip.
Wasting nothing, slicing off the end of whatever is wrong with blemished fruit or produce. That’s all that is needed to avoid waste. Turning kitchen grade farm grown products into tasty nutritious food.
Just being in proximity of a Maine farm property means you have perks too.
All the potatoes, broccoli, lots of produce free for the taking and the land owner is happy. What will just go to waste in the field is now rescued. Gathered in for your personal use or even resale. Just ask them and thank the farm land owner who gladly lets you roam the fields to glean for food.
Farming is about independent living and self sufficiency which is a good thing to have rub off on a growing family.
Stacking and splitting firewood for the farm homestead is survival, practical use of your child’s time. That helps shape their minds more than parked for hours or days at a time plugged into an entertainment device.
Sharing the fruits of your labor and the communication around a large farm table is not something hick or square.
Not just a fact of fiction depicted on a rerun of The Waltons. Or a more humorous representation of farming. Something that dates the blog post author like black and white television seasons of Green Acres. Farming is a challenging, rewarding endeavor.
No bank, buying land for cash or with owner financing help from a Maine land owner. It means you pocket the closing costs of appraisals, origination fees, mortgage lending service charges.
The expenses going through a bank loan to buy your Maine land can pile up if you have to finance your Maine farm property. The beauty of the move to Maine is often you don’t have to worry about a mortgage. From the owner, a bank, a credit union, from anyone.
You are running away from high priced living to low cost overhead. Relying less on others, more on yourself. That’s freedom and independence right?
Free and clear compliments the wide open space Maine’s rural nature provides a farm property listing buyer. Out of state properties sell for prices with more zero places in them. Buying a farm for sale in Maine.
It’s way way easier when considering moving in the direction of one of Maine’s sixteen rural counties. Take your pick when searching the current farm property listings that are so big, so cheaply priced.
When the city land around you is gobbled up for subdivisions and commercial development, farmers are the first to get squeezed out.
The high property taxes attached to the farm land in crowded urban areas causes the burning itch. To farm property land owners pack it up, cash out the chips.
To head to a place where farms for sale are plentiful and reasonably priced. An internship on farming may be a smart move before running out to actually buy a farm for sale in Maine from the current real estate listing inventory.
Are you searching for properties with land, maybe the farm property type?
You are not alone.
This blog post helps share the experiences of Maine farm buyers good and bad and how to avoid the latter.
First and foremost, a market for whatever you plan to raise on the Maine farm. Don’t plow and plant without a market come harvest time. Just being Johnny Appleseed and planting helter skelter without a plan won’t keep you on the Maine farm long. Plan your work, work your farm plan.
Also, the long hours, the working on the old tractor, tending the animals, keeping current with farm property taxes means no time off to be sick or away on vacation for long.
With a sustainable Maine farm, you are tethered to the needy business enterprise. Especially if animals are involved. Crops are alive too and need tending. But unlike your sheep or goats or black Angus cows or equestrian Morgan horses, you don’t lose what you plant in rows in the field as easily as what’s contained from the holes in the fences.
The ripped over night gaps in fencing gaps sometimes caused by a moose with not so hot eye sight. That is looking for love and wants to flirt with your Holstein or Guernsey, Jersey dairy milk producer that looks an awfully lot like a moose cow. Hit by a car, sickly and needing a vet. Any farming that involves two or four legs like beef or dairy does is constant attention.
Some people are just not cut out for farming in Maine.
The older I get, the less dancing around an issue and cutting to the chase becomes more attractive. Don’t candy coat it, spell it out with as few words possible. It does not hurt my feelings or seem rude. I deal with people in a hurry, that don’t have time to mess around with costly delays. Farming takes patience and not everyone has it or is about to learn how to develop it.
But listing and selling farms for sale in Maine I have seen someone with no agriculture growing experience under their belt who took to the lifestyle like wildfire.
Learning to weld a broken piece of Maine farm machinery, working late into the night to get planting or harvesting operations completed.
A natural roll with the punches of Maine farming means you better have a mate equally yoked for what agriculture today demands.
Staying industrious and loving it. Feeling alive and finally able to realize their dream to own a farm in Maine can be its own reward. But with the average age of the US farm producers today pushing sixty years of age.
It sure is encouraging that Maine has four times the average of micro farmers. We’re not just talking hemp, hops farming causing the increase either. Dabbling in farming is a lifestyle. You don’t have to whole hog, all in or out to enjoy farming in Maine on your own land.
Are you in this group? Want to build a bond with other farmers of all sizes and types who help each other out with sharing experiences and lending moral support?
The farming lifestyle can look pretty appealing until the dedication it requires getting off the ground hits home.
Long hours, little or no pay and the learning curve. Your green thumb with African violets on your kitchen windowsill or raising tomatoes in the back yard garden is one thing. Year after year building a farmstead that provides sustainable agricultural income takes patience, a bank roll, usually one partner that has a real job.
The employment of one partner away from the farm adds stability to a growing farm property in Maine that you dream about or an income that follows you into Vacationland. That helps your sleep patterns late at night.
Even when you have a market for whatever you produce on your farm property in Maine, weather can throw a wrench into the gear cogs.
Crop failure, poor markets, sickly animals all combine to create the pressure of income loss. Stay small or get big are the two primary approaches to farming in Maine. No a whole lot of in between and you are either in or out.
There is a reason less than three percent of our population is responsible for the food served up on our family tables. Farms for sale in Maine, it is one growing category choice in my state that has four times the average for new young growers.
The love of farming… there has to be that fire in your belly to be a good steward of the land.
Because without it, your farm land will become depleted and unproductive. To keep the yields healthy enough for whatever you raise to make ends meet requires respect for the dirt.
For the forest sections of the Maine farm too. Your wooded acreage provides a renewable source for heating whatever you build or buy. Heating an existing homestead, the timber needs careful management for create valuable stands for a mill, for recreation, for maple syrup, etc.
The selective wood cutting can yield funding from the timber harvest to keep other areas of the farming operation afloat.
Some folks buy the farm land without the buildings, no house. And take their time slowly putting it all together with careful thought and plenty of time to get up to speed.
The sixth reason for buying a farm in Maine, taking care of the Earth, providing quality healthy nutritious food.
Feeding others what they eat is its own reward. Farming is in our heritage. Today it helps provide food safety growing what we eat that is not a mystery.
The chemicals used to chase away pests, the farming practices that go into whatever we reach for down at the Piggly Wiggly can be kind of murky. How do you really know and trust what you are feeding your kids if you did not have a hand in the farming? Or know the farmer that did provide you with the fruits of their labors in their agricultural endeavor.
I have been told there are two basic types of people in the World. Vocation and vacation folks. Farming definitely is not for someone that would rather spend their day’s in leisure recreational mode. Unless the gentlemen farm is purchase but leased out to someone that truly farms the land, needs the storage space the buildings provide them for a fee.
Farming is not a spectator sport and it is hard to watch someone else planting, cultivating, harvesting your fields when you own the acreage.
Good food makes us happy and healthy which enriches our quality of life.
Many of us have discovered what has been missing. Slow cooked food grown on our own land or bartered for other kinds of food or services. That trumps the drive through quick fast food to satisfy the stomach grumbling any day of the week.
Bees buzzing, discovering what is growing in the early morning light under that leafy squash plant on the Maine farm.
Digging into the potato hills to check out the set, the tubers down below. You’re going to get dirty. Take off your suit and tie and lace up the work boots. Surprises, set backs, joy and pleasure all mix into one learning lesson of deep appreciation.
Sunshine, blue skies, fresh air and the pressure of too much or not enough rain. Being the best at keeping whatever you store from breaking down and needing to be thrown out.
Creating the best storage unless what you raise on the Maine farm is all field run. That’s another aspect of farming in Maine, the lessons you will learn from the toll and strategic planning done on the property acreage land purchase.
Farming creates new wealth for a small Maine community too.
It is not the same dollars turning over but brand new ones that pay the guy running the tire sale and repair shop. The lady who works at the fuel company who sends you the bill for diesel and gas, lubricants to keep the machinery moving.
The hardware store or local lumber mill that helps with the materials you need to one by one add another building to your farm in Maine spread. More from the state Of Maine farming resource links.
Dad a farmer like his father before him. My Mom raised on a dairy farm in Maine. Her family were also multi generation living off the land type folks. My Dad loved farming but admitted it is a jealous master. It demands, not asks for your undivided attention to details year round.
Farming is not having a day off if you are not feeling so hot.
The animals need tending, they are like having a baby… lots of them to tend to every day of the year, holidays included.
Farming is also an industry, a way of life that is reinvented every day. Try to keep up and stay in the black financially so you keep your farm property in Maine is your constantly reminded goal. Are you looking for a farm for sale in Maine and how big is the dream?
No farmer, no food is a sobering statement.
I bet the reasons for farming, buying land in Maine for agricultural purposes on whatever size scale has been touched on above in this blog post.
Have you been bit by the farming bug? Or have you a rich heritage of farming in your family DNA background? Not so long ago, most of us were farmers because food is one of the most basic needs. Ahead of shelter that does little good if you starve to death.
Farms for sale in Maine, you looking for one of any size, a certain price, in a specific location?
What type of farm property in Maine are you thinking… which type of animal husbandry or crop rotation did you have in mind?
Learn more about MOFGA farming another helpful resource for agricultural information.
Are you thinking conventional or organic farming with your agriculture real estate investment ahead?
Are you looking for a farm for sale in Maine?
Crops, critters, orchards, truck gardening, farmer’s markets or long hauls to the produce centers around Boston, Hartford, New York City?
Lots of hard work, plenty of luck, the never faltering steadiness discipline to stick with it farming attitude.
Are you cut out for this move to Maine, buying a farm property decision? Time will tell and MOOERS REALTY is here to help make the farm property purchase possible.
Ask lots of questions about farming, the local area, how to do what and when in the right order for the best real estate purchase. Learn about the Maine communities we list and sell in for the best farm property match for your lifestyle needs.
I own a farm in Maine, grew up on one and can share what I have learned personally over the years.
The motivation to start a farm in Maine or buy an existing one is a strong emotion for many reasons.
Sure would like to be part of your buying and selling a farm in Maine experience. Let’s talk. Have you been searching the farms for sale in Maine category of real estate listings?
