Goranson’s Farm Featured on MPBN – Maine Maple Sunday 2015

Goranson’s Farm Featured at Salt Institute
Salt Institute of Documentary Studies student Leslie Forstadt completed this story about Goranson’s Farm ‘Getting Farmed’ in 2014.

Goranson’s Farm Film

Goranson Farm: An Uncertain Harvest Trailer from William Kunitz on Vimeo.

A young woman, born into a potato farming family in New Sweden, Maine and raised in Dresden, becomes the first in her family to attend college. After college she finds work in San Francisco. In November of 1984, at twenty-five, she receives a call asking her to come home: her father has been diagnosed with cancer. Jan Goranson spends the following Spring and Summer working with her father. When he dies in August, she makes the difficult decision to take on the task of running the farm. In the ensuing twenty-five years, she and her husband, Rob Johanson, with help from their sons and the community, build the farm into an active and diverse organic farm serving mid-coast Maine.

The film follows the family and their crew through the 2009 growing season, as they struggle first against the rainiest June on record, then with a potato blight that threatens to destroy their entire crop. The community gathers around them. Volunteers help harvest what remains of their crop. The film is a testament to the skill, tenacity and dogged determination of this family to survive an uncertain harvest – and to continue to serve the community that supports them. 

Goranson Farm: An Uncertain Harvest aired on MPBN in May 2013.