Name Dale Sparrow Age 48 Occupation Farmer Location Gorham, Maine Farming is doing something that’s been done since the beginning of time: feeding people	Mosquitos the size of pterodactyls are beginning to swoop down, and the problem neighbors at the end of his drive have started to crank up their music, but for Maine farmer Dale Sparrow, life is a cup that is always half full. “I love my profession,” he beams. “The best part is handing someone a bottle of syrup or a bag of fish filets. The smiles are unbelievable!” Dale is Gorham, Maine’s very own Johnny Appleseed. The self-confessed “adventurer” ploughs his fields in winter, makes maple syrup in spring and fishes commercially in the summer. Dale, 48, and his wife, Honey, 39, plunged into the maple syrup venture at their property, Whipple Lock Farm, three years ago when Dale realized that the house he’d bought in 2010 had more than 250 Maple trees.“I love a challenge. So we decided to build a sugar shack and cook up maple syrup and be part of the community. People enjoy it and we donate a lot to charities for people who’ve had a hard time.” Dale believes modern technology has made farming a lot easier. “The hard part is all the licenses and getting your name out there. We’re on a dead end street in the middle of the country so that makes it kind of difficult.”
	The soil is always going to be there. That’s security that money can’t buy
But Sparrow is not one to dwell on negativity. He explains that his wife, Honey, is a whizz on the marketing side. As well as a day job driving a one ton truck as a high voltage substation technician for the local power company, Honey is in charge of promoting the syrup and is currently setting up a local maple syrup bus tour with the 7 other micro syrup farmers who live nearby. She also supervises the feeding of Whipple Farm’s growing flocks of chickens and Red Bourbon turkeys. Farming is a “noble profession” says Dale, “because you’re doing something that’s been done since the beginning of time: you’re feeding people.” It also makes him feel secure. “The last time we had a major market crash, everyone woke up one morning and all their stocks had crashed. But the soil is always going to be there. We’re self sufficient. That’s a kind of security that money can’t buy.”
	Their children Sophia, 6 and Josh 12 love the life too. Sophia has a new rabbit, Rosalinda, while Josh talks excitedly about how he’s a “tractor man.” He points to a nearby vehicle. “You see that 3-point hitch adaptor on it? I had to take the rototiller off to get it on. You’d be surprised how easy that is!” But Sparrows’ path has not always been easy. Dale never knew his father and his step father was “a very angry man, so I have some bad programming from that.” He made mistakes in his youth. “I was a young fisherman hanging out at the bar with a lot of money and no sense of direction.”
My father was a very angry man. I have some bad programming from that Then he got a wake-up call. “We have an awful drug epidemic in Portland. Several fisherman I know have died from drug overdoses.” Luckily he was about to meet Honey at his best friend’s wedding and now his favorite past times include “rolling on the floor with the dogs and my kids.” He has also learned not to get hung up on material possessions. “I think of a TV interview I once saw with a gentleman in California. There’d been some bad forest fires and he was sitting on his front steps and that’s all that was left of his house. He looks to camera and he says, ‘Don’t fall in love with material stuff because it can be gone in a flash.’ Since then I’ve tried not to be a person of vanity. One of those, ‘Look at me! Look at what I got!’ kind of people.”	Several fisherman I know have died from drug overdoses
	It’s only later, when Sophia is introducing a turkey named Jacks, that she reveals her family didn’t have turkeys “before our house burned down.” In fact the Sparrows lost their house in 2012. “Yeah, the chicken coup caught fire,” says Dale. “I was out fishing. They called. I just wanted to know if everyone was OK but everyone was out of the house.” “They pumped around 3000 gallons of water into the attic. Just ash water. It was awful.” He shrugs. “We lost all our things. But then, two days later when they went into the attic they found some totes that had survived. They’d sealed shut in the heat. Our wedding photos were inside.” Don’t fall in love with material stuff because it can be gone in a flash
Dale says he finds it easier to think about that man in California than to ponder his own plight. The main thing, he says, was that his soil was still there. Dale swats away another monster mosquito, saying he’s not sure where he got his zest for life. “I love the cartoon where the two guys are digging underground in a big pit full of diamonds. One guy’s got his axe and he’s walking away. He’s given up, but the other guy, he’s still digging. I’m the guy who’s still digging!”
	We lost all our things

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