When the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association announced the death of Russell Libby at the age of 56, farmers and local foods advocates throughout Maine felt the loss.
Libby died at his home in Mount Vernon Dec. 8 after a long struggle with cancer.
He was MOFGA’s executive director for almost 18 years, stepping down Nov. 2 to serve the statewide organization as its senior policy adviser.
Prior to taking the leadership role in 1995, Libby served 10 years on MOFGA’s Board of Directors.
Steve Plumb of Nobleboro met Libby when the MOFGA office was a small walk-up in Augusta and both served on the nonprofit’s board. Plumb worked at MOFGA’s Common Ground Education Center and continues to volunteer for the organization.
“You couldn’t just go someplace and say, ‘Here’s MOFGA,'” Plumb said Dec. 10. “MOFGA was an organization around the state. It didn’t have a spot.”
In 1997, after the organization began its move to its permanent location in Unity, things changed dramatically, he said.
“Russell put in a lot of work getting from being an office with people who did outreach throughout the state that published a newsletter,” Plumb said of the shift to the Common Ground site.
“I’m not sure he was in favor of that, initially, but he recognized that was where people wanted to go.” Plumb said Libby knew that the best way to preserve the Common Ground Country Fair was to find it a permanent home.
“He was someone who believed in the organization. You could always assume Russell was going to be there and be looking at how to make the organization better and stronger. He knew how to corral all the ideas and energies,” Plumb said.
Plumb said Libby’s experience with Maine Dept. of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Resources and Maine Office of Energy Resources, where he served prior to becoming MOFGA’s executive director, gave him a wide knowledge of the state and its people and helped him build coalitions that helped serve MOFGA’s mission.
“I think he was delighted to be in a position where there weren’t the constraints of state government,” Plumb said. “There were different constraints.”
Fairgrounds Logistics Coordinator Ellis Percy, of Whitefield, has been involved with MOFGA for more than 20 years. Like Plumb, he has served on the board of directors.
“We lost, boy, one of a kind,” Percy said. “Russell was so well respected nationwide. When he went to Washington, D.C. people listened. He just thought about everything.”
Percy said Libby’s work at the nation’s capital and around the country on organic standards and farm and food policy, put Maine at the forefront of a conversation that has grown widely in recent years.
“People really, really listened to what Russell had to say,” Percy said. “It was just so well thought out. I would hate to get in a debate with him. No matter what side I took he could out-debate you. He had that kind of mind. He thought of everything and then asked what’s the best way. Sometimes the best way isn’t the fastest way, the least expensive way or the most expensive way. He would think about all of those things.”
“He always came to careful conclusions,” Percy said. “Everybody wanted Russell on their boards.”
“Being the head of a nonprofit is not an easy task when you don’t have a source of revenue that continues to grow,” Plumb said. “There are always more program ideas.”
He said MOFGA’s work was primarily supported, prior to the move to Unity, by the fair and fees paid by farmers for the organic certification process. “It helped that the [Common Ground] Fair didn’t cost much to be put on.” Much of the work of running the Fair is done by volunteer labor.
Once MOFGA moved to Unity, Libby saw potential for the creation of year ’round educational programs.
“He was able to make everyone realize it could work,” Plumb said. “Russell was an administrator. He was able to take a look at what everybody was saying and what everybody would need and put it together to make it work.”
Plumb said Libby was a calm person who knew that was the best way to learn what other people really needed.
“Hysterical outbursts were not useful to him because it didn’t get anywhere,” Plumb said. “Over the years I probably had my head-buttings with Russell. He had to keep everything real and the budget balanced and I was just one of the many people he had to balance against all the others. He was always fair and reasonable about what he did.”
“I can guarantee, you won’t find anybody to say a bad word about him,” Straw said. “He had the ability to make people think without offending them. He could talk to a senator or congressman the same way that he would talk to a backwoods person or a farmer. He was a remarkable leader not just for organic agriculture, but Russell promoted farming in Maine, period.”
“He promoted local first and organic second,” Straw said. “It’s going to be a big hole for the organization to fill. They never will fill it in the way that Russell did.”
“He thought about the economics of sustainable agriculture,” Percy said.
Percy said Libby was the first person to frame the conversation about locally sustainable farming in terms of each family’s personal spending, suggesting that every family in every community spending $10 a week with their neighbors would keep local businesses, and the communities in which they operate, viable.
“Each dollar gets spent six or eight times when it’s spent in the local area,” Percy said. “A dollar spent at Walmart is gone before morning.”
“It’s such a terrible loss, not just to the MOFGA community but to the agriculture community all over,” Percy said.
Percy said Libby was a collaborative leader who gave volunteers and paid staff “a lot of latitude. He counted on them to do their jobs. It’s not just at the fair. We have a lot of year ’round volunteers that do other things for the organization.”
Percy said MOFGA grew from 1500 members to more than 6000 during Libby’s tenure. “That’s a big jump,” Percy said.
Libby led MOFGA to its current position as the country’s largest state-level organic association, with 418 certified organic farms and processing operations.
The nonprofit’s Unity location is a 400-acre year ’round education center.
MOFGA has 32 employees and more than 1500 volunteers lend their time and skills to its mission.
“What he did was work tirelessly, with a very strong dedication to the belief that having good, locally raised food and a community that supported farmers was worthwhile,” Plumb said.
“It’s the way he worked toward what he believed in. He didn’t just say he believed in organic food so he bought organic carrots. He said, ‘How can we make sure there are going to be organic carrots in the grocery store all the time?'” Plumb said.
Plumb said Libby was looking for long-term solutions and worked toward them even after he knew he was dying.
“He threw out the challenge,” Plumb said. “He knew that had to be his last Common Ground Fair.” Plumb said Libby looked at the thousands of acres of farmland in Maine and saw the potential to turn them into millions of acres.
“He knew it was something he was not going to see, but he threw out that goal,” Plumb said. “That was very telling about who he was. He was doing everything he could right up to the end. Not everybody does that.”
In his 2011 Common Ground Country Fair keynote address, Libby described the future he hoped Mainers would see, long after he was gone.
“Farmers in their fields, checking on newborn calves. Orchards in full bloom. Alewife runs up streams where they haven’t been seen in generations. Fishing fleets returning safely to harbors all along the coast. Foods of the season in every store and restaurant because it’s what’s available, and these are the foods wanted and expected by all.
“This is the food system we can have,” Libby said.
He said people had a responsibility to leave the world better than they found it, “Not better from a corporate, make-more-money mode, but a place of beauty, a place that gives us great pleasure throughout our days and throughout our lives. Because that sense of beauty, of pleasure in what we are doing each day, is what is going to carry us forward through the difficult times that we live in now, and the more difficult times that lie ahead.
“That’s what MOFGA’s been about for 40 years, and that’s what we all need to live and do right to our last breaths.”
