Posts Tagged ‘new york times’

Interviewed on LEF’s blog

Posted on: June 13th, 2011 by jason No Comments

Sara Archambault of LEF Foundation, who has been a steadfast supporter of our film Betting The Farm from the beginning, interviewed us for LEF’s blog the other day about the process of shooting the film, the relationships we’ve built with our characters, and our brief video summary of the MOO Milk story for the New York Times:

Sara: You are shooting BETTING THE FARM at a time when a number of films are coming out exploring our relationship to food. Your film is unique in that it looks closely at farmers as small business owners and entrepreneurs. Can you talk about why you chose to focus on that experience?

Cecily Pingree: There have been a number of excellent films about food and food policy in the last several years, and we’ve learned that audiences really respond to these issues. They are vital human concerns, and they resonate across geographical, socioeconomic and cultural boundaries.

But we never set out to make a movie about the larger political and environmental issues at all. We stumbled on this story when we met one of the MOO Milk farmers, Aaron Bell of Tide Mill Organic Farm, while shooting another project. From the very beginning, we were interested in this story because of the people involved. Character-driven stories are what we like to watch, and what we get excited about, so it feels natural to us to focus on the lives of these farmers and their families rather than, say, the complexities of dairy pricing. That said, hopefully someone else will make that film!

Read the full interview here.

Think it’s interesting? Leave us a comment below or drop us a line!

MOO Milk & Pull-Start in the New York Times!

Posted on: April 25th, 2011 by jason No Comments

In February of this year, the New York Times profiled Aaron Bell and Carly DelSignore, two of the main characters in our feature documentary Betting The Farm. The story is a good general description of the struggles of Maine’s Own Organic Milk Co. (or ‘MOO Milk’) over the past year or so, as this small group of Maine dairy farmers attempts to create a new model for small-scale dairy farming.

Aaron and Carly are raising their family and making a living on Tide Mill Farm in Edmunds, Maine.

Their farm is a six-hour drive from most potential customers — so far that their longtime processor, HP Hood, gave up on them in 2009, convinced that no one would never make a profit hauling milk such a vast distance.

But the married couple, part of the eighth generation to farm on Mr. Bell’s family’s land, is determined to keep dairy a viable industry here in Washington County. They are of a small, farmer-run outfit called Maine’s Own Organic Milk — MOO Milk for short — which hopes to persuade New England foodies to pick up a carton of MOO’s organic, local, slow-pasteurized milk instead of reaching for familiar national brands like Horizon Organic or Organic Valley.

Cecily was commissioned by the Times to create a video to accompany the article. With the help of DP/editor/brother-in-chief Lindsay Mann, they put together a brief glimpse of the challenges the Bells—and any of the other MOO Milk families—are facing.

To see the Times video about MOO Milk click here. And for more information about our documentary about MOO Milk, please signup for our mailing list!

© Pull-Start, 2011