Democrat Gov. Janet Mills naively picked a berry real fight hopping into a farmer’s field to promote blueberry weekend.
When the governor went for a photo op in a coastal Maine blueberry field, the critics came in from the wild to pounce on the irony.
“Glad the governor had time to rake some blueberries and smile for the camera but let’s not pretend that makes her a champion for Maine farms,” said Tyler Fish on Facebook.
“While she was out in Hope doing photo ops for Wild Blueberry Weekend her administration is helping out of state solar companies take over the same kind of farmland she’s pretending to care about,” Fish added.
“Now hear this: Queen Janet of the blueberry fields has declared wild blueberry season weekend officially open,” quipped Alan Grindle of Cushing. “Her next weekend is Wild Solar Panel Season but you won’t read it on any page of ‘Midcoast liberal soup!’”
“Village Soup” is an alternate name of the Midcoast Villager.
Grindle was having a heck of a wild time making fun of the Mid Coast Villager newspaper, which carried the juicy story promoting Janet’s plump blueberry weekend.
“Blueberries For Janet,” the villager’s headline actually read. Really and truly.
“Blueberries for Janet.”
Now there’s some hard-hitting journalism.
“Standing at the edge of a field of wild blueberries awaiting harvest at Brodis Blueberries in Hope, Maine Gov. Janet Mills on July 17 proclaimed August 2-3 as the state’s fifth annual Wild Blueberry Weekend,” the paper reported.
“I could do this all day,” Mills joked in the middle of raking. “Do I have to go back to Augusta?”
Moments later: “Anybody else want to give it a try? I got enough for pie already.”
Randy Hilt took the Villager’s coverage of Janet’s berry promo one step further.
“Are these illegal Chinese blueberry growers?” Hilt asked, poking fun at the administration’s alleged kid-glove treatment of the growing infestation of foreign agents buying up Maine land to grow another type of wild crops.
Poor Janet.
Heck, folks, all she’s trying to do is promote Maine’s fifth annual Wild Blueberry Weekend.
To kick off the promo, Janet participated in the ceremonial “First Rake” of the wild blueberry harvest in Hope.
The governor issued a proclamation for the weekend as “an opportunity for the public to visit farms and businesses to experience Maine’s wild blueberry harvest.”
Fish reports that in Rockport “a company from Massachusetts called BlueWave built a solar project right on top of a working wild blueberry field.”
He said that “University of Maine researchers found that blueberry yields dropped more than 90 percent under the panels. It’s not sustainable and it’s not affordable.”
Statewide over 160 out of 180 proposed solar projects are being built on prime farmland. Not rocky junk land. Real fields with real value that farmers use to grow food. Between 2017 and 2022 Maine lost more than 80,000 acres of farmland and about 500 farms.
At the same time developers are offering farmers over $2,000 per acre to lease land for solar. That’s double what many farmers can make growing crops like hay or berries. It’s easy money for landowners but it guts local food production.
“So yeah, Wild Blueberry Weekend sounds cute,” Fish said. “But walking through a field for five minutes does not undo years of policy that reward developers for covering that same land with glass and steel.”
“If Governor Mills really cared about farms she’d stop giving the best ground away to out of state energy companies,” he added. “Until then this is just another staged photo shoot to distract from the damage.”
