Dear Friends & Customers,

We have some very sad news to relate. We were just blindsided to learned that our home farm and primary lease field were licensed for the spreading of bio-solids in the early 1990s, (24 years before we purchased our farm and moved to Unity). Bio-solids have been in the news recently for their correlation with PFAS chemical contamination. We hired a private soil scientist to sample and test our well water, and soil and produce. All three tests came back positive. Our well water read at 400 times the state's recommended thresh-hold. The results are preliminary and need to be cross-checked, but we feel it is critical that we stop our sales and have requested that our retail outlets pull our products from their shelves for now. This is not a product recall. This is a precautionary product pause while we gather more info.

We are reeling from this news and are working to understand what this means for the safety of our products, the viability of our business and our health. We will be drinking bottled water and doing a lot of research in the months to come. We will also keep you informed as we learn more.

The State's response to the emerging crisis around PFAS has focused on the dairy industry. We have the unhappy distinction of being the first produce farm to communicate with the Maine Department of Agriculture on this issue, though sadly we won't be the last. The state has no guidelines for acceptable levels of PFAS in vegetables, but Maine CDC informed us that they will begin the work to establish specific produce guidelines this week. We are working with several state agencies on more extensive testing, which may begin this week.

The hopeful news for us is that grain plants seem to accumulate non-detectable or only trace amounts of the chemicals in their seeds, which is to say in the grain itself. Grain corn kernels grown on the worst contaminated sites at the epicenter of this crisis in Fairfield did not have detectable levels of PFAS in them. Likewise, cereal grains grown in intentionally contaminated potting mix in experimental plots showed very low levels. Noting this low level risk, MOFGA is advising us to leave our grain products on store shelves. Still, we need to test our own wheat, rye, oats and flint corn before we resume our grain sales. If you have our products at home, you might refrain from eating them until we learn more.

We are farmers, not doctors or toxicologists, but it is our understanding that there is no immediate health risk from the vegetables and grain products you have already eaten. These PFAS chemicals represent a long term exposure concern rather than a single exposure risk. Knowing where they are present and reducing all of our exposure to them is what we are trying to do.

If you are interested in learning more about PFAS in Maine, check out MOFGA's PFAS fact sheet, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection's PFAS fact-sheet, The Maine Department of Environmental Protection website and the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry website.

I can't tell you how heart wrenching this is for us learn and now to communicate. In a world where we can all buy conventional produce and out of state organic vegetables and grains at a cheaper price any day of the week, the one currency we have as local organic growers is our transparency and the trust of our customers. It's hard for us to visualize right now what the future of our farm business might look like. But if there is a future for Songbird Farm, we think transparency is the way to get there.

Thanks for your support and for baring with us while we sort this out. We will be back in touch once we have more information.

Until then,

Adam and Johanna