Community comes together to support a local farm during power outage

RICHMOND, Maine (WABI) -

Thousands lost power after the storm on Saturday.

For one farm in Richmond that lost power. keeping some of their smallest residents warm was critical for their survival.

Thankfully their community came through in a big way.

The owners of Lemon Ledge Farm raise dozens of different kinds of poultry. This time of the year that includes baby chicks.

Sibyl Peterson on of the owners of Lemon Ledge Farm says “the hatch started Friday night and continued into Saturday, uneventful, no big deal. Saturday night we lost power.”

Their generators stopped working this winter and they were not prepared to lose power again, especially with 100 baby chicks and 200 eggs in an incubator

“We thought, Oh, well, you know, we might be able to go a couple hours ‘but they’re new babies, especially the little guys that’s really hard on them to get cold,” Peterson said.

She adds “we were pretty confident the house wouldn’t lose that much heat for us, but those guys really need to be at 100 plus as far as degrees and they like to be under their little burner plates, and we had 100 of them. So it was a little too much for us to just put them in front of the fireplace and hope for the best.”

The weather wasn’t the only challenge they were facing.

“To get up to Augusta or down to Brunswick to get a generator was going to be touch and go and then my husband went outside and realized that our tire on our truck was flat too. So on top of that (weather) we now have a flat tire,” Peterson said.

So they headed to Facebook asking me if anyone could help and the community rallied in support.

“I just needed to get that one room, the heaters up and running. We had a ton of people reach out the response was overwhelming. Just trying to help us keep them warm. People were offering to take tubs that still had power take tubs of birds and bring them to the house locally and just keep them warm until we got power again,” she said.

They were able to get a generator from a neighbor a few doors down and all the chicks and eggs survived.

Peterson said “people knew that we were hatching they were getting ready to pick up nobody picked up Saturday because of the weather which was fine. But I’m holding on to you know we’re the stewards of somebody else’s babies at this point. So Sunday everybody picked them up and everybody looked great still so it was really good.”

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