Farm Finder and Food as Medicine in Rural Maine

Dr. Roxanne Bruce grew up around dairy farming in northern Maine and built an early career in music performance, touring and working alongside well-known artists including jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, before burning out on life on the road. Drawn back to questions about where food comes from and why farm stands are so hard to find, she returned to school and earned a doctorate in business administration, focusing her research on the structural obstacles that prevent small farms from reaching the customers around them. Co-hosts Dr. Lisa Belisle and Dr. Jeff Barkin trace that arc with her, exploring how a background in music, teaching and performance turns out to share more with agricultural community-building than it might appear.

Bruce founded Farm Finder USA and Cultivated Encounters to solve a problem she encountered while working with Maine schools under a Department of Education grant: distributors based in southern Maine found it economically unworkable to serve Aroostook County, leaving schools and farms without a reliable connection. The platform grew far faster than she expected, and the conversation covers how she built out an agricultural processing kitchen, coordinated with local couriers and worked directly with school nutrition staff to deliver locally grown produce, meat and other ingredients in whatever form each kitchen could use. Belisle and Barkin press Bruce on the food-as-medicine dimension, and she speaks candidly about her own experience managing multiple sclerosis and discovering, through an elimination diet guided by an allergist, how much difference changing what she ate made, while being explicit that it is not a cure.

The third part of the conversation turns to technology and scale. Bruce describes a collaboration with Liam Sullivan of Standard Magic, a Maine extended reality company, to merge her platforms and add a game-based learning component where students track food from farm to table, building an understanding of seasonality and supply. Dr. Susan Woods, a Maine physician and digital health innovator, is mentioned as a collaborator in that effort. Belisle raises the concept of food sovereignty, the idea that access to locally grown food is itself a form of agency over one's own health, and Bruce connects that to practical strategies she uses with Food is Medicine customers: buying cosmetically imperfect produce in bulk, foraging for wild greens, and meeting people where they are in terms of cooking equipment and skill. The co-hosts and Bruce close by discussing what it looks like to build a bootstrapped business in Aroostook County, and why the model depends on the whole community taking a small share rather than any single actor capturing the margin.