Growing up on her family’s farm in Cape Elizabeth, Penny Jordan saw how hard her father worked. As she went on to be a project manager at Unum, she watched her brother begin toiling alongside him.

“I never understood why my father and brother were doing it so long,” she said.

But as her father, Bill Jordan, started to slow down and her brother, Bill Jr., needed help, Penny Jordan returned to manage the wholesale business and marketing, and she began to understand.

“I walked out onto the field one day, and I said, ‘Now, I get it.'”

Seven years later, Penny Jordan is leading a new committee formed to help identify the challenges facing farmers in Cape Elizabeth – a priority listed in the town’s latest comprehensive plan, adopted on Oct. 10.

“My dad was always very involved in the town,” Jordan said. “I need to do this to ensure farming can be viable in this community because that’s what this farm was supposed to be – a farm for the community.”

According to Town Councilor Jim Rowe, who is acting as a liaison between the committee and the council, because of anticipated pressures on next year’s budget, Town Manager Mike McGovern originally thought the goal of creating an agricultural profile of the town, meaning identifying who the farmers are, along with their needs, would be too expensive and would have to wait.

But Rowe saw the opportunity to accomplish the same goal at less cost by involving the people it would affect the most.

The committee’s first meeting is on Wednesday, Nov. 14, at 7 p.m. at Sprague Hall. The goal is to gather the stakeholders – residents who own farms or tillable land – in order to figure out the problems they face and what the town can do to help.

Some of the issues are obvious. There are taxes to pay on large parcels and pressure for farmers to sell their land to developers. Jordan said one of the issues she’s run into is the restriction of having a farm in a residential zone. Seventy-five percent of everything sold at the retail farm stand has to come from the 120 acres owned by the family.

She would like to be able to consider other options for trying to attract people to the farm market, like having prepackaged meals or serving coffee and muffins, but the zoning won’t allow for it.

Along with Jordan, a steering committee representing the variety of farms in town has come together to start moving the process along.

There’s Kelly Strout, who keeps horses at her farm on Fowler Road, and Jay Cox, who grew up on a Christmas tree farm on Sawyer Road and who, within two years time, will have trees of his own to sell.

There’s Bill Bamford, who is continuing to work the Maxwell property with pick-your-own strawberries and a few wholesale products, despite the fact that his brother-in-law, Nate Maxwell, couldn’t reopen the farm’s retail market on Spurwink Avenue this spring because his business was no longer viable.

Though each farmer has different daily woes, they’re all trying to keep traditions alive while eking out a living, and none of them is having an easy time of it.

“We’re not looking for handouts,” said Bamford, who never expected life as a farmer to be cushy. But he hopes the committee will be able to figure out ways the town can help “just to make it a bit easier” for farmers to continue to do what they’re doing and be able to put food on the table for their families.

“It’s getting to be more and more of a challenge to do that,” he said.

Bamford is optimistic about what the committee can accomplish. He said the residents of Cape Elizabeth have spoken: they want to preserve open space. If they want that land to be farmed, as well, he said, there are going to have to be mechanisms in place, like lessening the restrictions on the use of farm land or reworking zoning ordinances to keep taxes lower on tillable parcels, in order to keep those traditions alive.

According to Penny Jordan, when she walked on the field that morning and realized what her family was doing was worthwhile, what struck her was the cyclical nature of farming and the special experience of going through every step of the process, from planting a seed to harvesting a crop to watching shoppers in the farm stand fawn over the fruits of that labor.

“It’s watching that whole cycle, and all the ‘wows’ along the way,” she said.

Now, Jordan sees her years working in corporate America as training for her return to farming. She sees the responsibility each generation of farming families has to keep the cycle going- whether it’s by doing the job themselves or making a commitment to see that someone else does. Though Jordan does not know how her father made it on his own, she and her three siblings have all taken on different roles on the farm to keep it alive, all the while, keeping him in mind.

“He kept farming until the day he went into the hospital. He loved it,” Jordan said of her late father. “All the members of the family are very committed to making sure this remains a farm.”