Farming can be tough. The same hard work that leads to a good crop one year could produce little to nothing another year, depending on the weather.

Still, it's a satisfying life for Jan Goranson, husband Rob Johanson and their sons on Goranson Farm on Dresden's River Road.

Goranson is a third-generation farmer, the second on the land the family now farms.

On January 3 at 10 p.m., MPBN viewers will meet the family and their farm, and see what they endured following the rains of 2009. They lost 60 percent of that year’s potato crop.

“If it doesn’t do anything but give the boys a piece of family history, that’s fine,” Johanson said of William Kunitz' film “Goranson Farm: An Uncertain Harvest.”

Goranson thinks the film could do more than that. “It's consciousness-raising, for what it can be like to be a farmer,” she said. “I don't think people realize the level of work involved.”

“There can be a really bad year and it can really shake your confidence, and the following year it can turn out to be a really great growing year,” she said.

The family is accustomed to media attention. The farm is one of Maine’s largest organic farms and one of the few multi-generation farms of its size. The farm works sixty acres of tillable land, including 36 the family owns and the rest that it rents from the state.

Unlike the rest of the family, Johanson wasn’t born into farming. He was a Navy brat until the eighth grade, when his father retired. His experience with growing food when he was growing up was limited to the family garden.

That changed as an adult, living in North Whitefield. One winter, when didn’t have any masonry jobs, he got into making maple syrup.

Then he started growing asparagus and cantaloupe, followed by sugar beets.

By the time he and Goranson met and married, he was fully into farming, but he grew food organically, with none of the chemicals that were in use at Goranson’s farm.

The change was a shock for him, he said. Goranson Farm has since gone organic.

The quality of the produce is owed in part to the farm's practice of crop rotation.

For two years, a field will grow vegetables for harvesting; then it will have two years of growing grains and grasses, not to harvest, but to be plowed back into the soil, feeding it. That helps maintain nutrients which will go into the vegetables. It also helps avoid pest problems caused when a farm harvests the same crops on a field, year after year.

The farm sells food at markets in Bath, Brunswick and Portland, has a farm stand with produce and eggs, and sells food to some area businesses. It employs 16 to 18 people in the summer and four or five in the winter, in addition to the family.

Goran Johanson, 17, learned to weed by following older brother Carl around. “I’ve been in the field since I could walk and talk,” Goran, a Lincoln Academy senior, said. “I don’t know what I’d be doing if it weren’t for this. I’d probably be one bored kid.”

He hasn’t touched a video game in about three years.

The teen plans to study agriculture at the University of Maine at Orono.

Carl Johanson, 22, attends Bennington College in Vermont. He's interested in animal husbandry, his parents said.

They never pressured their sons to go into farming careers. They helped them pursue whatever interests they wanted to explore while growing up. But both have taken to it, and Goranson and Johanson are looking forward to what their sons' knowledge could add to the farm.

In addition to the January 3 air date, MPBN will also air “Goranson Farm: An Uncertain Harvest” on January 5 at 11 a.m.

Click here for a review of the film.

Susan Johns can be reached at 207-844-4633 or sjohns@wiscassetnewspaper.com.