When I stepped off a fishing boat in 1983 to go to work as development director for the Maine Maritime Museum, one of the first things I did was to tape the definition of the word “museum” to the front of my Rolodex.

“A building or place where works of art or other objects are kept and displayed,” it read. (I still have the Rolodex.)

The definition omitted most of the activity of museums — the adult and children’s programs, the field schools and publications programs. Museums use their objects to tell the story of our history in ways different from our textbooks.

Now that I am a farmer, I thought it’s time to learn the dictionary definition of “farm.”

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a farm is “1.a. A tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production.1.b The fields, buildings, animals and personnel appurtenant to a farm. 2. a A tract of land devoted to the raising and breeding of domestic animals.”

Other definitions were related to fish farms, and baseball farm systems. There was no mention of tank farms, fat farms or funny farms.

There is also no mention of healthy food or of healthy soil, which is what we need to have if we are to be healthy and have a sustainable food system.

It’s possible that healthy food and healthy soil were left out of the definition of a farm because 95 percent of the farms in the United States have little or no regard for healthy food, healthy people or the health of the soil they work for a living.

They are called “conventional” farms, and they range from the 1,500-acre potato farm in Exeter where the entire crop goes into potato chips, or the vast acreages of the Midwest devoted to corn production just for the purpose of sweetening nutrition-less soda, or the large California strawberry farms where the soil is gassed with poisonous methyl iodide, producing woody, tasteless fruit.

In fact, a true definition of conventional farming would be much closer to a mining operation than food production: “1. a. An excavation in the earth from which ore or minerals can be extracted.”

Conventional farms destroy the structure of the soil and the balance of insect and bird life by drenching the soil with a large array of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizers designed to feed only the crops they are growing.

In the Mississippi watershed, thousands of tons of nitrate fertilizer wash down into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a 16,000-square-mile dead zone.

At the same time, we can look forward to the creation of “the Great American Desert” stretching from Maine to California when these fertilizers and pesticides — all petroleum based — become too expensive to use or are not available at all. The once-rich soil of the Midwestern prairies will be lifeless and unrecoverable.

So let’s look at a different definition of a farm, one that applies to the remaining 5 percent of farms:

“A tract of land cultivated for the purpose of producing healthy food to enhance people’s health and at the same time building the health of the soil.”

These farms are called “organic” although their roots stretch back to the beginning of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Organic farms build soil by using animal manures, compost, mulches and cover crops.

At Long Meadow Farm, we get our manure from a nearby dairy farm. We mulch our garden paths with hard wood chips from a nearby neighbor. We mix our own chicken manure with hay and kitchen waste to make our own compost. We scythe our hay for mulch, and grow cover crops such as buckwheat and oats to enrich the soil and suppress weeds.

Although some organic farms use biological pesticides to control crop-eating insects, we don’t. We pick off the horn worms on the tomatoes, we use row cover on the cucumber and squash seedlings to deter the cucumber beetles and squash bugs. Last year, we thought we were on to something when we planted our potatoes in late June-early July instead of late May. The usual army of Colorado potato beetles were totally faked out and we had our best crop in years.

We build raised beds for all of our vegetables, and we use only hand tools and human labor to reduce soil compaction and avoid dependence on high-priced, noisy tractors and rototillers that pulverize the soil. We grow 35 kinds of vegetables and share them with 100 families over the course of the season. We eat the food we grow, and the combination of healthy food and hand labor keeps us healthy and in shape.

Denis Thoet owns and manages Long Meadow Farm in West Gardiner. www.longmeadowfarmmaine.com.