Farmers are very busy people.

They're usually up before dawn and spend their long days in backbreaking physical work to sow, tend and harvest crops or manage livestock. They must foil attacks by pests or diseases, they have to be geniuses at repairing ancient and cranky equipment, and their skill with pesky and potentially destructive creatures must also be applied in relationships to the bankers who underwrite their operations.

Oh, and they often have day jobs, too.

Which is why we're not surprised that Maine's farmers have been loathe to take advantage of what, to us, looks like free money from the feds to expand their markets in a way that would not only help the bottom line on the farm, but get more local food into the mouths and stomachs of the hungriest Mainers. Turns out, it's too much trouble to get that money.

That's a shame and a wasted opportunity.

Here's the background: For years, farmers and advocates for the poor have tried to make the connection between farmers' markets and people on food stamps. The idea is that the food stamps could be used to buy fresh, local produce -- something lacking in the diets of the poor -- and the farmers would have a new market that would significantly expand their income.

But the problem with doing this lies in how to use food stamps in a farmers' market. Those benefits are now issued as, essentially, debit accounts drawn down with an electronic benefits card, or EBT card, that's much like an ATM card. But if you frequent Maine's many farmers' markets, you know those markets not exactly high-tech affairs (and therein lies their charm).

The markets are usually located in a parking lot or empty field, and the electricity and Internet connections necessary to process credit and benefits cards are simply not handy.

So the markets didn't take EBT cards from food stamp recipients.

The federal government decided to do something about this. Armed with good intentions and millions of dollars, they established a grant program to pay for new EBT card setups at farmers' markets and even roadside farmstands across the nation. All you had to do was fill out the application.

The good folks at the Maine Department of Agriculture sent notices out to all farmers' markets about the grant program. And you'd think that farmers would have been jumping at the chance to make some more money. But instead, only one market, in Gardiner, applied for and got a grant. That's out of almost 100 markets in the whole state.

The reason? The application is an incredibly complex mess of jargon, administrivia and red tape that would be daunting even to the most seasoned Soviet Politburo veteran. The program guidelines run to 30 pages and are filled with sections like this:

"AMS has developed the voluntary "FMPP Supplemental Budget Summary Form," available at www.ams.usda. gov/FMPP, to assist applicants in preparing supplemental budgets. The use of this form is not required. However, details regarding requested funds, justification, and fund usage contained within the FMPP Supplemental Budget Summary are required. Use a supplemental form for new EBT project work."

We'd rather shovel cow manure, thank you.

The offputting and opaque process doesn't stop with the program guidelines. It extends to what happens after you've gotten the EBT machines, should you be so lucky or determined to have persevered through an application and snared a grant. The reporting requirements are likewise overly burdensome.

Staff in Gov. John Baldacci's office recognized how difficult it would be for Maine's farmers to get this grant money and instead went ahead and bought six wireless, battery-powered EBT machines, which will be distributed to six lucky markets soon.

But that still leaves a lot of Maine markets without the ability to get their food into the shopping baskets of hungry Mainers. And it leaves those hungry Mainers without the option of buying good and nutritious food directly from their neighbors.

We could suggest that the state Department of Agriculture run workshops to help farmers fill out the applications. But the understaffed department barely has the personnel to carry out its core functions, while farmers need to spend their time farming, not doing paperwork.

Instead, the federal government needs to revamp the application so that it's farmer-friendly. That doesn't mean taking away any measure of accountability -- these are taxpayer funds and we need to know that they're being well spent.

But surely there's a process well-short of impenetrable paperwork that could accomplish that necessary accountability -- a process that would accomplish the program's simple and admirable goal of getting more local food to the growing number of hungry American families.