MONMOUTH — David Handley is the state’s strawberry expert, one of the state’s sweet corn experts and likely to be the state’s hops expert — as soon as he bones up on hops.

He jokes that he’s still not entirely sure how that crop fell to him.

“I’m desperately trying to learn how to be a hops grower,” he said from his office at Highmoor Farm, part of the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station, and home to the local University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension.

The plants are spiny and sticky and shoot up to 20 feet into the air — and 100-plus years ago, they were wiped out in the state by disease — but Maine’s craft brewers are clamoring.

So he’s got a half-acre test hop yard started.

All in a day’s work.

An extension vegetable and small fruit specialist, Handley spent an average week last month teaching maximum security prisoners at the Maine State Prison how to start a fruit and vegetable garden, pruning grapes at a research plot, and teaching master gardeners in Sanford and Ellsworth.

Handley, 57, is a Massachusetts native. Growing up, his father was a University of Massachusetts floriculture specialist, conducting research and giving commercial growers advice on flowers. He said he didn’t expect he’d choose a career path so similar; he originally went off to college for graphic design.

Handley was at the University of New Hampshire working on his master’s degree when a fruit specialist there spotted the job opening in Maine.

“He gave me an elbow in the ribs and said, ‘You ought to apply for that,'” he said. 

At the time, it was a four-month position with the potential for one additional year of funding.

“That was almost 33 years ago,” he said.

His work varies by the season. In the summer, Handley oversees summer students who check in on farmers weekly and scout fields to monitor for pests. 

“We try to keep in touch with them and let them know which critters are gnawing on their plants,” he said.

That helps him give advice on pesticide use and, ultimately, farmers are able to use a little less, he said. It saves the farmer money, it’s better for the environment, and makes for a happier consumer.

He also works on research plots. Right now, Handley is keeping an eye on two dozen test varieties of strawberries from Italy, France, Nova Scotia and elsewhere planted at Highmoor. This summer, he’ll take meticulous notes on color, taste, yield, harvest season — Which do well in Maine? Which flop? — helping steer the planting decisions of 200-plus berry farmers in Maine.

His theory: “Let me take the lumps so you don’t have to,” Handley said.

It’s very practical work, but also, as he describes it, fun.

“It’s like the breeder makes the toys and I get to play with them,” he said.

A pair of Handley’s UMaine videos, “How Do I Prune Raspberries?” and “How to Grow Raspberries,” have received a half-million hits between them on YouTube, giving him an unexpected dose of Internet fame.

“Horticulturally, I don’t consider them a real tricky crop,” Handley said. “(Yet) I have more people get into raspberries, and get out of raspberries, than any other crop I work with. It takes time and they’re thorny, and they come right at the same time of year you’d rather be at the beach.”

Handley, who lives in Monmouth, said he heard through a co-worker 20 years ago about an effort to start a local theater group at Cumston Hall. He volunteered to build sets and found himself quite unintentionally auditioning for “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

He said he was told, “If you want to build, you’ve got to act.”

Handley has been in about two dozen shows in the years since, in Monmouth and at Auburn’s Community Little Theatre, including being cast as Patsy in 2013’s “Spamalot.”

“I love to do the comic relief,” he said. “It’s fun to be somebody else. I’m always looking to get a cheap laugh.”

He met his wife, Michelle, during a sabbatical from work to study raspberries in New Zealand in 1996. In retirement, which is still years off, he anticipates they’ll spend more time there.

By then, he may have aced those hops.

Know someone everyone knows? Contact staff writer Kathryn Skelton at 689-2844 or kskelton@sunjournal.com