Would you start just telling me a little bit about yourself and where you're currently working? 

So I work on a farm and live in Baltimore. I work on a farm just outside of Baltimore. It's like a 40 minute drive. I've been working there for the past three years. It’s a 25 acre diversified vegetable farm, and I've been a farm worker there. 

How did you get into farming, and have you been working at that same farm for the whole time you've been farming? 

Yeah on the same farm. I got into it because I desperately needed to do something else. I was working as a nanny, and I was so burnt out, and I wanted to work outside this, the pandemic. I had been interested in farming for a while before that, but it was sort of filed away in the back of my brain. And then I  was talking to people like, oh, maybe I should actually get into farming now. And a friend of mine had a connect with the farm I work on. So I interviewed and started working.

So had you had any farm work experience before that? Or is that where you learned? 

That's mostly where I learned. I did WWOOF at one point. 

Got you. We have a similar experience. I had WWOOF’ed before, then didn't farm for a couple years, and then started working on farms. I know you said that you wanted to be outside, but were there other reasons that you were interested in working on a farm or learning about farming?

Yeah, I think I've always been interested in farming. There's a lot of stuff with WWOOFing that I don't like, but at the time, it was a super life changing experience. I feel like I learned a lot about myself, and I learned how to cook when I WWOOF’ed. I think that was the first time when I thought, oh I want to steward land. I felt really connected to my body and to the work that I was doing. I think farming feels, or just growing food, not even necessarily farming, feels really important. And as far as being self-sufficient, I feel really passionate about making farming and gardening accessible. And I think a part of the reason why I've continued to stay on this farm is having access to veggies that I can redistribute to people, and plants for people to put in their gardens. And that's been super rewarding. 

But aside from that, I love plants. I love farming, and I'm newly really interested in seeds. I think seeds are really cool. And I haven't ever farmed for seeds, but I did visit True Love Seeds for one day. I kind of am in love with seed farming. I feel like there's an attentiveness and care work that goes into seed farming and just farming in general. And I try to see farming in that way, although it's really hard under the context with which I'm farming, to push for farming to be care work, but I really see it as a form of care work.

That's cool. I love thinking about farming as a form of care work. Someone I interviewed previously was talking about how he wanted to be a doctor, but he got interested in farming, and he still sees it as a way of being in medicine.

Yeah, yeah. Right before I started farming, I was in school to be a massage therapist, and then the pandemic happened, and I was like this school isn't doing anything to keep me safe, I'm out. But I'm definitely interested in healing touch, whether it's people, plants. Just care work in general, is a place that I see myself. I don't necessarily want to do it under capitalism,  I want capitalism to die totally. That's also care work. 

Can you talk about why you chose to farm for someone else, or work on someone else's farm?

I think at the time, I really just needed a job, like I needed to come up with a way to make money. So that's what I did, like it was a choice, but also it was also desperation. Ideally, I wouldn't be working for someone. That was kind of my goal with massage therapy, to not have to work for someone, not have a boss. That’s still a goal that's in my head, but yeah, I think at the time, needing money and desperation was why. 

What are some of the issues that you've faced while working on a farm that you don't own?

Where do I begin? The thing that’s kept me there was, having a really strong team of workers and having people who really had my back and we supported the shit out of each other, but the context which we were coming from and the culture of the farm was really oppressive, and continues to be. I think with organizing the crew, we've shifted a lot of things, but you know, ultimately the bosses still have power over us, and there's been a lot of retaliation for organizing on the farm.  I'm trying to think of a succinct way to answer that question. I don't believe in land ownership, and I think developing such a deep relationship with the plants on the land and feeling the neglect of the owners, both towards their workers and towards the land, has been soul crushing, and it's definitely not how I want to be in relation to the land.

So I think trying to fit myself into this business model that's exploitative, exploiting the land and exploiting the people who work the land, it's been really, yeah, soul crushing. There are times when I have moments of doing mostly greenhouse work, and that's a space where I can kind of be with myself and with the plants, and I've found ways to, like, bring in care work to farming. But when I'm working under conditions that value efficiency and want us to be machines, it can be hard to do that.

Totally. Would you want to talk a little bit about your organizing efforts?

Yes, sure. 

How many people are on the crew, and what were you discussing with each other that led you to organize?

I feel like there's been multiple efforts. I think the first one was kind of a solo effort around a COVID situation where they had a worker come to work who actively had COVID. And I've gotten the farm to be a lot more COVID safe than they otherwise would be, and they've actually been, pretty okay, aside from this situation –  like we wear masks indoors, in part because I've advocated for that. But, yeah, one of my co-workers at the time, tested positive for COVID. This was when the CDC said five days isolation time, which is bullshit, but yeah, he had tested positive on a rapid test, and was still testing positive. Felt like shit. Came to work. I was like, this is not okay. My nervous system, I cannot handle you being here. He was great throughout, my coworker. I was like, Why the fuck did you come into work? And I was really upset, but he organized with me afterwards to get the bosses to change their COVID policy because they had just done this without telling us beforehand. And my coworker came to work thinking that everyone had said that this was okay. So he felt misled. You know, he was also really sick, and that was apparent, like, he sounded terrible, he looked terrible and  yeah, had COVID. So, I had, like, a series of meetings with them that did not go over well, where I felt like they were kind of gaslighting me a lot throughout this situation. 

And then they held a weird meeting where I felt like they were taking me to court with the whole farm, and I didn't know that we were gonna have this meeting, so when I found out, I was frantically organizing all of us, just to make sure we're on the same page and we're not comfortable with people coming into work with COVID. Most of my coworkers agreed but one of them just didn't care. So they shifted things after this weird meeting, but like, the way they went about trying to communicate with me was so weird, okay, yeah, because I really just wanted to have a conversation, and they came at me with this whole, like, flow chart that was really convoluted. And I was like, I kind of thought we were going to be having a conversation and working through some of this together. It felt like a very escalatory reactionary response to me, naming that I was uncomfortable and just wanting to talk about it. They’re very conflict avoidant people. So when I have had issues with them, it often resulted in them having an escalated response to me having a problem, in a very fragile way.

So that was one of the organizing moments. Another was last winter.  I was having a really hard year with a lot of things that were happening that were deeply traumatic in my life. So I had a lot of what they named as “unplanned absences”. There was a lot of organizing we did as a team that I initiated. Due to my unplanned absences, they didn't offer me winter hours, even though I was their most senior employee and they offered other coworkers winter hours. It was just really shitty and they kept putting off having this conversation, like I didn't know if I would be working. This added job insecurity, and there were a number of other things, but basically, me not having winter hours prompted us as a team to organize  a list of other demands. Something we advocated for was to have a 15 minute break. The culture on that farm was such that I was scared to sit down for the first year of me working there.

Me and one of my co workers who ended up being really, really tight. We were very much in solidarity with one another. And I was like, hey, if I see you taking a break, I'm going to take a break too, because we were trying to shift the culture. It feels really alienating when you're sitting down and everyone's moving around you and kind of like scoffing. It was just very much in the culture to  look down upon someone for needing to sit and needing to rest. Part of this is my own internalized ableism, but I felt a stigma around sitting because it means I’m not working, not being efficient and contributing or whatever. So one of our demands was to implement a 15 minute break where we would all sit down and have a snack. And that felt like a big deal. And the bosses were kind of resistant towards that, or wanted control over that. 

We would sometimes need to take breaks in the field, even just for a minute, and our bosses ended up using that against us. They would cut our hours with the reasoning of we just need a harvest crew that doesn't need to take breaks. Also me and my coworker, we drive over 40 minutes to the farm and wake up at five thirty  in the morning, sometimes earlier. And we carpool for many reasons, but we value carpooling, and we would often be five minutes late, and they could not handle the fact that we were late. We were pretty on time at the beginning of the season, and then later on in the season, we would all be extremely burnt out, and waking up that early is really hard. 

We even had strategies for this. My co-worker and I had this system of calling each other every morning,  and being like “Okay, we're doing this. Feet on the ground.” We were trying really, really hard, yeah, but it kind of felt like an access need to have that window of 10-15 minutes to just have transition time in the morning. And we have been saying this for one or two years, and it just had been a constant issue where they continuously brought up our lateness, and we were saying, when we don't carpool, we're not late. There’s variables to consider, like we're driving 50 minutes, not getting compensated for gas, and they just could not budge, and they didn't see it as an access need. I think ultimately it was the fact that they knew that we were a team, and we were in solidarity with one another. And when you're carpooling, if one person's late, the other person's late, and we're not going to rat each other out. So that year that they didn't offer me winter hours, we had a lot of demands or asks. We didn't call them demands necessarily. 

We wanted more transparency and communication from the bosses about what was going to happen . My entire first year working on the farm, there was this power dynamic of being a new person and not knowing what was going on. I really felt that my boss would almost never look me in the eye. I was always the last person to know what was going on. I felt like I could never keep up, because people were hoarding information and knowledge from me. I had no way to get on board, and I just constantly felt like I was being left behind. Like, there was never “enough time” to catch me up. I'm putting that in quotes because that's an excuse, right? I confronted the boss about it because it was really rude. It was to the point where newer people would notice this dynamic and the way I was being treated by the boss. That was really affirming.

And then most recently…there's more. I feel like there's been a lot. Most recently, my coworker was having a really hard time this year and needed to take time off. I wanted to transfer my PTO to my co-worker, because he really needed the time off and at first they wouldn’t allow that and didn’t give us a reason why. PTO has felt like it's been used against us also, because last year I had used up my PTO, and they were kind of using that against my “unplanned absences”, which were all involving a crisis in some way, shape or form. I think they wanted more predictability in an unpredictable world. So a lot of the organizing or work that me and my co-workers have been doing really just boils down to, Hey, we're humans. We're humans who are struggling. We're struggling constantly, and we can't always know when that's going to happen, because we live in an unpredictable world and we're impacted, by everything happening in the world.

Right. Shit happens. You're gonna be late sometimes, you're gonna need time off, and you're gonna need to take a break. You can't plan for that all the time. How many people are on your crew? 

Currently it's just me and the farm manager, because my coworker is not coming back, but there was three of us. Oftentimes there's four of us and there's someone who also does deliveries. It's a small crew. Farm crew, I would say, vacillates between three to four people. And then there's our delivery person. 

And it's 25 acres?

Yeah it’s a lot. A lot of land, we never have time to do all the things. And I think that also decreases morale, because we see how much things are getting neglected, and we don't have the time and space to care for everything. It feels like they're constantly trying to scale up in ways that we feel the impacts of the most, because we can never keep up. And I feel like we're being set up to constantly fall short, because there's no way that four people can handle that much land.