I’m pregnant now – that is an impossible thing to do when you’re farming for someone else. I’m doing it now, and it’s fine, but it’s not like I feel like I can continue farming much longer. We are tied into pretty long work days during the summer, and it’s physical labor – there’s a certain point where I won’t be able to do it fast enough. I’ve chosen to do it for the past five seasons, but I’ve put myself in a position where I have to find something else to do. I could work at other farms with more contained hours, but childcare is really expensive so the wages wouldn’t pay for the childcare…so it feels like this sort of impossible thing to keep farming.

Well, the friends of mine who have had children, part of what of they did when the kids were little, not that it worked well, is that they could work much slower. They were not paying themselves hourly obviously, or they transitioned to doing more computer. Mostly I know if they own their own farm, they farm with their partner and are shifting the roles to take care of the kid. Certainly it’s not easy, but you have the flexibility to have the kid on the farm, or do computer work when your body isn’t able to do field work. And because it’s a physical job, I don't think I can say to a farm, “I’m 8 months pregnant” because part of farm work is physical labor and people are expecting it from you. That is true with any big body change, injury, sickness, there is pretty big instability with any manual labor job. There’s workman’s compensation, but all those things are not quite as enforced because the margins for the owners are so small. There doesn’t seem to be a need to pay for these social services, when owners are making so little. If we were living in community, we would somehow. 

And also, it is my decision to farm. I’m not saying somebody else should pay me when I can’t. 

In some ways, when I worked on my friend’s farm, I feel like we had a lot more rules set out for each other around my time so I didn’t feel like I was being taken advantage of. There are a lot of boundaries when you’re a laborer on someone else’s job. Now I’m a manager and salaried and there are not a lot of boundaries around time. We have to have produce for the CSA. The day goes on and on.

We have 15 hour harvest days sometimes. It’s up to us to set the schedule, but it can feel like the season can swallow your whole life when there is too much coming in to harvest, and you have CSA members who are depending on you to have the food on the table. You can’t just not have it there. 

And I know farmers on their own farm just do it. They pull that 15 hour day and just do it. 

The staff definitely leaves, it’s the managers who stay. Especially last year, the staff would get overtime if you worked over 40 hours a week. Managers do not get overtime because we are salaried. The coop has a rule, basically full-time people don’t have a schedule that goes overtime regularly. We always cut the crew’s hours at 40 to be fair to them. They never do more than a 10 hour day. But yeah, the managers stay. 

The person before me who managed that site definitely didn’t have boundaries. It was part of work ethic, that work culture got built around the job in an unnecessary way. When I started, the days that we have market on site closes at 7pm, so those days still began at 7am and the earliest you could possible leave was 7:30pm. We just weren’t set up to leave. With just figuring it out amongst the staff, we changed that and decided it doesn’t have to be like this.

The woman who has been here the longest and manages both sites helped to get one of the farms started. We have a lot of partnerships, schools, the arboretum, a lot of partnership work has to be done. She’s been doing it for twelve years and there is a threat that they are going to get rid of the farm because we don’t make money. We are living with constant threat - we have to do whatever it takes. It’s not a healthy way to approach it.