HAYLEY PARK

CORVALLIS, OREGON

Hayley has been farming for 8 years on farms not her own. She has primarily worked on seed or research farms, and currently works on a research farm in Oregon.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)

  • Currently I am a graduate student in the horticulture department at Oregon State. I’m working on a plant breeding graduate program. It’s a job and also the student part of being a grad student. I have a formal job with the university - for that I do  everything that field work encompasses. I plan all that for a research project of my own or other people. We grow all summer, I work with vegetables. What’s different is that usually we harvest, take data and donate our food. We can’t sell any of it. 

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?

  • This next season will be my 8th year working on some type of farm.

  • Before this I worked for a seed company for two seasons. I worked in trials and research. I helped grow some seed, but a lot of what I did was vegetable trialing. You grow everything, you take notes, you harvest, you donate. 

    Before that I did a year as an apprentice on a commercial veg farm in Oregon. Before that I had 3 seasons in Colorado working on a research farm for Colorado State University. And then I’ve volunteered on farms. 

    My significant other is a farmer. I don’t actually “work” on his farm, but I work on his farm. 

WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?

  • I came into it a little different. I started my undergraduate program with soil and crop science without ever having considered farming as a career. I just liked the idea of working with soil. I liked environmental science in high school and it sounded like I could be outside doing some of that. I immediately ended up with a job working for the university as an assistant to another grad student. I think 3 weeks into my undergrad program, I had this job where I was working with an oil seed crop and threshing. So then I spent a lot of years working with grains. It’s funny, I miss working with grains now because I've been working with vegetables for so many years.

WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO FARM FOR SOMEONE ELSE (NOW OR IN THE PAST?)

  • Not many people know what research farming looks like, it’s not the same connection to the community. The food we grow, we can donate it or work with gleaners. It's very different from how commercial farming feels... maybe that is part of the gratifying feeling farmers get of people thanking you for growing their food. 

    I actually do think starting a seed farm is something that I'm interested in and I’m trying to work towards right now, but if I give up research farming that would potentially make it harder to earn a livelihood.  The university does not pay well, but it does pay me year round. 

WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?

  • The bathrooms - this is a perennial issue. I think people may imagine that a university farm would have their stuff better together  - they do not at all. I also work in an extremely male dominated part of the research world, so it’s not catering to anyone who might not be able to stand by a bush. That’s been a huge issue for me over the past four years. 

  • Anywhere that you have people who work exclusively inside and people who work exclusively outside, there is a huge mismatch in work expectations. I think that what I have seen across the board is management or colleagues in other parts of my work places at the seed company or universities, don’t understand the physical aspect of the work, the labor piece of the farm. There are huge gaps in understanding what a work day for someone looks like. They don’t understand why you need a longer break here, or to move a schedule around. 

    At the seed company, they had their break times that everyone company wide had to take, but then they had people working in the field and it never matched up well. We have to sit now, we don’t work for 15 minutes, we can’t go back to shade or cover. There wasn’t the time to make it worth it. There is this disconnect between what it looks like to the people in the field and the people in the office side of it. 

CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?

  • I had my own apprenticeship experience and I felt let down by the education that I was supposed to get. Maybe because I was coming out of some background of learning about plants, but I’d love to see farms and would love to work on a farm that is really using this information to teach people. There are so many young people who are becoming interested in farming, who want to learn about this and that of agriculture and I don’t see why these apprenticeship aren’t dong more of that. My brain has been filled with all this information on plants, diseases, all taught in the university without field application. And all these people who want to learn all this are working all this time in the field and don’t have access. This is a huge mismatch. I would love to be part of something that gave that information away as part of the work. There is no reason to hoard that. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars

    I’d like to see farms that are run with multiple people at the management level in equal roles. The two biggest reasons for this is it balances opinions and it balances the responsibility. I think it’s important to not have those leaders be able to take full control, and it’s also important to balance that workload. Maybe I’m biased, and I can see both sides of it, but maybe his (the person in power) opinions shouldn’t be so over considered, and also I can see at the end of the day that every single person can walk away and that person (person in power) is left there trying to keep himself from collapse. 

    I know people who are trying to collective farm, many people who get a long well and have families to do that together, and I think that is incredible. It doesn’t have to be families. I just envision for long term dedication, we need multiple groups of people dedicating cooperatively for a long time.

“Not many people know what research farming looks like, it’s not the same connection to the community. The food we grow, we can donate it or work with gleaners. It’s very different from how commercial farming feels… maybe that is part of the gratifying feeling farmers get of people thanking you for growing their food.”

WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?

  • Something every year. I think it’s the arc of the season and it feels like habit now. It’s not just one part, it’s not just the growth at the early part, it’s not just the abundance of harvest. I love/hate the smell of rotting tomatoes and cleanup of that. It’s so tied to a seasonality. I just can’t envision what a summer would be like without that. It’s a cycle of life and death that is part of my year. Each experience in the season, smells, sights, tastes, are just kind of part my living pattern, I think.

WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?

  • I think I struggle to say the word farmer. I so tie that to ownership even if I don’t agree with that. I’ve worked in grains on conventional farms and there is the farmer who is the owner, and then there are the farm workers. That divide is so enforced. I think people are starting to question it, and I like that, but I’ve also struggled myself. I can tell people that I farm, and I hear my friends who farm, I hear a lot of them say the same things. The verb is easier to say than the noun. It kind of escapes having to talk about the ownership piece. It strikes me that that it’s enforced by history or the owners, I’m not sure. I’ve seen it in multiple states in organic and conventional, oil seeds, vegetables, everywhere. 

DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A FARMER? WHY OR WHY NOT.

  • I think a lot of people don’t see what I do as farming even if we do the same thing. If you’re not selling it, for some reason, that’s not farming, and maybe that is fair. Where I work is on a farm, I work on two farms. 

    I could call myself a ‘research farmer’, maybe, to the right person.

WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?

  • The first thing that I think of is winter support. I think that farm owners get away with not having to consider what the off- season looks like and I would like to see more farm owners going out of the way to find resources and connect their farm employees to winter support. If they want to bring that person back the next year, I think they should be putting in the effort to find something or some place for them to live for the winters. I know the feeling of terror so many of my friends have had and I have had at the end of the season: where am I going in 3 week? I don’t think that is fair. The farm owner has somewhere to live and they aren’t going through that fear in the off month. More support in that way is really needed. 

    I know for some farms it’s totally out of the question for them financially to pay for health care. But even just starting with changing the dialogue to when you’re sick, take your time, we will pay your wages for the day. I had an experience during my apprenticeship when I was really sick for four months of it and I had a parasite. I never took the time because I was living rurally 40 minutes from an urgent care. You work all day, are you going to drive at 5 o’clock to get it checked out? I had all this pain, but it didn’t feel like I could go to my managers and say I need at least a day, maybe a couple, to recover. It was this apprenticeship program, you can’t miss any days, etc. It didn’t feel like there was any support for that. 

    Now with a job where I do have sick days, I can’t even imagine if they were to say, no, you can’t take care of your health. HR would get involved. 

    There needs to be equal training on equipment for employees regardless of gender. They only teach the men how to drive tractors and they expect everyone who doesn’t drive a tractor to pull weeds all day! I learned how to drive a tractor this past year - it was a new season at a new place and I felt like I had the ability to start new, but all of the other places that I’ve farmed before this, there were men on tractors and no one else. I’ve been told by people, ‘maybe they have more mechanical skills or they were more excited about doing it’... the implications of that are that there is more damaging work happening to non-male bodies. It doesn’t matter at the end of the day whether it’s intentional or not

  • In all education settings, you need people who look like the people learning, teaching. And it’s important for anyone who wants to go on and start their own farm one day, they need that skillset, too.

WHAT IS YOUR OPINION/TAKE ON THE FARMER LUNCH? (DO YOU TAKE LUNCH, DO YOU SKIP LUNCH, DO YOU ENJOY TAKING LUNCH WITH YOUR CREW - FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING, IS THERE PRESSURE TO BE SOCIAL....)

  • Mostly it’s been a bit of a bummer because it’s been on the standard time clock. During the year when I was an apprentice, we took hour and a half lunches. It gave us enough time to make our lunch, take our lunch, and take a nap. It felt really sustainable for my body. Everywhere else on the university and the seed farm, it’s been: this is your 30 minute lunch window. Everyone needs more time so people just linger for longer, and it ends up being 45 minutes. It’s just not enough time! People are exhausted and they want to sit and laugh and eat, or they want to get something from the field and eat that.

    I love the long group lunch, people sleeping in the corner. That makes the afternoon work load a lot easier.