KATIE GOURLEY

PORTLAND, OR

Katie currently works at a farm education non-profit in Portland, Oregon, and will be joining a production farm crew this upcoming season. She has been farming on farms not her own for 4 years.

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

  • I work part time for a farming education non-profit that works to train and equip the next generation of farmers. It also works on preserving farmland through succession planning, providing resources to the double edge problem of the aging farmer problem and new generation of farmers who don’t have access to land, where to get those stake holders to meet in the middle to dismantle the barriers that young farmers have to accessing land particularly folks without inherited land access or wealth. Figuring out how to break down some of the barriers for low income first generation farmers, BIPOC farmers and veteran farmers. I do that work part time. 

    I’m at an interesting stage in life. I've been a professional baker for a really long time and have worked on various farms my whole working life. I’m more seriously dedicating my future to farming, in a kind of interesting identity shift. Instead of introducing myself as a baker, I’m at the stage of introducing myself as an aspiring farmer. It’s an intense emotional process. 

    They both relate and intersect in a way. I’m seeing how it evolves, bringing baking into whatever future farming identity I hold. I’m joining a farm crew starting next season. We are having crop planning meetings and seed selection chats, and I’m going out to do some gleaning and hanging out. They are close friends of mine. I’ll be on the farm crew starting more intensively in February or March. In Portland we have a pretty long growing season. 

    A vast majority of my farming experience has been in urban agriculture. I managed a farmers’ market in Chicago for a handful of years and therefore was deeply seeded in the ag community. I really spent a lot of volunteer hours helping out on various urban farms in Chicago and worked for an urban farm here in Portland, as well. It was small scale, a quarter to three quarters of an acre. It’s really exciting to know that I’ll be rooted in one place for an entire growing season. A lot of my rural farming experiences have been in this category called “nomad farming” . I have so many friends in the ag world and I’m always helping out on farms and lending a hand, or learning about different topics, like seed saving or helping with harvests, all a little bit of a no-home farmer.

    I’m stoked to be a part of a really great team, rooted in a very similar ideology about land and equity.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?

  • It’s hard to define when farming started versus when I got involved in the agricultural system. 

    I studied food systems planning in graduate school. I wasn’t actively farming, but thinking about seed sovereignty and food justice movements. It all feels intersectional for me. 

    I’ve been farming for about 4 years.

WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?

  • I think for me it’s about contributing tangibly to the things that I like, those topics that just keep you at night… both what you're absolutely in love with and what is so painful to witness, thinking about them in the abstract, having ideologies or philosophies, something so different to contribute in this physical and kinetic way. You’re rooting yourself in something that is so very fundamental about living. I think that is what really drew me. It’s related to how I feel about baking. I bake whole grain sourdough bread. I’ve been doing that for the last year and there is something about holding a world/universe in between your fingers and creating this reciprocal conversation with the world around you. It radiates into this whole way of being. 

    For me farming is this — I talk about it a lot — it’s a way to locate my form of radicalism and form of resistance work. It’s where I feel grounded in actualizing the way I want to model not a new world, but a better future world and I talk a lot about care based economies. I’ve never found a place where I can make that more manifest than in growing food and tending land and learning and apprenticing from land directly. Nothing else around us models care the way that land does and being part of actualizing a solidarity economy, an economy not rooted in extraction and pain and competition and destruction. I think a lot about what does it mean to enact a world where gifting, trading sharing and bartering actually exists. Once you become involved in the farming community, we are already doing this and people have been doing this for years and years, but rendered invisible by the hugely dominant capitalist machine. 

    The further you go into communities that are doing land based work, not to say there aren’t massive cases of extractions and capitalism, I have found a lot of farm families that are deeply rooted in sharing and reciprocity. 

    Farming feels like home to me. 

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

  • I’m definitely excited to farm on someone else’s farm because I humbly acknowledge how much I have to learn and will for the rest of my life no matter what version of farming that I'm doing. You never run out of stuff to learn. 

    I’m really excited about learning, also excited about building a bigger, more radiant community of farmers, and I think that the infrastructure to learn and be participating on the farm feels very important to me at this stage. 

    I feel extremely lucky that I have found a farm to work at that is folks who prioritize the treatment of their employees above everything else. Knowing a space where democracy among the farm owners and farm workers is placed front and center gives me mental spaciousness that understands this is the exception to the rule. I shouldn't feel so blessed and privileged to be working somewhere like this. It lights a fire in you - this shouldn’t be an exception to the rule, how do we fight for a world where this is the norm?

    This is another part of the big transition that I’m in. I am in a long term partnership with a fellow farmer and that is the first time that that’s been the case for me. It’s opened a very new chapter of discussing what it could look like to farm together. He’s also going to be on the farm with me next season. This will be the first time we are growing side by side. 

    It has evolved into a conversation of what it would mean to start our own farm one day. We are both excited about more collectivized visions of what a farm community could like. There is something deeply twisted about what our (society’s) ideas of what farming should look like is rooted in deep individualism. A person is stronger when supported by a collective. 

    We want to farm. We want to farm together. We know it’s our life’s work. We want to feed and nourish our community and land. Do we want to own land? Land ownership in this country is something we deeply don’t believe. There is a world we want to support where we all lift each other up and support each other, what does that look like? We are definitely in the deep speculative space of what does our dream farm look like? It’s a sweet spot to be in. 

    I don't want to live in a world where it’s crazy that we want to farm because it means we are both going to take massive pay cuts and are both going to struggle. 

    I’m in my late 20s, me wanting to farm shouldn’t be this, “oh shit that’s a horrible choice, that is wrong.”

    We are interested in alternative models, but a farming future. 

    We are doing our own side hustle this coming season, exclusively a dry bean CSA. He’s been farming for a lot longer than me and has at the same farm in the Portland area for 3 years. The farm owner has allowed us a field to farm just dry beans, with a labor input exchange. We are planning a pop-up dry bean CSA. 

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

  • I think I see so much valorization of overwork in this way that people wear it as this badge of honor and I think that is destructive and harmful. Touting how you work 80 hours a week or how tired you are, or how much you work in the evenings. People just feed off of this energy of toxic overwork. That is pervasive. 

    I see that with both farm owners and farm workers. It’s not limited to one category. 

    I think that the expectation that folks know everything, too…I see a lot of people scared to not know how to farm, they are scared to ask and scared to learn. You’re expected to do something perfectly. We live in a society where we don’t grow up learning these skills. We live in a world that has suppressed that ancestral knowledge and blood memory that we all have in our roots no matter where we’re from, it’s been so pushed underground. We show up on a farm and are ashamed to not know. That fear lingers over us. Learning environments are not created on farms very well because folk don’t know how to be mentors. There is a huge discrepancy with people who want to learn and are there to learn and grow as a farmer and an environment where people are so stressed and overworked so they are not tending to a culture of mentorship. It sucks some of the joy and creates tension. 

    There is so much to say - I’m speaking about the farming community that I’m rooted in - it tends to be a smaller scale “alternative agriculture” folk who tend to already be in a more progressive, more supportive employment environment, those are the conditions I’m speaking to. 

    The ag sector is a perpetuator of the most human rights abuses nationally and globally. 

    The lack of health insurance is a radically under addressed issue in farm workers. You are doing work that demands extreme level of physical input and then we don’t have health insurance. I don’t know a single young farmer who has employer provided health insurance. 

    There is a lot of overlap between toxic kitchen culture, which got called out pretty hard core, some of those narratives definitely apply to farm workers too . There are a lot of accepted hetero-patriarchal standards. People are talked to a certain way on farms and it’s laughed off as if it’s totally cool. I see a lot of misogynistic language in farm settings that even when they are not used with malice are still representative of a larger system that you are unintentionally complacent in. A lot of farming can be an old boys club. There are a lot of folks doing wonderful work to take that down, it’s just pervasive.

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

  • I think a farm that takes seriously what radical care can look like in reality. That care means care for the land, care for the water, care for the soil, care for the humans and a super expansive definition of care. Your basic needs are met but you are actually thriving. You are given space for pain and joy in your workplace. The workplaces that have made me feel the dreamiest are the ones that acknowledge your whole human self and don't ask you to put that on pause. I don’t want to pretend that I'm not a full human because I’m at work. I’m a full human every waking moment. I think that is strange that we pretend that is put on hold. We have painful moments. We say dumb things. We say smart things. We have embarrassing moments. Showing up as your full self every day. If we dismantle some of the divisions of when we are at work we are one way, and when we are not at work I can be myself...the work of being a human is extremely hard work. A space where we all collectively can be working toward each other's full liberation, in whatever that means to that person. Every person is the only person who can define what their own liberation looks like to them, creating spaces where people can actualize their own liberation. 

  • A farm where everyone is paid a living wage and is able to thrive even though capitalism will never actually let us thrive. We still live within it. 

  • Where bodies are recognized as the only thing we have. We only have one vessel to navigate this world. If you work a job that treats it as disposable, it’s not a sustainable world. 

  • I think joy! I think joy should be the foundation of farming.

“I think a lot about what it means to enact a world where gifting, trading, sharing and bartering actually exists. Once you become involved in the farming community, you see that we are already doing this and people have been doing this for years and years but rendered invisible by the hugely dominant capitalist machine.”

WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?

  • I mean getting to participate in a tiny miracle every single day is pretty magical. There is something so captivating about being a part and witness to and given the gift of observance of life in this way that really roots you in reality. There is a way that you could live your whole life under our current circumstances and forget that the earth is still turning or that there are seasons or sometimes it’s a dry season or a really wet year, without that awareness, do you even live in a place? Being made humbling aware of place is something that I really love. Nothing like farming has taught me. 

    I just love plants, and I love physical work. I think that we are not taught particularly as folk who grow up in a very white centric environment that privileges the written word and academic success as some marker, we are taught to look down on physical work in this way that is really destructive. I really love a hard day’s work and when there is a way that we can do that that is not super extractive and exploitative of our bodies, it is deeply satisfying and enriching. 

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

  • I don’t want there to be a difference because without farm workers (unless you’re farming alone, which I see people do and it’s extremely hard and could be made easier if we farmed in community), a farm doesn’t exist without the people who work it. I think the fetishization of land ownership in America is deeply twisted and the fact that a farmer is determined by a piece of paper that has their name on the deed of some plot of land doesn’t make any sense to me. It devalues the hands that actually feed the community, and also makes this weird idea that farm workers are somehow less knowledgeable than a farm owner, which anyone who has experience on farms knows that is just not true, sometimes the exact opposite is true. There are very distinct cultural and ideology myths around the differences between a farmer and farm worker. It is premised on a lot of lies and dominant cultures of supremacist culture and harmful narrative. 

    Your name being written down and seen on paper as a farmer is very determined by land ownership. Being seen on those pieces of paper is how policy is made. If you’re not engaging with the people who are working the land and people who know what is going on on the farm, we see over and over again how American farm policy is not actually supporting small farms. I myself, in my professional role, use these stats about farms.

  • My partners who has been farming for a decade has never been interviewed or surveyed as a farmer, yet you hear this statistic that the average farmer in America is 60…where are you getting that number? Everyone I know who is 25 and actually farming has never been asked if they're a farmer. 

    The terms are not reflective of human beings. It’s a problematic perspective of what farming means and that’s not even opening the complete pandora’s box about what it means to be undocumented. Those are the humans who are feeding the vast majority of this country. 

    Some people think if we don’t pay too much attention and then it’s not real. It breaks my heart everyday. We aren’t even at the point of collectively talking about it openly, let alone doing anything about it. I would like to see that treated more urgently. 

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

  • There is this weird gut feeling that I can’t use that term. I’m not good enough to use that term. I don’t have enough experience or I’m not valid enough. It’s taken me a long time to publicly say that I’m farm-curious or an aspiring farmer. At night my partner and I talk about our dream farm or farm land, or trying to find a place to farm. It’s all we talk about and care about. I have three book shelves full of farming books, but I still have this clenched gut of calling myself a farmer. Or I feel the need to qualify myself and say, “I know it’s crazy.” It’s this weird thing that I feel like I have to justify or have a self deprecating tone about it. I’m kind of in a weird ambiguous stage of knowing how to identity. And my partner too who has a decade of farm experience, he doesn't call himself a farmer. I relate.

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

  • I think anything that creates a sense of community and solidarity helps. That can mean so many things. That can mean physical resources - it can be really hard for demographics that don’t get privileged by grants or opportunities because you don’t have a business name or tax number that any given form would make you have, that can be a really isolating feeling. You don’t actually count because you’re not a member of certain category. 

    Shared infrastructure or shared resources could be helpful. 

    We need emotional solidarity.There are so many educational programs - online farm schools, more pdfs and webinars and coronavirus-induced online zoom things that you could fill 24 hours/7 days a week for the rest of your life, but when I’m trying to engage in that content, it can make me feel isolated. Watching a webinar about soil health doesn't make me feel like I’m going to be a better farmer. I want to hear farmers’ stories, their pains, their whims across different cultures and ages. 

ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?

  • I think that one thing that’s keeping me up at night right now is how to navigate the compromises we have to make in the world that we currently live in in order to imagine and enact the world we want to live. I don’t know that I'll ever know the answer to that. I’ll probably die before I do. Having the resolve to keep doing it, even when you’ve hit that realization that you might just keep fighting a battle that you’ll never see won. 

    Access to land and capital as someone who doesn’t have inherited wealth keeps me up at night. 

    And the fact that I feel like it’s so hard to get into farming and I come from so many occupied and embodied privileges. If I think it’s extremely tight and stressful and vulnerable, that makes me extremely angry that someone with the levels of privilege that society bestows on my abled body, even in that, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to make this work. It makes me angry, it’s not a very profound emotion, but it’s anger. 

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....)

  • I think it is the best part!

    That is totally determined by the fact that I’ve been in farming communities that are very culinary. I arrived at farming from having studied seed saving and the people I surround myself with are the ones who tend to think about biodiversity and flavor on farms. I’ve had some really wonderful experiences of sharing food and that being a really important part of team building and community building. 

    It is celebrating why we do this. Eating simple foods from your labor is something that completes the circle of understanding the whole cycle and reciprocity with plant life and cycle of community. Humans are social creatures. Humans are feeders. Humans are nurturers. Being able to do that on a farm is extremely important. 

    But also, sometimes I will eat a whole watermelon on the ground in the parking lot because I’m so tired and disillusioned and that’s my lunch.