KATIE WILLIS
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
Katie has been farming on farms not her own for 14 years. She has farmed in Alabama, New York and Minnesota. Currently she is in her second season at a 5 acre diversified vegetable farm outside of Birmingham, Alabama.
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
I work on a farm in southeast Birmingham. I don’t have a title. I feel like I do almost everything there. We have a farm manager who has been farming there for 4 years. It’s a diverse vegetable farm. It’s probably about 5 acres, and this is my second season there.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
I think this is my 14th year farming.
WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?
I started farming in high school. There was an urban farm a few blocks from my high school that did an agri-science class in the school. They offered internships over the summer, and I started farming when I was sixteen. I didn’t expect to like farming, but it reconnected me to Alabama, a place that I was really wanting to leave. It reconnected me to my body, something that I really struggled to love or find value in. Later it would deepen my connection to my working class roots with my parents and also eventually helped me come to terms with my queerness. I feel like I struggle to leave farming because I feel so much like my queer identity when I’m in it. I’m able to be my fullest self when I’m farming in terms of gender, sexuality and class background.
I did four seasons/summers at a farm in Birmingham, the urban farm, and then I worked in upstate New York for 3 seasons. Then I went to Minnesota and worked there on a farm and came back to Alabama and have worked at technically four farms back in Alabama.
The farm in New York was a non-profit educational farm and that is the same for the urban farm that I started on.
WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO FARM FOR SOMEONE ELSE (NOW OR IN THE PAST?)
In the beginning, I always dreamed of having my own farm. I think part of why I never jumped the gun is a lack of confidence and not feeling like I had been prepared enough with all the right knowledge because I feel like in a lot of situations there was some knowledge hoarding, doing the labor and not being told why. Financial reasons are most of what has kept me back from pursuing my own farm goals. Lots of student debt and I have no access to wealth in my family or stocks or anything like that.
I would say now the way that I see farming is, I haven’t seen it as economically sustainable anywhere that I’ve worked and so as much as I would like to have my own farm and make a living, it doesn’t seem like it’s possible unless you have wealth from family or support from wealthier friends or access to family land. So I feel pretty locked out of the possibility at this point.
I would like to continue farming. I am pursuing a Masters in Counseling right now. When I started school I wasn’t working on a farm at that point, I was working in a bakery at the time and didn’t want to work in a bakery for the rest of my life. At that point I had vowed never to work for a farm in Alabama at that point, and went back to school. I was struggling to figure out ways to bridge the things that I’m passionate about. I went into counseling for reasons of social justice, pursuing social justice in helping people see their own humanity and humanity of others.
I also run a feminist bookstore.
So yeah I struggle with all of those things and figuring out how to live the way that I want to. If I had it my way, I would farm for the rest of my life, but I don’t know if financially I can do that.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
The biggest thing I’ve experienced is sexual harassment and blatant sexism.
Also I’m a white woman and I’ve farmed with mostly H2A workers, males from Mexico. I saw racism and sexism sort of - I don’t know the language to describe it, but the way our roles were relegated. I was washing veggies for 8 hours a day and they were picking okra and squash and all the horrible jobs that I actually wanted to do , but because of our identities, we were regulated to certain jobs.
I think about when I apprenticed on a farm in New York, just the small, meager wages and the thinking that housing is adequate compensation for farm laborers, and then the housing is pretty shitty. Making people live in cramped spaces or spaces with a lot of mold. You cover it over with the idea of “building community” and you love the other apprentices, so you don’t see that you’re living in a way that is not sustainable and not normal. This is not a lifestyle that could continue if you wanted a partner or a family. I think that can be a really hard mindset. I thought it was great at the time, but it’s hard to break out of that and envision different ways of being and different ways of compensating people for their work. That was a really great farming experience, working for little money and shitty housing, working with women and queers and I felt totally respected in the field, but on the backend it’s the compensation that is the disrespectful aspect.
That is even more complicated when you think about apprenticeships. The people often doing the apprenticeships are white and college educated so you can afford to be poor, so there is less complaining and more romanticization about living on so little, when other people aren’t choosing that.
When I moved back to Alabama, I worked on a farm, where I experienced the most sexism that I’ve ever experienced farming and it was hard to bottle up all of those feelings and not be able to push back on them. I also looked around at other farms in Alabama, and most are not owned or run by women. They don’t pay a living wage or hire employees. I didn’t think I could stomach it anymore and didn’t want to put myself through that. At that point, I thought I’d just work at this bakery and save money and buy a farm, and then I realized that wasn’t a reality for me either. Then I got lucky and had a friend who was working on this farm that he was managing at the time and he hired me to work there. Coming back to farming even though it’s still frustrating and I’m undervalued and disrespected often, it puts me back in my body and is just who I am. That feels so cheesy to say, but I don’t know what else to do with myself. I don't feel like myself when I’m not farming.
CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?
I don’t know much about horizontal management systems, but that sounds like it could be pretty dreamy. I think maybe it’s simple. Open lines of communication and adequate knowledge sharing and allow any employee to help make decisions about what’s happening on the farm and how things are done. Farm owners and farm managers would recognize that they aren’t just teachers; they are students. And the people they employ have the power to teach them things.
What farm owners and farm managers miss from their employees… the farm workers are the ones out there in the field and they are trying things differently all the time to make them better, but the people calling all the shots, they don’t know how to do things differently.
Just learning from each other and having fair, adequate compensation.
Having paid time off, sick leave, having parental leave. I think allowing for some sort of normalcy, whatever that is, when you work on the farm and you can still feel like a real person. I’ve often dreamt about being a real person when working on a farm. My clothes are always dirty. I’m always dirty. I don’t have weekends off, living in a 10x8 foot room We need space for people to decompress from farming, so your life is not fully consumed by farming.
“I struggle to leave farming because I’m able to be my fullest self when I’m farming in terms of gender, sexuality and class background.”
WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?
I honestly can’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve tried. Even trying to imagine being a counselor is difficult for me. I don't know how to not work with my body. I feel so affirmed in my gender identity when I’m farming in a way that when I’ve tried other things I haven’t found it to be as adequate. It feels really silly, I don’t know how to break out it. When I think of wearing professional wear, I don’t feel like my gender is affirmed on either end of the spectrum. That has become more and more important to me.
Also I come from parents who didn't’ go to college and my dad did manual labor for all of my life. They they basically forced me to go to college because they wanted me to have a better life and better financial opportunities, so I did that and I’m really in debt and working on a farm. I feel like the more I pursue education or professional based (not that I don’t think farming is professional) office jobs, I feel like I’m disconnecting myself from my parents and uprooting myself from a way of being that is truly who I am. I know that is not real, but I think farming keeps me connected to a lot of my identities in a way that I don’t think I would feel in a different position.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?
I see myself as a farmer. I started calling myself a farmer immediately when I was 16 and started working on a farm. When I introduce myself, I always say I’m a farmer. I didn’t realize that a lot of people don’t see me as a farmer. I noticed it a lot in conferences when they ask if you’re a farmer, but they really just mean, do you manage or own a farm. Unfortunately one of our advocacy organizations, National Young Farmers Coalition, I’m pretty sure they don’t consider me a farmer, I’m just a farm worker. I know there are grants that only farm owners can apply for. In terms of assistance, there isn’t much assistance for farm workers who aren’t technically farm owners.
I will always call myself a farmer. I call my coworkers farmers and if I need to explain it to someone who thinks I own a farm, I’ll do that but I won't undervalues my skills and experience. I just mean that identity is really important for me. I think there should be a shift in how we talk about people who work on farms. When I worked on a farm in Alabama that had H2A workers, a lot of those guys had been farming for at least 15 years and had way more knowledge than the white farm owners who they were working for, but they didn’t have money or family land.
It’s so complicated and there is so much privilege in being able to be recognized as a farmer.
I think there is a lot of power in claiming that identity for myself
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?
I think that - big picture - people that are aspiring to own their own land could, there needs to be resources for finding and accessing land, finding people that want people to farm their own. I do think land access is one of the biggest obstacles to having your own farm. I really liked what you said about having assistance just to get boots and having just the different things you’re required to have as someone working on a farm. Good quality stuff is expensive. Access to boots and rain gear and tools would be really helpful.
I think an organization that supports farm workers in terms of sick leave and parental leave and - I don’t know - adequately investigates sexual harassment and sexual assault and racism and brings those things to light, so these farmers’ market loving shoppers have a better idea of what actually happens on farms. It doesn’t matter if you are at Earthbound Organics in California or a small family farm in Alabama - a lot of the horrible things that happen on farms happen at both. Family farms don’t mean friendly farms.
National Young Farmers Coalition talks about student debt, and part of me is like student debt is something that privileged people have, but it’s not only white people who have student debt, lots of people have it of varying identities. I feel like the Farmer Student Loan Forgiveness program is not for farm workers, just for farm owners. It continues to keep people who are farm workers not being technically farmers.
Obviously we need land and wealth re-distribution and reparations for BIPOC people and we need to honor the work and experiences and practices that those different peoples bring to farming.
Farm workers that are not similar to me that are working on big farms need a lot of resources, as well. That’s an overhaul of the whole labor system and thinking about farm laborers and domestic workers who still don’t have a minimum wage and can’t get overtime. And I think we at least, in my circles, and because so many people in my position don’t work closely with migrant laborers or H2A workers, we don’t work on those farms , there’s a disconnect. We don’t think about the connection between our needs and ways that there our bigger needs than those that we have. We need to overhaul the whole ag system.
I want to acknowledge that my being a farm worker is a position of privilege. I am still choosing a life that is lower income. I could/do have options, and I struggle with that, that I'm choosing this life, and some ways it makes me feel like a fraud. It’s a tension that we need to honor and figure out.
ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
I have struggled with my relationship with farming, knowing that I’m still in a position of privilege knowing that i’m still choosing this way of life.
Farming brought me in in a weird way. It brought me into social movement, it was my entry point, even though the way I started was in a fucked up position. It opened up a world to me to see connections between different identities, race, sex gender, sexuality, ability. My anchor has always been farming and thinking about access to food. These are base things we all share, we all need access to food.
I would probably have come to recognize the different oppressions and injustices that happen, but farming was a special way for me to see the world in a different way.
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 love farmer lunch. I love eating. It’s part of why I love farming. I don’t understand how anyone ever forgets to eat. I structure my day around my meals, that’s how I get through to the next thing.
The way I think I came of age in farming was a rotational lunch. One person cooked each day and you shared the meal. I found that great for morale and a way to relax and appreciate the bounty and your coworkers. Right now I only eat my lunch with one coworker and at first we were just bringing our own individual meals and one day I was like, ‘We used to share food and make something together.’ We are slowly now starting to share meals together. Even if it’s not delicious, just the act of sharing food with another person is morale building and literally fuel and metaphorically fuel to get through the rest of the day. I really appreciate showing care for other people because I think it can inspire you to care for yourself, which we often fail to do when you’re farming because there is always urgency
The farm owner and farm manager work on the farm and never take lunch. I don’t understand how they are not eating. It feels really special to take that time.
If we had more people, I would love to do the lunch rotation and there’s another farm a seven minute drive away, sometimes we will take a long lunch and have a potluck with them.
It’s hard with Covid. There hasn’t been the community building between different farms and farmers, community building and different ways of learning through that as well.
