KEELY CURLISS
WESTPORT, MA
Keely has been farming on farms not her own for 13 years. She is currently the farm manager on a 10 acre vegetable farm with a poultry operation for eggs and meat.
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
I currently am a farm manager on a ten-ish acre vegetable farm and there is also a poultry operation for eggs and meat. I don’t manage that. The owner of the farm, he’s going from it being a sole proprietor to being in the process of turning it into a non-profit farm. It’s a fiscally sponsored operation and this is a transitional year. He is moving from a farm business to non-profit model.
The farm is called Movement Ground Farm. They just approved the mission last week. The owner used to do a lot of social movement work with refugees in Providence, and the mission is to use the farm as healing and land based work for movement building, as a connection point. We are in flux and the owners is utilizing movement partners he’s worked with for a long time, wanting this to be a space where people can access food and land.
I had two employees this season, and then I have mostly work shares as the main brunt of labor. The two farm workers I had were one full-time and one part-time. We have a CSA - 115 families, and two farmers’ markets.
This is my first season at this particular farm. I’ll stay on for one more season, but am still deciding. This is the last week of my CSA. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and look in retrospect. I don’t love my relationship with the farm owner and ED, but after you’ve learned systems and put in a lot of energy to learn a piece of land and have the ability to make it better, you don’t want to abandon that. I have to weigh it out. Is it worth the amount of energy it will take for one more season or am I maxed out at one more season? I feel like I’ll probably do a second for the fact that it’ll be easier than this year and it’s hard to imagine managing a new farm again for another year.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
This is season 13ish for me. I started farming when I was a teenager through an organization in greater Boston. It was food justice programming and employed teens on farms. I was just out of 8th grade when I started working on veggie farms. The first summer I just wanted a summer job, and sort of fell into the food system and food justice work through the farming side of things. I absolutely adored being in the fields and being part of the food system and being so connected to food and being outside. I wasn’t a young person who did great in school and who loved school in a formal sense. I loved hands on work and how my brain and body were fed through farming. All through high school, I worked in summers on farms and post high school that is what I’ve done. I didn’t go to college.
I’ve farmed mostly in Massachusetts. This is the first time being out of state. Massachusetts and outside of Boston, it’s a hub of small farms. Boston definitely has an absurd number of small to medium scale veggie production farms. A lot of them are non-profits, even if they don’t have a good reason to be a non-profit. They do it for a means to support capital expenditure, always some small programmatic thing that they somehow convince themselves is worthy of being at that tax status. There are a handful of farm businesses, competition is complicated. I could name probably 30 to 50 within an hour and a half drive of Boston. There are a lot of options for work. I grew up in Boston. I grew up with one parent in the city and one parent outside. I had a familiarity with farms outside of Boston, and in the city, a familiarity with the consumer side and food access and a farmers’ market understanding of the food system.
I worked on a bunch of non-profit farms. It’s questionable whether their mission was a real thing or not. They really feel like veggie production farms with less stress around the financials. I have worked on farms ranging from 1 acre to 31 acres. I spent the most time on 31 acres and a 5-7 acre farm. They have all primarily been veggie CSA farms.
WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO FARM FOR SOMEONE ELSE (NOW OR IN THE PAST?)
For the first couple years out of high school, I would always think, I’ll have to get a real job eventually - I had that idea. After three or four years of thinking that, then being employed by someone else, realizing you can have a position that they have clearly drawn out and budgeted off of that you can live off of. I’m definitely a person with side hustles. As long as I can have my winter side hustles, other ways of making sure that I’ll have a little extra here and there, this a feasible way to make a living. I’m not seeking to make lots of money or get rich. The stability of not having to stress the books or keep your business afloat in our capitalist system that we have. I was like, word, this is doable.
It’s really hard to work for other people if it doesn’t feel like you love everything about how this person runs their operation or their ethical care of the land. Their values need to be really aligned for it to be a good fit long term.
I have worked for a lot of people and this is the first time I’ve been actively thinking “this is shitty.” I’m having a really hard time working for the person that I’m working for. After this season, I don’t necessarily want to be a business owner, but I would also love to have more. I don’t want to be a control freak, but I want autonomy and not to be micromanaged and care for the land the way that I feel it should be cared for.
That’s a longwinded way of saying Yes and No to wanting to have my own farm. I would love to avoid being a business owner and I just don’t know yet. I’m very interested in cooperative farm operations and collective models that live under a different business as a project. I am curious to see if there are other means, just getting to be on the land and grow food that sort of keeps me out of the business side of things, which forces me to exist in this impossible game of capitalism where you have to sacrifice so many things, things you love.
If being in the field was taken away from it, I wouldn’t want to do it. I definitely would love to figure out a way to sort of manage my own project in a way that is not owning a business but have autonomy.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
One of the most interesting things for myself and other folks I’ve known is the land owner relationship, whoever that human or entity is, whoever owns the land. The relationship between the people working the land and the owner is such a complicated and sometimes painful and tumultuous relationship. It’s uncommon for me to see a positive relationship with a landowner. One of the farms I worked on, the land was leased from the farm land conservation trust. I was in my early 20s, my first 4-5 years of farming and committing to it. The manager I was working under, she always had to go to these meetings of wealthy folks who had put tons of money in or had financially invested in pristine farmland in their town. It was a super wealthy suburb of Boston. They would come and inspect the land and find ways that we were infringing on how we were in violation. They would expect us to pull invasive weeds in the middle of season when I’m exhausted and busy.
That struggle with alignment of what good use of land is. The farmer is the person who has the most intimate view of the land and relationship with the land, on a day to day, hour to hour basis. They are acutely aware of everything that is happening. This overseer who walks the land however often they walk it and does not have the intimacy with the land, and yet they have time to percolate on all these options of how they want the land to look, or not look. Unless they have been a farmer, it’s hard to explain the struggle with that relationship and how hard it is to work with people like that.
It was magnified this year 10 fold where I work . The landowner lives on the land with his elderly parents and I live off site. Unless you live on the land that you work, it is damn near impossible to be there all the time. Something happens and you can’t always be the one to respond to it…the person who lives on the land is the go to for emergencies. It has been so challenging to come back from my days off to see something has changed or moved or he took it upon himself to do a thing that counteracts how I’ve been trying to manage a certain system. It is so hard.
There are so many things I could say, but that is the one that always gets me as most challenging or takes the most energy and effort outside the actual physical exertion of job.
Right when the season was starting, COVID was starting to blow up. I was commuting really far actually because I couldn’t find an apartment because no one was leaving because of COVID. We talked about figuring out how to put a makeshift situation on the farm until I could find more permanent housing closeby. The farm owner was very into it. I thought it was actually going to happen, but it just never happened. It’s been something we have talked about more, that someone from the farm has to live on site or within a 5 minute walk. We are losing opportunity also to hire awesome people who need somewhere to live on the farm.
I was never offered housing. He offered to email people for me to help me find housing.
CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?
None of us are immune to thinking “in a different world.”
If I balance the dreamy farm ideas with reality, i hope to eventually land farming with really competent, confident, badass folks who have been at it for awhile and who love it and really value rest and caring for their bodies so they can do it for a long time and have different skill sets to me. A beautiful symbiosis of the team and people who want to stick around and work together for a long time and get good at our systems. I think about crew turnover a lot. The years you worked with a crew that clicked so hard and so good, I want that for a long haul, for a stretch of more than two seasons.
I definitely want to grow veggies forever. I love growing vegetables so very much. I love so much about the CSA model. Just the idea of the same set of folks riding out a season is so awesome. Whatever CSA size that I would have, I’d want to create a mutual connection, not just receive the food but also be part of the farm family. A more intimate relationship with the farm or their food rather than just picking up the box all season.
I definitely want to be a 3 NOT 4 season farmer. I have a loose list of things.
I do not want to be the person who has to worry about business side of things. I don’t want to be the person who keeps the books. That is not my jam.
I don’t necessarily want it to be a profit seeking business that is always trying to grow and get bigger. I want to find a model that works on the piece of land that I have longterm access to. I don’t need to own land. I just hope to be able to farm or grow on land without having to worry about it slipping away to development or the next rich person to build mansion on it.
There are only a few farmer coops in our area. I really want to understand why that is and if there is spaciousness in our current network to figure out how we can be working cooperatively. Maybe grow less things, share resources and equipment and be more cooperative in our models.
I’m not looking only to manage a farm. Why did I decide to do that? There is a little bit of wanting to have this opportunity - if I were to farm with a group of people where some folks don’t have all around skills or information for irrigation systems or building a cool bot, that I would have that familiarity. I’m not married to the idea of managing a farm. My strengths are in managing people and crew dynamics and all that stuff, it depends on the farm and what positions are open. I like having some level of responsibility to have the back end thinking of plans.
But so many farm manager jobs don’t stop in the winter even if the winter stops the field.
I know so many managers. I can think of 3 people who I would work for. If you love or trust or know a manager is able to listen and collaborate and hear your opinion and feedback, it can be good to have that pressure off your brain. I haven’t gone the other way though - yet. I do think about that. I would love to have children at some point and there is no way I would want to be managing a farm at that point, but I’d love to be farming.
“The world is trying to tell us that there is such scarcity, but when you are outside and with food and the land everyday, you are reminded that the opposite is actually true, there is so much abundance.”
WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?
All of it! It’s the best job in the whole wide world. It’s magical. That’s a huge reason. You get to witness magic every single day.
This morning I was harvesting kale and it was 35 degrees and I saw a bald eagle chasing an osprey! Things I put in way too late magically heading up anyway. Little and big things that you get to witness in the field every single day. After the first couple seasons of being committed to it, I hope I never go a day without being outside all day. I want to know what is happening outside in the real world, not in the indoor world. It make me feel alive and a lot of farmers have this desire to do hard things and feel really proud of yourself and farming offers ample opportunities for that. Thinking, I’m really tired, there is no way I can lift this, or harvest all of that - insert random impossible task - by yourself, with a crew, you make the impossible happen all the time. That is so rewarding. There is the really obvious food being a major motivator. I don’t think I could afford the way I’ve been able to eat if I didn’t grow my own food and being able to share that with people. My abundance that I can share with the world feels important and special. It’s the reason why I will never not grow my own food. There is always enough. If there is not enough of one thing, there is always something else. Abundance. The world is trying to tell us that there is such scarcity. But when you are outside and with food and the land everyday, you are reminded that the opposite is actually true, there is so much abundance.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?
I think there can definitely be a big differece in all those terms and it’s different for everyone. Farm worker in my brain often is just a connotation of the way I’ve heard people use it, a low level farm job, that’s the connotation it has gotten. It’s grunt labor on the farm. I have definitely worked positions where the title of the job is farm worker - that is often the meaning the word has carried in the spaces that I have farmed.
Personally I’m good with both farmer and farm worker. Those are words that I would probably use to describe myself or respond to if people called me that.
It’s a little bit of personal identity thing for folks who call themselves farmers, even in myself. I think for the first couple seasons that I farmed, I’d say that I worked on farms, but wouldn’t say that I was a farmer. That doesn’t mean that after your first season of farming you shouldn’t call yourself a farmer because you are. It’s a personal mindset, I’ve taken on this work that I’m doing as a part of my identity. That is different for everyone. Using the word farmer means you’ve internalized the work as your identity and part of who you are.
Farm employee is a job, like I work for this farm and what not.
I identify as a farmer- whether I am belonging to a crew or land based or actively farming. If I had no farm, I would still call myself a farmer.
DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A FARMER? WHY OR WHY NOT.
I do.
I went to a National Young Farmers Coalition gathering and this woman was from Colorado. She called herself a microfarmer and she farmed crickets, mealworms, and bugs.
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?
Health insurance. That is one that I think about all the time. I think about that and job security. All the things that I’ve seen deter people after two or three years of seasonally farming, it’s the lack of benefits. Not being guaranteed a job back, not being eligible for unemployment. All of those barriers to financial security can make choosing seasonal farm work a challenging career choice. I go back and forth - do we want big regulated institutional support? Would this make it more accessible to folks from a wider variety of economical backgrounds? Would that cover folks who aren’t US citizens, would that be helpful? I don’t have all the answers. It’s been one of the harder parts for me when I kept saying I need to get a real job or get married in order to survive. I’m glad I didn’t get a real job or get married, but am still wondering what happens when people have children? The only people I know who have children are the farm owners. Maybe that is an important piece that is more feasible on a project like yours (Not Our Farm). If you’re sharing these stories on how people make this economically work for themselves and the real conversations around that, what does it take to ever retire? What did you set up for yourself so that if you got injured, how are you able to take care of yourself in the many situations that come up for people? Hopping from state to state and farming, how do you do that? It’s the sharing of stories and better understanding of decision making of how other folks have made this life possible for themselves.
Can it become more economically feasible for people?
I have a friend who is in her early 40s and I always feel blessed to have her as a guardian light in my farming world. She always dishes the best advice. Your body is going to feel 10 years older forever, whatever you can do, like get a massage, do it. She and her partner decided not to have kids a couple years ago because they couldn’t financially swing it. Her partner became a teacher later in life, in their mid-40s, and were just getting to a financially stable place and they missed the boat. She says it so other people will hear it: you have to plan and make hard decisions now if you want to do those things, you can’t just say, Oh I’ll make it happen later, because it won’t happen. Damn, you’re not an example on how to manage doing the kid thing. How do you insure a child if you don’t have insurance yourself? There is semi affordable healthcare here in Massachusetts, but even that, paying for multiple people is not accessible for so many folks. How do you pay for childcare? There is no way in hell you can afford childcare in farm manager positions or even the highest paying farm positions in Massachusetts.
ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
I’m Native American. My tribe is from Massachusetts. My relationship to land and land tending is deeply entrenched in that identity. That impacts how I think about long term relationship and tending to land in the future. Working for other people versus not - that is why it’s a little bit complicated and why I feel exhausted by managing that relationship with land owner who owns land in the territory where my tribe is from. It’s a challenging thing to think about. I just want to live and farm. I know so many people who feel that way. Myself and other Native people who want access to our land. The same way that I believe there is abundance of resources, there is abundance to land. tThere are a lot of people who hoard resources. I hope there can be a fundamental shift in how people look at land ownership.
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....)
It’s been different at each place.
I only worked under men and then I worked on a farm as Assistant Manager, a farm that was co-managed by two women. It was so awesome and different. They had a mandatory snack break. It was so hilarious. That was something that when I was hired I was told - snack time was at 10am. It fucked me up after that because I went to a different farm and there wasn’t a snack break. To this day my belly knows when 10am is. I carry snacks in my pocket. I’m always eating. I’m farm manager now, I could institute a snack break. I highly recommend that. A mandatory snack break - 15 minute strict break. People brought their own snack or if we were harvesting, we would snack on something from the field or walk to the cherry tomatoes, etc. There were people who were really good at bringing snacks to share. One of the people almost always had a bag of potato chips to share. I forget about sharing food because COVID this year has been so not that way. It’s typically fun to see what people are cooking. For the most part I have worked on farms that have a good lunch experience.
Every farm I worked on definitely takes lunch. This year has been a shit show. I always made the crew take lunch, but I wasn’t always good at taking lunch with them.
My experiences have almost always been taking lunch with the crew with the option to wander off and do your own thing. Some farms had better lunch cultures than others.
