KYLE MCBRIDE

ALBANY, NY

Kyle currently works at a non-profit in upstate New York operating a mobile farmers’ market. He has WWOOFed at farms in several western states, including California, Arizona, Oregon and Hawaii.

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

  • I currently work for a non-profit whose main mission is to bring food and fresh produce accessibly and affordably to anyone. It’s called Capital Roots, and it’s a mobile market on wheels. We have a 16 foot box truck, a transit van, and it’s loaded with fresh produce. We drive to about 39 stops a week all over the county and we’ve been doing for over 25 years. The stops have been the same for 8 years. We are always there unless it’s treacherously snowing or something really unplanned has happened. The stops were hand picked. They are nursing home facilities, senior living facilities, food desolate areas, and lower income areas. During the pandemic, we never stopped. People were if anything relying on walking out their door and us just being there, rather than trek on a bus, not having access to public transportation. 

    It’s a great feeling to do it. Every week we had a free giveaway. Before the pandemic, we would cook it for them, and we would say you have to eat it before you can have it. 

    We have a program called Squash Hunger that helps collect donations and get donations from other parts of our programs to redistribute it to places where they need it, like at a refugee welcome center, a bunch of food pantries and shelters and we work with this organization that has social workers who have clients who then use our services, as well. 

    The organization has its own farm and we have internships for students. It’s called the Produce Project and it is semester based with one group of kids. They learn from seed to harvest to selling it and we sell their stuff on the truck. 

    Most products are from a 50-mile radius. We do carry pineapples and oranges. It’s a super great organization to work with and we accept any more of payment.

    I started right in the middle of the pandemic. I was living abroad and had to come home.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?

  • I’ve always been intrigued by it. I am from downstate NY and I was curious about and drawn to minimalist lifestyle, off the grid type of deal. I went on a random roadtrip to California and thought, this is my time to start this. I picked farms in locations that I wanted to be near. The first farm was a create your own adventure type of deal. We were standing around not really knowing what to do. I was not being put to my best potential or did I feel like I was helping them out. I was not sure what to do and didn’t know who to ask. 

    In Arizona, I worked on a goat farm with a bunch of animals. I milked the goats every day and helped the farm owner make baked goods and sell them at the Renaissance Fair. I would dress up. Everyone was really great. I had this story with this one guy - he was bicycling across the country. He left that farm before me, and we both ended up at the same farm a month later. 

    There were 10 of us making it work in this one lady’s house. There were a couple of rooms and everyone was everywhere. She was super nice and tried to accommodate us. 

    I met two cousins there and we continued traveling together. We kept intersecting up and down the coast and got matching tattoos. 

    The best farm time I had was in Oregon, just outside Portland by about 30 minutes. I’m a Queer Latinx farmer and it’s always important for me to find somewhere to be safe to live my life. A lot of things I have to research to figure out where I can go. I read farm profiles looking for things like: LGBT encouraged and welcomed. If it says that, that is where I’m going to go. It was the best time. I was there for 2 months. It was woman owned and operated, you don’t see that too often. The woman who owned it was such a badass. I wish I am you in 15 years. We would go kayaking, white water rafting, and hauling ass. I learned a lot. I did an internship at this program called Rogue Farm Corp. You do their internship on farms in Oregon. There were two students who would help us get our things together. There were two foreman and two students. We broke up into 3 groups to work and it was helpful to break up into smaller groups. The farm owner owned a few preschools, and we had lambs, chickens, pigs, and a bunch of crops and all of it would help feed the preschools. There were 10-12 of us there at at time - rotating. When I ended up leaving there, I had killed 135 chickens, helped deliver a piglet, rode a tractor, all the things I could never do living in the city. I think it’s kind of funny is because I could go into Portland all the time, and I only ended up going to Portland once because I loved being on the farm and off the grid. I went to Portland once to check out the museum and never went back.

    I was in the Peace Corps in 2014 and I lived with a host family who had done a lot of organic farming. I helped to create a pesticide prevention program.

  • I have farmed out in California, Arizona, and Oregon through the WWOOF program. It is a rad program. I encourage people to try it out. 

    This led me to do horticultural therapy out in Hawaii on the Big Island, incorporating farming and therapeutics. It was on the Big Island at an inpatient facility for people with a wide range of behavioral and mental health issues. We would meet them where they are at and use the farm to regulate a lot. The program is typical 3 months long. Hawaii is very based in the land and respecting the island.

WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?

  • I have tried a lot of things in my life and I think that I need to experience a lot of things in order to figure out if I want to do it professionally or not. I had the tiniest taste during the Peace Corps experience of living off the land, growing your own food, not buying food from grocery store, and feeling the accomplishment of pulling food from the ground is empowering. With WWOOFing, you go there and help them and it’s an agreement - you teach me how to do this thing for the week. It’s the opposite of how you teach a fisherman to fish. You’re teaching someone to grow. 

    It drove me to move out west for better farming conditions.

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

  • I don’t think I would start my own farm. I move around a lot. If you’re a cook, you can go to all these different restaurants and work. Having the knowledge of doing this and then learning in different parts of the world. I can go to Oregon for two months, then go to France and make my own wine and learn that aspect. I can go anywhere and learn this trade and be essential to the next farm I decide to go to. The thought of owning land and staying in one place freaks me out. 

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

  • If you’re going to your first farm and you don’t know anything, and the foreman is kind of just doing their own business and not having a lot of time to give you direction, that can be very difficult. You are just here for however long you are and it’s not a contract, but it is uncomfortable if you’re in over your head and you don’t have direction. 

    Expectations, on the farm. We had this one WWOOFer come in and she did not do much. We always got up and circled up at 8am and we were in the field by 8:15am because you have to beat the sun, and she would never come on time. She would sleep in and she wasn’t really pulling her weight, and it was super frustrating for everyone involved. Luckily for me, it was toward the end of my stay, but it is kind of not fair for the people who are housing her. It’s an uncomfortable situation, there shouldn’t be a high level expectation but the agreement in WWOOF is you work X amount of hours in exchange for room and board. 

    I have a very high work ethic. Someone who could be doing more, and isn’t bothers me. It puts a bad taste in farmers’ mouth for WWOOFers. That is the farmers’ perspective and I’ve seen problems on both sides. 

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

  • I would definitely think the farm that I worked at was great. I felt like I learned a lot. The longer I stayed, the more responsibility I gained because I gained more knowledge, that was the best thing. I like to learn. If somebody has me doing the same thing, that’s fine, but I want to know why I’m doing the same thing. I want a road map of what’s happening. Not being a farmer myself, but being a really great farm hand, I enjoy learning about crop rotation, all the stuff about soil, stuff about seeds. It’s not just, here put that in the ground and shovel. I want an explanation of this. That gains you a better appreciation of farming in general. 

    I’m thinking more of a WWOOFer situation. People who are likeminded. People are here because they want to do some good. They want to help a farmer out, treat land with respect and be able to grow their own stuff. 

“My friends might call me a farmer, which I think is a true honor. I don’t think I have all the knowledge to even call myself a farmer. I hold that title to such high revere. I don’t think I would be a farmer based on my standards. Maybe an honoree - just a ‘little tractor boy’ or ‘first tractor.’”

WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?

  • I think it’s a good way to make things simple for awhile. I know that when I was farming, not that I was putting off doing something, I was thinking, I have this amount of time before I figure out what I’m going to do. Why not do something I really enjoy? I hike and camp a lot too, so it was great to just be in that environment of being outside all day in this beautiful middle of nowhere place and when I’m off my shift, I can go drive an hour to another beautiful place and take two days and then come back and do it all over again. 

    In my heart of hearts, I’m quite a minimalist. I like living in an off the grid situation, having wifi now and again is not the worst, but to have these conversations with people, or to be able to hear nothing, or absences of cars, just hearing rain, birds!

    Where I grew up, I lived by a highway and a train station in the city. I am trying to make up for that time. My family really likes luxury, and I’m very different from them. How do you know you like this? What if you like this other thing better? I like to try living outside of how I used to live. 

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

  • I think I can see how they could be construed differently. 

    A farmer knows the ins and outs of the land and who can tell you why this crop hasn’t been growing, can tell you about the pH of the soil, how to improve living conditions of what you’re trying to grow. 

    A farmworker is somebody who maybe can do similar things, but maybe this is more of hobby rather than a true passion, maybe they are in between some things. Working on this farm while I figure out where I want to go to school or doing farm work to see if I like that. It is more temporary. 

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

My friends might call me a farmer, which I think is a true honor. I don’t think I have all the knowledge to even call myself a farmer. I hold that title to such high revere. I don’t think I would be a farmer based on my standards. Maybe an honoree - just a ‘little tractor boy’ or ‘first tractor.’

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

  • I think having a good relationship with the farm you’re working on. If you get really sick, how are you going to get to the doctor or your next location? Not having a good rapport with the person you’re with is hard, you wouldn't want someone to feel obligated, that it’s not at will.

    Emergency funding, nothing crazy, but something that would benefit the farmers there with no kind of insurance or benefits or things like that. They really have to be at their own risk and be very careful that they don’t get injured. Having something to fall back on to encourage people to do things like that because of risk of injury. 

    I don’t know if WWOOFFIng has some thing like online classes or tutorials, having things accessible. Power tools training, how to safely chop a log to make firewood, preventative measures and in multiple languages. We assume that people who go on farms will speak English, that’s not the case all the time. There are so many languages spoken here. 

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’s always been great. It’s a good way to kind of create that community and support and build connections and relationship with who you are with at that time. When you think about it, we are just a bunch of shooting stars crossing paths, had we not all taken this leap of faith to go farm, we would have never met. It’s great when we all come together to chat about anything for an hour, hear about people’s stories. A big part of me doing this is so I can connect with so many people that I would never cross paths with in 1000 years. It’s one of the most beautiful things and seems serendipitous. All these friends from my WWOOFing days are all over the place. We send snail mail and keep in touch. I hope to keep doing it. I plan to be moving out west by next summer and will pick it up again while I’m there for however long I can, just to keep myself grounded. 

    It reminds me of why I began doing this, to learn something and meet new people. Why I continue to travel and do these things to get out of my comfort zone. To meet people, it’s the craziest thing in the world to show up at this farm and become great friends with this person and stay in each other’s lives. I would never have known this person existed if I hadn’t gone to the farm. That’s the beauty of communal living.

DO YOU HAVE ANY TIPS FOR HOW TO CHOOSE FARMS THAT WILL FEEL SAFE FOR YOU?

As a Queer person, I pick locations that are probably more populated. I wouldn’t have as much luck on a farm in Nebraska. I would not have much luck in being myself. It’s also why I relied on WWOOFing a lot. I could read the profiles and read reviews and comments from other WWOOfers. A lot of farms have facebook pages or websites and I can base it off of comments. For example, reading something like, ‘I went here and the person started saying all this stuff and didn’t like how I dress.” Maybe I shouldn’t go there. Or something else like, “Come here, they welcome you with open arms.” I”ll be more inclide to go there, though sometimes that’s less common than not, sadly. 

I do try to stay in coastal areas where it’s more liberal than not.