MARK RUSSO
NEW YORK
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
I’ve worked primarily the last 7 years as a stage hand and also do farm work in the off season. This year obviously there isn’t a lot of stage work happening. My partner manages a community garden and we decided to try doing more farming stuff. Turf Farm, I kind of created it. The rabbits live in my backyard, the quail live at the community garden, microgreens are grown at my house. It’s more of an exercise than anything significant. We can’t scale to the point where we can actually pay ourselves a living wage just because of the lack of space. For me, it was about doing it and doing something for myself and doing it with my girlfriend to see if we could be full-time farm partners. We would need a lot more space to actually make a living from it.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
This would be my 8 season. I’ve farm pretty much all in New York, except one farm in Connecticut. It’s been really off and on for me both because of the seasonality of the work and my chronic health problems.
WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?
I’ve always been interested in food and my family’s gatherings have been around food and food culture. The thing that clicked for me that made me decide to be a farmer was actually reading, The Vegetarian Myth. I was already a meat eater and already aware of the negative things in the food system, and the idea of working outside and using animals to manage and improve landscapes and sequester carbon in the soil while producing good nutritious food, that all that clicked for me while I was reading that book.
I’ve grown veggies and other things like that, but it was really that radical environmentalist lit and wanting to do something material and literally affect the ground and have that impact on people’s plates on a day to day basis.
WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO FARM FOR SOMEONE ELSE (NOW OR IN THE PAST?)
The number one reason is lack of experience obviously. Being an intern is how you learn. I grew up in New York City so I didn’t have a lot of experience. The reason I am still working for other people is lack of capital to acquire land and actually start a farm operation on leased land. There are obvious downsides to that. It’s mainly capital.
I would say also support. As a theatre person working collaboratively has always been how I’ve operated, but because of my health issues and my experiences on nuclear family farms, owning my own farm has never appealed to me. Finding a group of people that I can farm collectively with takes time.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
For me the number one issues are not unique to farming. The thing I’ve had the most experience with is the person not responsible for doing the actual task dictating the way a task has to be done, without any open feedback response and in a way that majorly inconveniences the worker. It’s a marginal gain to them and it’s not conveyed to me as a person. It may take a bunch more time, and it’s somebody telling me how to do something a certain way that benefits them, but not explaining it to me.
The wage/labor system. Most farms are not rowing in money, but working especially as hard as you work as a farm worker without a path to equity without some kind of appreciating again or something that like, it just sucks. With farm wages being what they are, it’s almost impossible to save up money while working on a farm, especially if they don’t provide housing. It’s like this treadmill. It made sense when I was really green, but now that I know what I’m doing, it’s lame to work for $12/hr and not get equity.
This is less of an issue in most places I’ve worked, but working on farms here in the northeast, you see farms beat to hell for such a long time, extracted from for such a long time, inheriting bad decisions from prior generations. It’s really frustrating. It makes an already hard job harder than it ought to be.
CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?
I think part of the appeal of farming to me is the equity/ownership part of it. Unless you’re getting paid $25/hr, the equity is kind of your retirement plan, especially given how hard the work is. For my dream farm, It would have to be a higher wage, like $25 or more/hr, with a cap of 40 hr week and over time and paid time off and vacation time over the season for it not to be extracting for me and allow me to save money to buy a farm.
My dream farm is actually a cooperative farm. I don’t need to own a majority share or anything like that. I do want to have ownership of decision making over the thing I’m responsible for, the input and share of overall profits of diversified operations.
I’m very inspired by Chris Newman. He is several steps ahead of an idea I’ve had and other people have had as far as the way to make a living off of land that is not exploitative and allows for work/life balance.
Number one quality in a collective partner is someone who is seeking the same thing.
Number two is developing communication skills. In my experience, the people is a much more difficult thing to do than actual farming.
Then someone with farming and manual labor experience. And somebody who has a clear idea, who has done some internal work in a lot of different facets. Part of our cooperative vision/ farm structure plan would be as a requirement anyone we would invite as a farmer owner/partner has to be engaged in personal development work like therapy, meditation, yoga, and actively engaged in improving themselves. They must communicate and navigate conflict with kindness. Conflict will always come up and it’s really important that people have skills to navigate that.
People have networks of friends/family, access to resources, different kind of skillsets. I’m mainly looking for people who get it and care enough to work on themselves and answer hard questions.
“As a theatre person, working collaboratively has always been how I’ve operated. Because of my health issues and my experiences on nuclear family farms, owning my own farm never appealed to me. Finding a group of people that I can farm collectively with takes time.”
WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?
I’m a very materialistic person in the sense that I need to live in a nice house and drive a nice car, but not in a Kardashian way. I am gounded in the material world. The intrinsic rewards of farming are appealing to me; they help my brain work well. I’ve never done well with abstract work in school or working in an office. It’s challenging to get motivated about those kinds of things. Farming is very real and up front, what is out of control is out of everyone’s control. The weather and things which affect everybody.
I value the connection to the natural rhymes of waking up and being connected to animals and plants and spending time outdoors connecting with non-human people, experiencing non-super constructed and controlled environment. You get a sense of your place in the universe and world. You can be a positive influence. It’s not just all paved paradise and malls.
And food security. My illness is tied to the food that I eat. There is no way I could mentally and emotionally handle the kind of job that I would need to afford the kind of food I need to eat.
This is a way for me to do it.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?
The term farmers is used very casually. It is used to describe a landowner, where very few other skilled professions are used in that way. It would be like saying a Lawyer is someone who owns a bunch of law books. English definitely lacks the nuance to describe it. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that.
Farmer should be reserved for highly skilled farm workers.
There are plenty of people who are called farmers who could more accurately be called a farm manager/crew manager. It’s like “planter” for plantation managers, they didn’t do any planting.
There is this whole culture of American farmers growing corn and soy and sitting in the tractor the whole time.
The terms farm worker indicates an H2A worker, Central American, non-English speaker, a laborer, someone exploited.
Farm employee is slightly fancier, a person like me: middle class, white person working on a farm for not great wages, but who is making less of a desperate choice.
DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A FARMER? WHY OR WHY NOT.
I call myself a farmer now because now I feel skilled enough to do that. I don’t have, as a farm employee, management experience, but I can do what farms need to do to be successful, I’m just lacking the land. It’s like being an architect, but not being certified.
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?
People who are working on farms should be covered under all the worker protections that other employees are covered by, and be entitled to overtime and all of that stuff. We need universal health care.
A farm workers union would be pretty cool because isolation is such an issue. The Young Farmers Coalition kind of does this, creates some level of camaraderie and connection in the area. I had the experience of leaving New York City and working on a farm in the middle of nowhere and it was hard for me socially. We need social support, health care, and worker protections .
Also more education for people about what farming is and what farm work actual entails.
ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
I’ve had some really positive and some really negative experiences of farming.
The negative is working for people who were not farmers. They were retired and bought land, were hobby farmers, hired young people to help them manifest their vision. Those experiences were overwhelmingly negative and exploitative.
I’ve had relationships with people who were actually farming and had done the work, etc. Those were much more positive experiences. I had a woman who told me as we were turning compost, which was heavy work, one was turning and one would stand, afterward she said ‘ You were standing half the time. I don’t want to pay you if you were standing half the time.’ It was ridiculous.
Meanwhile, the farm where I worked last year, I was helping them do morning chores. They had some interns and they were really flexible with me. When I had take off work for my stage hand job, they were fine with it. Stage hand jobs pay more.
My main beef with working on a farm is the pay.
I’m pretty open about a lot of things, and the thing I’ve been really struggling with is really knowing the thing I want to do with my life (farming and knowing how to do it). I have a distinct vision, but I have so many huge barriers to making that happen. It’s mainly in terms of the economic systems and financing and labor and land being so expensive. If I didn’t have radical politics before this, I would definitely now.
Honestly the last year has really been very eye opening for me. When I got into farming, I read a lot of Joel Salatin’s books and there’s a lot stuff that I’ve read that is technically very helpful in terms of how to farm, but completely hides that capital inheritance or whatever that allows people financial freedom to do this.
We need more honesty about farming and how to get into farming.
I’ve made mistakes in business because of opportunities, and lost very significant amounts of money for me because I didn’t have the big picture of what honestly happens. In the last year, that has come to light in a lot of ways. I appreciate that and the emotional side of it. It’s so hard with so many avenues for disappointment. It’s a hard job, there’s death and a lot of shit happens. I just wish people were more honest.
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....)
Lunch is one of my favorite things. It was the best on the farm. One person would go back early to cook and you’d come in and there would be all these fresh veggies that you picked.
The connections that you make are reinforced in those moments.
Breaking bread with your crew on a daily basis creates level of camaraderie especially when you’re dealing with all the crappy stuff.
It is challenging for me because of my limited diet. Food has been a really alienating thing for me in a lot of ways. It’s what cemented my interest in farming. My first ever internship was at Soul Fire Farm. Later that season I got really sick and I needed to eat these high quality foods and meats and stuff like that. Part of what keeps me in farming is being connected to the food and having access to that and creating a space for people who have similar health scares to have access to food that won’t make them sick anymore.
