MARSHALL HART
PITTSBURGH, PA
Marshall is not currently farming right now. He spent the last 9 years working for a non-profit farm in Pittsburgh. He has farmed on farms not his own for 12 years. Right now he is doing side jobs like cleaning job sites, tree work and landscaping work.
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
Farming - none. I’m not exactly trying to farm at the moment. I was farming as recently as like the middle of this summer and I left that place. I’m working very little right now. I take side jobs with people, basically labor kind of stuff, cleaning job sites and tree work, or landscaping. Anything that comes up. The small farming is my skill set. I don’t have something else I can jump intol.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
I think twelve years.
WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?
I guess my backstory is that my dad grew up on a dairy farm. I have farmers in the family. My dad is not a farmer. It was always in my conscious, but I did not go to college. Basically in my mid-20s, I needed to do something besides work at dead end jobs for one year at a time. Farming came into my mind. I had a fascination with food and plants.
I was an intern at a gentleman’s farm. The family didn’t rely on it for income. I was an intern for one season in central Pennsylvania, a small diversified farm, and then I moved to Pittsburgh. I got a job at a fledgling urban farm from a non-profit and ended up being there for 9 years,. Then I worked at one other farm after that for one season, and was definitely not into it. I worked half a season this year out of necessity for a guy that I knew and it was never going to be my ideal situation, but I did it out of necessity. I ended up leaving because I felt overqualified. I was just frustrated with my buddy in the way that he was running it. I had too many skills. I knew a little too much to be regular crew, and couldn’t keep my opinion to myself all the time.
WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO FARM FOR SOMEONE ELSE (NOW OR IN THE PAST?)
I don’t have plans to start my own farm for various reasons. My family still has a farm in western North Carolina and I did actually plan on going there and farming for 2-3 years, but then my life got in upheaval, and that is not the plan anymore.
Otherwise, I think I felt a little bit silly to get myself into something that was so life consuming and was always going to be working 55 hours+ /week to not have that much. You haven’t met me or anything, but I tend to be a pretty cynical, skeptical person with a chip on my shoulder. I couldn’t justify it. I could basically beg my way through life and still get by, so why do I want to work 55 to 60 hours a week?
When you have all this stuff and work at a non-profit and are giving so much food away and know half the food in country gets wasted. The difference in incomes, farmers are important like doctors, but the difference is there. I felt pissed off and burnt out and silly for choosing grueling career path. I started in mid 20s and now I’m almost 40, and it hurts a lot more than it used to…on and on and on, not enough fat in the land. I’d rather not have much and rely on the excess of society than to work so much to feel the way it made me feel.
It’s a natural thing for me, I can’t help but have a garden in my yard. But it wasn’t working for me anymore, and now I’m in a place where I didn’t go to college and I didn’t learn a skill that can bring in that much money.
I could be a farm owner and work 60/70 hours a week, but I didn’t care for it anymore. I lived in the city, didn’t have a social life from being tired. I burned out and decided to let other people be the martyrs.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
Farm employees aren’t entitled to time and a half, that is not acceptable. That just can’t be a way. You can’t have this group of people who you are constantly patting on the back and when someone complains that they are tired and working a lot and you say, “That’s just being a farmer.” Farmworker should get paid a lot better.
That’s the thing, I was in such a privileged place, you have no idea. I was doing very fine for myself. I was the most senior employee out of 20 people. I had a month paid off a year. I had benefits, all this stuff and it still just broke me down. I would say it was probably pretty typical issues surrounding non-profits that made me want to leave. The grant chasing and money sorta seeming to be wasted and the story that comes out in the yearly report seems to be more important than the reality of the situations. Having to work with employees on the farm who were never going to be able to get it together, but we couldn’t let anyone go because it would look bad so I was there 7 days a week picking up the slack, on and on and on.
It is partially my personality.
If you talk to the person who has had my job for 3 years after me, he can roll with this stuff. We have different personalities. For me it needed to be good enough to be good enough.
People there (at the non-profit farm) needed a job and had no interest in what we were doing. They showed up 15 -30 minutes late every single day they were scheduled and my hands were tied to do anything to discipline them to make anything better
When I started that job, my dad told me they were going to run me into the ground, that people are their resource. I felt so bitter by the time that I left. I probably should have stayed about 6 years, but I stayed 9. It was more non-profit issues as to why I left. Eventually there was a straw that broke the camel’s back.
After I left I went to farm for a guy actually who worked for me as an intern in 2012 and was his first time farming. I could tell he was the real deal, he was going to be into it and go forward in his life. He then went to work at an organic farm around here that has been around here for 40 years with a 1000 people CSA. He worked there for a handful of years and then started his own farm. I was trying to get by doing side work and it wasn’t quite cutting it. He asked if I would like to work at his farm, and I said no thanks. When I do get side work, the money is easier, like $20/hr to vacuum a job site, it’s completely different. In the spring, I wasn’t making enough money so I helped him out. In early may he wanted me there 40 hours/week so I did, but I was just always felt sort of critical of the way he did stuff. I was in the situation after being manager for 9 years, maybe it wasn’t going to work if I wasn’t in charge. I knew I wasn’t going to love working for him, his management style grated on me and we would talk and not feel like things came out of it.
I really like to keep things clean and organized and there are a lot of farmers who don’t do that very well. It was one of those situations. That was a constant daily stressor between us. I would explain that the job doesn’t really get done unless everything is put away. We couldn’t see eye to eye on a few basic things like that. I also felt like he spent more time being concerned with doing field work and being buddies with the crew than the boring the farmer/owner responsibilities that are so important and only he could do them. He would want my input and advice on things, and I would tell him, ‘I’ve see your notebooks, you have a ton of good things to do, I’m just going to make it murkier if I’m giving my input on this stuff all the time. There are these fundamental things for your farm to do different that you aren’t doing.’
One day he was out in the field with us and dicking around with volunteers and he was neglecting what he should have been doing. I lost my temper and left.
CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?
Ownership really screws it all up.
My family’s farm is almost 300 acres and there’s like 6-7 properties there from various pieces of land that my grandparents bought. They built a few modest places for workers to live. It was an operation that I never saw because by the time I was born they had switched from dairy to beef. But I always thought, I would want a community and people around. I have no interest in asking my friends to come and be at this place that eventually one day they don’t get any of. Maybe if we were selling off parcels? Selling the properties to actually give people equity.
That seems like such a big part of the problem, equity. When I was at the non-profit, in the back of my mind I would think, ‘My gosh, I pour myself into this tiny piece of land. I garden this place intensively with all my time and one day I’m going to just walk away and one day they are going to put a fucking Target here or something.’
I would be spit balling to try to answer this question -maybe more like worker-owned places, cooperatively owned places, profit sharing.
It feels flawed right from the start. The concept of private property, it’s not even a thing, it’s kind of imaginary, something so fundamental like that is a concoction that people in power came up with.
“When I was at the non-profit, in the back of my mind I would think, ‘My gosh, I pour myself into this tiny piece of land. I garden this place intensively with all my time and one day I’m going to just walk away and one day they are going to put a fucking Target here or something.”
WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?
Well like I say I do get a kick out of plants. The magic of that. And I was so super spoiled in my non-profit job. The less I can think of plants as units and selling things, the more enjoyable it is.
Just knowing how to do it keeps me coming back, but I’m looking around for employment some and I’m not looking at farms. I’ve have to drive outside of the city, that would take some time. I have a 9 year old dog who has historically always been loose at the farms, and the idea of leaving him in my apartment for 9 hours a day to go to someone else’s farm is unacceptable.
What has kept me going back is that I knew how to do it. At the non-profit it was financially so cushy. If I had been true to myself, like i said, I would have left earlier. Seeing money go into projects that don’t ultimately succeed just makes me feel like the wealthy people should keep their money rather than these token grants. Far and wide, they don’t follow up with how things go and you get money from the same people you’re working against.
I haven’t felt so anarchist since my early 20s.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?
Farmer implies ownership. People have called me a farmer so many more times than I’ve sort of felt like I identified that way. I identified more as a site manager or crew member, but it always felt like the farmer was the person the farm belonged to.
DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A FARMER? WHY OR WHY NOT.
I would say, I manage farms. If they asked, what do you do? I don’t think I would have said I was a farmer. I probably would have said I worked on a farm. The intricacy of language matters.
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?
The last two farms I worked at I tried to work it that I would be working less than full-time and got enough resistance both times that it didn’t work out. I wasn’t allowed to do that basically either time. From my perspective whether I was there for 32 hours or 40 hours or 48 hours a week, it was all the same. It was more about adjusting. I have always found that work creates work. For example, at the last farm, if we had a volunteer or something, he might be inspired to have them plant 50 feet of something, but he wasn’t going to be thinking about how the volunteer was going to leave at the end of the day and then we have this 50 feet of something to maintain for the next 2-3 months, harvest, maintain, sell.
For me it would have been nice to have not been met with: You can either work for 40 hours/week or not work here. It would have been nice to be able to do it how I want to do it. I feel for them because they are stuck there for all waking hours.
I think the time and a half after 40 hours is huge because that would force a manager to be thinking more that way. They really like taking people’s lives for granted, keeping someone longer because the manager didn’t plan properly.
It all comes down to the manager and planning. It’s a worker’s rights type of thing. I don’t know if you talked to anyone who felt they were regularly asked to stay late working on something. I’m very punctual. I like to be on time and show up. I get a lot of anxiety if I don’t. It’s a really basic thing. If you’re to be there at 730, you’re there at 730. I was finding I was being asked to stay late multiple times a week, and I kept doing it but I kept thinking about it. It’s an uncomfortable and confrontational talk, because in my mind I realized that staying late at a job is the equivalent of running late to work. It is literally the same thing. If I show up at 8 instead of 730, that throws the manager off. And if they can’t plan their day and prioritize their day so they can let you off the time you’re supposed to be let off, that’s also running late. So I did it 203 times and I put my foot down and we had an uncomfortable conversation and I said, ‘this is like you running late every day’. So I didn’t have to stay late anymore, but the greenhorn who was there was staying late every day. This younger guy, a good ten years younger than me, he was picking up that slack, he was staying late. He was more of a pushover than me. It was his first or second season farming.
So yeah, everybody having the same amount of power in a way would be nice, yeah.
I don’t take much from people. It bites me in the butt, but it shouldn’t necessarily. I’m not saying outlandish things. I’m being a one-member union or something.
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....)
Breakfast was more of a thing. I got to where I didn’t eat breakfast anymore so it would be 5 or 6 hours into the day before I would eat. That was kind of weird. That wasn’t great. It’s possible it started because I had trouble running on time, or it could have been nerves. That 9 year career was pretty stressful. You’d have days when 20 volunteers show up, or 6 teenagers who were dicking around and disrespecting you. It was a circus and I was the only constant.