MAX MACK-HARDIMAN
Buffalo, New York
Max has been farming for 3 years and just finished working at an urban farm in Buffalo, NY. In the spring, he will be working at a non-profit incubator farm for refugee and asylee farmers.
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
From the first week of June up until the first week of November, I was working at an urban farm here in Buffalo. The farm has been in operation for about 6 years. They do a CSA program, they also have a market at their farm on Saturdays and invite some other local vendors to the market. They sell artisanal pizzas and stuff like that. You can get an idea that while it’s located in a historical low-income area in the city of Buffalo, they cater to a bourgeois crowd. The people who own the farm were not born in Buffalo. They were born in the suburbs. I’m saying this as someone who was born in this area of the city. The owner essentially funds the operation of the farm through having a number of rental properties in the city of Buffalo. The farm is not really successful and that is something that is interesting - outwardly in terms of how they market themselves, even when talking to people at my new job, there is this outward appearance of great success, but from brief conversations about cash flow of the business with the owner, the farm is not making any money. Part of that is - the person who owns the farm while going back in her family there is some farming background, that’s not something she had any training on, it’s more of a boutique interest. As the possibility of expanding out of the initial one or two lots she had, as that opportunity snowballed, it became 8 or 9 city lot operation. I think that they were not prepared for that rapid expansion. They also weren’t prepared that in the city of Buffalo there is declining housing stock over time and definitely huge population loss from the city in the past 5-6 decades, there are a lot of open lots in the city especially in historically low-income neighborhoods, so there is more competition now, there are more urban farms in Buffalo operating with the same business model. Whether those farms are successful is another thing I’m trying to figure out. There has been a significant amount of turnover in the past few years - every year there is a farm that is looking to sell the land and all their assets and then there will be another farm starting up.
I was hired largely because of my experience working on a large scale grain farm in Montana. It’s a whole different scale, and I quickly realized that it’s very different in terms of the physical nature of the labor. You would kind of assume a large scale farm that also has intensive cattle grazing integrated into it would be more physically taxing, but I quickly found that the garden vegetable farm where I was the only full-time employee was much more physically taxing. I don’t think the owner of the farm was ever able to put herself in my position in terms of what that felt like during the course of a 10 hour day, especially one in which you are exclusively doing field work: harvesting, prepping beds, and planting. One thing that was strange to me you could maybe attribute to the owner’s lack of historical experience in agriculture: we started work everyday at 8:30 in the morning. Buffalo is certainly known for being a cold place, but in the middle of the summer it can get up into the mid-90s with significant humidity. I had to advocate for an earlier start time on the hottest summer days. I had to say “I don't think it’s good for me as a worker or for the produce we are harvesting.” We settled on certain days when the forecast was above 85, I would come in and start working at 7am. That was the earliest they would allow for. The owner of the farm definitely had a lot of micromanaging tendencies - that may have played a significant role. There was also a profound lack of foresight or planning.
The farm that I worked at in Montana, we not only had weekly team meetings including the two owners of the farm and employees, at any given point there were 8-10 people working there. Because of the scale of the farm, we needed to be up to speed on what field and section was next to be swathed, how soon the combine could come around to pick up the crop, what field and section cattle are being moved to next, all these things. The one thing I will say about that farm is that the communication was pretty good in terms of task management. We would have at the very least a phone call meeting every morning to determine the direction of the day. We were always in contact via a Groupme messaging app throughout the day. After a task we would check in before going onto the next thing. However, outside of the task management aspect of communication, the owners of that farm also exhibited abusive behavior, especially when equipment broke (not due to the actions of the operator. The farm that I worked at in Buffalo, frequently I would come in there and the woman who owned the farm and her brother who was there full-time were just figuring out what to do. There were very few systems in place for crop planning even. It was like, ‘ok we harvested this from this bed, what do we have that could go in there?’ It was very disjointed. From the owner's perspective, it was more like, ‘we want to sit down and talk about what we are going to do for the day and then involve our employee (me) and tell him what to do.’ Given my age and general work experience, it was a bit insulting.
That was a huge challenge for me to go in there at 8:30 and want to hit the ground running so we could do as much of the labor intensive fieldwork as possible while it’s still relatively cool out and the owner is still trying to figure out what she wants to do that day. Then that was coupled with a lot of language around efficiency. For me, having worked more public sector things and not so much in commodity production for a small business (that is something I’ve really just had experience in for the past 3 years), it was quite striking to me that at those small businesses where the work is productive, you are producing an actual commodity for sale, the management of the workers even given the performative liberal veneer of the business was really really intense and quite frankly something that was very disconcerting to me.At the urban farm, I’m working ten hour days, largely doing field work because most of the packaging or less labor intensive work the owner did. I’m doing that for minimum wage. That is a choice I’m making because I love the productive nature of the work - I like working outside, I want to get experience in all facets of agricultural work, but to be working under those conditions and then have the person managing you use a lot of efficiency language including phrases like ‘economy of movement’, I found deeply offensive.
I just concluded working at that urban vegetable farm and I was just offered a job at a non-profit. Their model is something that I’m really excited about, working with them has been a very positive experience. That non-profit has farmland available as a three year incubator program for largely refugee and asylee farmers because there is a huge refugee population in Buffalo as post-industrial rustbelt city where the cost of living is relatively cheap. Most of those farmers are Congolese, Somali-Bantu. Those are the two main populations. I had been working with them on an independent contractor basis working one-on one with their farmers on some business development, but in 2024 I’ll be working with them on a full time basis, helping to assist in their market promotion and also managing their CSA program, their farmstand they have at the farm and trying to expand their list of wholesale accounts especially into restaurants and retail locations in Buffalo and western New York. That’s what I’ll be doing coming up.
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HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
I’ve been farming for 3 years.
WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?
In my early 30s, after working as an English teacher (both in Mongolia and Buffalo, NY), refugee resettlement caseworker, and small business advisor, I decided to seriously pursue work in agriculture. Through a family connection, I was able to get a job on a large scale grain and pulse farm in Montana for two subsequent summers. My main tasks on the farm were swathing during the harvest season and assisting in the integration of intensively managed custom cattle grazing on field strips out of the cultivation rotation (building and breaking down electric fencing, moving herds, refilling drinking water). The scale of this farm, comprising several non-contiguous leased plots, meant a lot of beautiful views and wildlife, but also a massive waste of resources in transporting equipment, and the potential for dangerous situations working alone, sometimes up to 30 min drive from another person. The owners of this farm place a high importance on apprenticeship and education in their literature on the mission of the farm, and it is true that some workers with little to no farm experience were able to gain valuable experience at a scale of farming where there are numerous barriers to entry while I was working there. But employing relatively unskilled labor power also allowed the owners to save significantly on payroll and created a work environment where the owners could explain every issue delaying production (down to every machine malfunction) by the inexperience of their workforce. Communication from ownership often became abusive towards workers if things weren’t running smoothly, and at no point were the owners ready to acknowledge that they were responsible for the successes and failures of their business. During the two seasons I worked at this farm, this was compounded by back-to-back severe drought years and the exponential expansion of the leased land brought under cultivation by the farm. Here the contradictions arising from operating a business as an ideological project intent on raising consciousness around organic and sustainable practices in an area dominated by multi-generational conventional farms became fully expressed. I would drive by neighboring “hostile” conventional farms harvesting full monocrop wheat fields on the way to attempt to swath weeds to be baled into hay in a field strip where none of the seeded crop grew. The workers started to feel the pressure to operate machinery and burn diesel just to scrape together something productive that the ownership could show for the season, which led to a general disillusionment with the work that we were doing. Since I worked there, the farm has lost their relationship with an apprentice placement organization and has moved to exclusively employing white South Africans as H-2A workers. The disconnect between how the owners and workers at this farm viewed the business can be summed up with an anecdote about the name of the farm business: the owners chose a latin word that they present in their literature as directly translating to “steward” of the land, but the word also translates to “overseer” (as mentioned in footnotes in Marx’s first volume of Capital).
After my experience in Montana, I wanted to continue to search for farm work that allowed me to continue to build my agricultural skills and knowledge in a less isolated (and thus dangerous) context. I worked the following season at an urban vegetable farm in my hometown of Buffalo, NY. The ownership of this farm mirrored that of the previous farm in some significant ways: both were from farming families but had no farming experience before starting their businesses, both funded their businesses from outside sources (other professional work or property ownership), both presented their businesses as ideological projects and mission driven to promote organic and sustainable practices, both were isolated from their surrounding community and catered to an external boutique consumer base, and both immediately expressed cashflow concerns after hiring me and complained extensively about not being able to make money. Perhaps the most significant similarity, and one which lies at the core of the antagonistic relations between ownership and labor, is that ownership of these farms appeared to believe that the value of their commodities (whether a truck load of rye or a bag of salad mix) was created at the point of sale rather than in the production process, where labor turns a plant growing on land they leased or owned into something that could be sold. Especially at the urban farm, this contradiction was intensified by the failure of the owner to sell what had been produced. In smaller business management structures like these farms, marketing and driving commercial sales are often the responsibility of ownership, so if ownership situates all value creation in the realm of commerce rather than production, it becomes easier for them to think that they are doing all the work, and that labor power engaged in day-to-day production is worth less or even worth nothing in situations where sales aren’t being made.
WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO FARM FOR SOMEONE ELSE (NOW OR IN THE PAST?)
I am interested in both working at farms for a career and having my own non-commercial farm. Whether that is a for-profit farm or a non-profit model in my future, I don’t know. Part of my interest in finding different types of farm work is also to find what type of model I enjoy working at.
The two for-profit models I’ve found deeply problematic in many aspects. In the future I would like to have some land and farm, but I feel very strongly that it wouldn’t be at a commercial level. I have no interest really in farming to produce commodities.
So yes I would like my own farm, for basic subsistence farming, yes absolutely, but I’m not interested in developing it into a business.
I think there are certain laws (derived from Marx & Engels) that guide commodity production (especially at a small or boutique scale) that make it very difficult to successfully produce attractive and profitable commodities that can be sold at an increasing scale to combat the tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time. I think that it is impossible to achieve this when the business model is committed to certain ideological principles that prioritize sustainability. To me, sustainability is incompatible with the capitalist mode of production. For example, the farm that I worked on this summer, they grew a number of root vegetables that they like to bunch into nice looking bunches with the root vegetable and the greens, like carrots or beets. They do that because it’s a more attractive product. Just in talking with people who have purchased shares from them in the past - they want one thing or the other, they want the greens or the root vegetable or more or less of one of them. That fundamental contradiction of coming up with a commodity you can sell for enough money to not only cover your expenses, but also make a profit is a very difficult thing to achieve given the fact that in the United States you are always going to be competing against agricultural products that are produced in the Global South via super exploited labor that can be purchased and sold at a price that captures more profit.That means you are exclusively going after a more boutique or artisanal market, which means the whole thrust of your business has to be geared towards meeting the needs of a bourgeoisie target market.
I find in the current situation again taking all those things into consideration that to farm commercially for me would require a number of compromises or things that I’m not really willing to do. It’s one of those things where - do you want to commodify something or an activity that you deeply love doing? I think no. There is so much that I derive pleasure from in farming that to turn it into a process of producing commodities purely for sale, commodities that have to meet a certain class of consumer, that is not where my interest lies.
Prior to going out to Montana, I was working as a small business consultant, which is where I’m basing a lot of the business critiques of farming on. For one year I was working remotely during 2020, the subsequent year I worked in an office full time. Physically I felt ill. Even though I was active outside of work, going to the gym, hiking, running outside, those 8 hours I had to spend just sitting at a desk in front of a screen, it just made me feel physically really bad. After having the experiences of living in Mongolia and then visiting Montana, two places that are the most open you can imagine spatially, I just wanted to seriously pursue working outside more.
Even though I’ve been quite frustrated by both of the commercial farms I’ve worked on, definitely at the end of the day I’m thankful for the gift that is being able to work outside and be physically engaged throughout the day. It just makes me feel better at every level.I also want to continue to learn. I want to continue building skills. I want to continue to build my knowledge in any way that I can. That is something that is also a bit of frustration in farming. I guess given the low rate of compensation and the difficult working conditions, I feel a lot of people go into it for something akin to a formal apprenticeship. When I was working in Montana, that farm did have some apprentices from an organization that operates exclusively in the west. The past few years that farm had 1- 2 apprentices per year. It was great working with them every year I was at that farm. I think every place that I’ve worked at, the people who are attracted to farm or ranch work are just really great. I’ve only had positive experiences with the workers. Pretty much everyone is coming at it from the aspect of being open to hard work but a level of humility that everyone I’ve met has had and I just think that is a very important quality to have in general. A sense of humility in the sense of not being above any task or kind of work, but also a general openness to learning and not insisting that they know everything there is to know. Unfortunately I’ve found while the worker universally had that kind of attitude, farm ownership has the opposite outlook. It’s very much ‘This is my decision. This is the way it’s going to be done’. There is less of a communally consultative process.
“It’s one of those things where - do you want to commodify something or an activity that you deeply love doing? I think no. There is so much that I derive pleasure from in farming that to turn it into a process of producing commodities purely for sale, commodities that have to meet a certain class of consumer, that is not where my interest lies.”
DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A FARMER? WHY OR WHY NOT.
I don’t refer to myself as a farmer largely because I don’t think 3 years is really enough time to feel like I’ve owned it. Because of the seasonal nature of the work, these are seasonal contracts that I’m working. Throughout the winter I work other jobs. Another aspect of why I don’t call my farmer is I came to it later in life after I had already turned 30. I had been an English teacher, I had worked as a social worker in refugee resettlement, I had done business development, I had done restaurant work. I feel like farming is something that definitely shapes who I am now and has definitely shaped the past 3 years of my life but because of the seasonal nature of it and because of the fact that I have all of this other experience and it definitely isn’t something that I have derived my primary income from over the past years, that makes it kind of difficult for me to say this is my profession.
Even when I was working in Montana, I came back to Buffalo during the winter. I do delivery work at a local bakery. I work doing setups at a large historical theater where the Philharmonic plays. Just kind of part time things to fill in hours during the winter. At times I have done English language tutoring online. I have a Masters in teaching English to speakers of other languages and I have 4 years experience teaching language both in individual and group settings. As I alluded to earlier, doing virtual education is challenging for me because the medium of the screen is difficult for me to derive the same kind of pleasure that I would from teaching in a real live situation. This winter I’m also going to pursue substitute teaching for the Buffalo Public Schools. Generally part-time things to fill in the winter before I start working in the spring again.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
One significant difference I noticed going from large-scale to small-scale farming was that the intensity of the labor increased a great deal. I can attest that I had no idea of the physical toll working at a high bed turnover garden vegetable operation would have, partially due to the perception that harvesting by hand is generally perceived to be low-skilled labor while operating a tractor is perceived to be a skilled operation. Having done both, I feel that while the consequences are potentially greater at a larger scale, there are just as many variables involved in successfully doing either, requiring the same amount of concentration. Considering the breadth of manual non-mechanized operations and the exposure to the elements that I experienced at the urban farm, I would say that this work was significantly more challenging than the work I did in Montana. Specific decisions by ownership compounded the difficulty of this work. Despite forecasted temperatures in the 90s and full sun, we started work at 8:30am and worked through the day (with a 30 min lunch break) until 6:30pm. The division of labor on the farm often manifested in myself exclusively doing field work (harvesting, prepping beds, planting), while the owner or other part-time employees did less labor intensive work in the shade (packaging, seeding). Despite the relentless pace of the work, the owner would use efficiency language to micromanage workers down to simple movements. I distinctly recall that she used the phrase “economy of movement” to justify telling me to stack bins before moving them a few feet. I eventually brought both of these issues up (division of labor and efficiency language) with the owner and described the demeaning nature of both from a worker’s perspective. While the owner acknowledged my concerns, not much actually changed, and I neglected to follow up as it became clear the farm would not be operating the following season. The owner expressed pursuing an educational opportunity as the primary reason for putting the farm on hold, but from growing up in this now heavily gentrified area of Buffalo, I think pausing operation stems from increased competition from other urban farms and produce delivery services for a boutique consumer base that has not grown at the same rate as competition.
I want to stress an important aspect of the issue of compensation for the farm work I have done. I made a choice to leave more lucrative fields to pursue farm work, and for that reason I don’t feel that I have as much right to complain about compensation as many other agricultural workers. I also acknowledge that while my compensation ($600 bi-weekly + housing in Montana for an average 72 hr work week; $15 an hour in Buffalo for four consecutive 10 hr days) is low relative to other industries in the U.S., I am still likely in the 1% globally, especially if informal agricultural labor is factored in. This of course is combined with other social benefits of living in the imperial core. I think this is an essential point to emphasize. I realize that I am situated within an international division of labor, which places me in a relatively privileged position to agricultural labor in the Global South. I strongly believe that it is essential that any organizing done by agricultural workers in the imperial core around fair compensation not only acknowledge this reality, but also seek to understand the mechanisms by which this international division of labor is reproduced.
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE FARMING ON FARMS THAT ARE NOT THEIR OWN?
I definitely think that at both farms at certain points I felt confident enough in my position to approach the farm owners about certain things. In neither situation did I feel like the underlying issues got addressed, but I was, at least because again of my age and prior work experience, confident to approach ownership about some outstanding things. Especially for younger people who have less work experience in their background, some kind of resource would be helpful - how do you bring up serious concerns with the owner about your working conditions? How do you keep the momentum going? Because that is something that I have very much struggled with. A lot of the time, and isn’t exclusively related to farm work, it’s just simply easier to keep doing what you’re doing and ignore the really annoying parts about a job just to minimize conflict. That is just not sustainable. No one is going to stay at a job for subsequent years if those are the conditions - it’s just not good for the mental and emotional health of the worker.
ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
I think that one of the things that is especially tragic to me is that while I was living in Mongolia, I was there to witness a particular moment in history where traditional small scale herders are being thrown off the land. A lot of the neoliberal market reforms that have really ramped up after the fall of the state socialist government in the early 90s has led to an absolutely heartbreaking severing of the ties between people who for countless generations have lived off the land and now are forced into horrific urban slums. This is the story of the development of capitalism, it’s not new. From the Highland Clearances to the changes I witnessed, enclosure of previously communally held land and displacement of people from lifestyles of self-sufficiency is an essential feature in the development of capitalism in either classical or imperialist stages. Seeing that and how at an individual level many people who I talked to felt helpless to resist those changes and then seeing the way in which agriculture functions in the United States, obviously small sample size, I’ve only worked at these two farms - there is clearly a movement to kind of heal some of those ties between people in our society who have been really alienated from not just the land but also general productive activity get back in touch with that. I want to see that not just at a boutique level in the United States, I want to see that be a possibility for everyone everywhere.
It’s also tragic for me that a lot of the people who I’ve worked with who are pursuing agricultural work that is physically very difficult, that is not financially lucrative by any means, if they have a series of really negative interactions with farm owners, there is the potential that those people that I think have a lot to give to a kind of like nascent agricultural, pastoral movement in the United States, it’s possible that they become frustrated with it where they lose all interest. That is a second tragedy.
People who have a passion for farm and ranch work, who are philosophically in the right place, simply are just beaten down by some of the material realities of the daily work and how it functions under the capitalist mode of production, even given the relative privileges that the international division of labor and monopoly over technologically advanced labor processes provide for workers in the U.S. That is not sustainable if there is going to be a next generation of people who are going to farm sustainably in the United States.
