MEY DOLCE-BUN

COLUMBUS, OH

Mey has been farming for 7 seasons in MD, NY & OH, and currently works at a year-round 20 acre flower farm in Columbus. She got her start farming by working the farmers’ markets in NYC.

Mey is a member of Not Our Farm’s Advisory Council.

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

  • I am a farm crew member at Sunny Meadows Flower Farm, a predominantly flower farm. The farm grows flowers all year round. They have perennials and seasonal flowers. I’m a crew member right now and we are making holiday and dry flower wreaths. The day usually starts with the day’s list - we go through orders (shopify, people ordering wreaths and flowers), get orders ready for customers, etc. Right now we are getting ready to seed our spring crops. The farm has a bunch of heated and unheated greenhouses. We are prepping all the spring flowers right now. We have ranunculus in the ground and we are seeding those in the seed house and that will be transplanted in four to five weeks. We are also dividing dahlia tubers. We are just dividing the crops for folks for next year. 

    There’s 7 of us on the crew, but during the height of the season, there’s at least 14 - 15 people. It’s about 10 acres and they have an additional 10 acres that they are leasing from another property.

    I intend to stay there. It’s a year round farm. During the winter months we are either transplanting or dividing tubers. Dividing the tubers takes the bulk of the winter months. 

    I’ve been here a little over a year now. My wife and I moved to Columbus last August from New York and I started working at this farm in September. 

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?

  • I’ve been farming for 7 seasons now. I started in 2013. 

WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?

  • I started working in New York at a farmers’ market just selling products for a farmer, trying to figure out life at the time. I wanted to be around food so I looked into going to culinary school, but that was really expensive, so I thought of other ways that I can be around food. Maybe I can grow food. That just sparked my interest. I started looking into apprenticeships and this was the winter of 2012. I started researching apprenticeships and going on interviews. I landed an apprenticeship in Maryland on a non-profit farm.

    I farmed in Maryland, and then my second year I apprenticed in upstate New York on another non-profit, and I stayed on this farm for two years (veggie apprentice one year and livestock apprentice the second year). It peaked my interest in learning more about animals and the full circle of learning about veggies and animals together. 

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

  • Initially when I first started farming, that was one of my questions these farms asked. What are my plans in the next 5 years? My answer was always, I want to start my own farm. I would love to start my own business. The more I worked among other young farmers and seeing friends who started their own business and the struggles they go through with not having enough capital to start their own business, having 2-3 jobs in order to support themselves, I just found it difficult to do it on my own. In a sense right now, would I want to have my own farm? The answer would be no. Just because of knowing the hardship of first, finding land, which is hard and expensive, and then doing it alone is also a hard thing, too. Farming is hard already and then starting your own business alone is another challenge that I’m not quite ready for. That’s why I’ve been working for other farms or organizations. It’s one less responsibility. I think it’s just scary to own a business, and I think the thing that is hard is actually finding the land to make farming your own, that’s the hard part.

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

  • I think a lot of the farms that I’ve worked on it’s this expectation of this image of a farmer or for example, at the organization I worked at in New York, it was about the apprenticeship program, but behind the scenes it was more of a facade for the organization. People didn’t realize how hard it was for these apprentices to learn and work. There is a lot of work in producing 50 different varieties for a CSA. 

    The lack of transparency was one of the things that the organization lacked, presenting the hardships that we go through, especially after the apprenticeship…the challenges to find jobs, what do we do now. There was a lack of resources for the apprentices to find other opportunities. This organization is a really huge one and they have all these resources, and they lack the support for the apprentices, but for them it’s an image or a scene that they want people to know about. 

    Most of my experiences farming has been working on non-profit farms. These farms need to write grants to pay the apprentices. I just felt overworked and underpaid, but also not getting the recognition that we should have gotten from the organization. 

    I think going in I had this idea that as an apprentice, you kind of follow and learn from the farm manger who is running the program. The issues were outside people versus inside people. Farmers versus administrators, the people who don’t work outside. There was a clash of understanding difficulties of presenting certain things in a perfect way. 

    The folks who work in the office don’t really understand the struggles of the apprentices or farm manager, day to day, heavy lifting, hard work, grueling hours. They just see the end product and they don’t understand how much work goes into producing a radish.

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

  • I am currently working on a dream farm! Working with like minded folks who have the same end goal and the end goal is to make our customers happy. And also the open transparent communication. The owners, Steve and Gretyl, for example with the pandemic they had been very open and supportive to the crew’s decision to come to work, how comfortable we feel with each other, trusting in each other to carry precautionary safety outside of work. We all in the sense trust each other that everyone is being responsible. We all care for each other. They’ve done a great job of being open and honest and giving us the space to express our feelings and not disregarding it. They take it in and respect whatever decisions we make about each other’s safety and our safety.
    I feel comfortable talking to them about anything. Being upfront about work or people - they just made it a space that we can talk to each other. I think that they have worked hard so that their employees feel that they can express themselves and talk pretty candidly and not feel judged. 

    It’s one of the first for-profits that I’ve worked on. In a sense I want to work for these people because I care about them, and it’s a cool business and I want them to succeed. Because they are a first generation farm business and they’ve been doing this for X amount of years, I want them to succeed. 

    I’m very lucky. I found them through the Young Farmers conference 5 years ago - they left their business card there at the job fair. I grabbed it. My wife is from Ohio, and I thought one day if we ever come here, this is a place that I can work at. I kept this card and kept them in my mind. When I moved here, it’s seriously the only job I interviewed for and I was really hoping they would hire me. I was banking on this farm crew position. I left it to fate to see what would happen.

“Initially when I first started farming, I was always asked what my plans are in the next 5 years. My answer was always that I wanted to start my own farm. The more I worked among other young farmers and saw friends who started their own business and the struggles they go through with not having enough capital, having 2-3 jobs in order to support themselves, I just found it difficult to do on my own. Right now would I want to have my own farm? The answer would be no.”

WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?

  • Working outside. Farming, there’s never a dull moment. I learn so much every single day. This year is the first year that I’ve worked predominantly with flowers. I’ve never worked with flowers this intimately before. All the other farms were mostly veggies and just some flowers, like growing sunflowers for CSA members, but not to the extent of predominantly making bouquets and selling to retail stores. 

    Every day there is problem solving and learning a lot about different types of crops, vegetables or flowers. And I’ve learned how to raise animals, too. I’m constantly every day learning something different, something new. It challenges me in my brain. Being around people who are also as excited as I am to produce something that gives joy to other people. I try to join CSAs and stuff and be connected to that world even if I’m not working around vegetables.

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

  • The difference is maybe people think farmers are older, white men, driving a tractor. I don’t see a difference in them personally. When people ask me what I do, I usually say that I’m a farmer. 

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

I do call myself a farmer. I’ve worked to that place that I can say that I’m a farmer.
At the farm where I work now, I don’t have an official title. I am a crew member. Right now we call each other the “barn crew” because we are working in the barn making wreaths. But otherwise, I think of myself as farm crew.

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

  • Having health benefits would be great. The farms that I’ve worked on - all the non-profits, there was the lack of health care benefits. Why can’t we have those kinds of benefits? That would be something I would like to see happen in the farm industry. And better wages - better pay. The pay at the current farm I’m at is good compared to the apprenticeship programs. Those are either minimum wage payment or a stipend. We need better pay regardless of it being an apprenticeship. 

    I think when you use the word apprentice, it’s an internship, but the work is the same as the farm crew or farm manager, so why do apprentices have to get a stipend? That could be because the farm or non-profit can’t afford it or don’t have the money to pay the apprentices more.

    The target would be the big businesses that look at the farm workers as little people and pay them less. 

ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?

  • I’d like to share that I am a Cambodian American Queer person in the farming world and I haven’t met many people of color in the farming industry. Not at the farms that I work on. I would like to meet more folks - POCs or Queer people. I’ve thought about it more and looking back, I feel like farming is pretty white and there aren’t a lot of POC, but I don’t know.

    When it comes to choosing a place, it is the question of do I feel comfortable working here? I feel like I haven’t had any issues with the places that I’ve interviewed for, that they are judging me because of my ethnicity or me being Queer. When we came to Columbus, we knew that Columbus has a large Queer community, so we felt safe in that way. At Sunny Meadows, on their website they talk about being transparent and supporting their farm crew.

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 do enjoy taking lunch. We have an hour lunch break and before COVID we would all sit together and kind of like hang, but now we either sit in our car or just remain the safe distance from each other while we have our masks off. 

    I do enjoy lunch because I can take a moment to myself. When you’re working with your coworkers 7 hours/day, it’s nice to have a minute to hang out with yourself, read a book or take a lunch nap.