ROMAN WARLICK
WASHINGTON, DC
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
I’m currently unemployed. I had a job set up for this March for a farm in upstate New York, but I was in Florida at the time with my partner when the pandemic hit and it was clear that it wouldn’t be going away. With the pandemic ramping up, and me having the only vehicle, I didn’t want to leave my partner, a Black Trans person alone in Florida, so I ended up declining the job.
I did workshares on a couple different farms in Gainesville, and was mostly working on my garden in the backyard of the house where I’m staying.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
I’ve been farming professionally going on 3 years. I grew up on a farm and I ran away from that trauma and rural area.
I went to school and didn't study ag at all.
I was doing activism in Baton Rouge, hosting potlucks, participating in the act of feeding people and community building, and food sovereignty. I realized, you can’t strike if you are worried about how to feed your children. If your farmer is like ‘I’ve got you - then you can do the work.
In 2015, my partner of that time and I moved to DC and I was working in tech because that is what I can do here. My now current partner had a friend in New York on a farm who said they would be my mentor, and I live and work here, so I quit my job and moved to New York to be farm. It was a non-profit farm.
It was a journey of remembering things I learned from childhood. There was also a lot of learning on the fly.
When I got to New York, the apprenticeship was me being occasionally picked up to go to work. It wasn’t how I wanted to start farming. After that summer, I moved back to DC and started my longest tenure on an urban edible flower / microgreens farm. I did that for a year and a half. I moved from farm hand to flower production manager. It was a very profit focused farm. The farm owner wasn’t there for the first 9 months - she worked in the government and was overseas in Iraq doing some bad things, I’m sure. The farm is inside of a warehouse because it was microgreens, so indoors, towers of lights, seeds going into trays, every two weeks cutting it for rich white women. It was the worst place I’ve ever worked. The boss had really weird expectations. She micromanaged and you were expected to be on call 24/ 7 to make Instagram content.
She would you pull you aside and ask you to jump 10 times so she could get the right photo.
She was really obsessed with being in the top 8% of farms grossing, because of the size and how much money she made.
She would talk badly about farms in DC with social justice missions, wondering how they could ever make money.
I’m a Trans person being paid minimum wage while she talks about how much money she is making, which was $30k in revenue a month.
I became flower production manager because of so much turnover. I was the most senior staff at a year, even our boss who started the business doesn’t ever work on the floor. She was trying to sell the microgreen farm to Coastal for a multi-million dollar venture. It was November and we had to move the farm and we moved into a new warehouse that did not have AC. That’s fine only from November to the beginning of March. It was a very old warehouse, mouse and roach and rat infested and now it’s starting to become summer and we don’t have AC. There’s mold and it was not a nice place to be. It was so hot, you’re literally dripping all day. I don’t have a problem doing physical labor outside, in the heat or in the rain, but in a concrete box, you just knew that everything you were growing was rotting. We were growing 4x the amount and getting a third of the yield because of rot.
We also had a small outdoor flower farm. I was only going out to the farm one day/week. The breaking point for me comes in October I’m supposed to get a bonus, which was 2% of all flower sales. It’s not a lot, maybe $300 per quarter. She told me my work was unsatisfactory and I wasn’t pulling my weight. I’m here thinking about how I’m coming into work every day, things are rotting around me, and I don't have the resources or equipment. I was coming in at 6 in morning and leaving at 6 at night. And doing all of this in a swamp.
It’s just white ladies owning farms and wanting to have an Instagram and be fancy. I quit in October, and over winter I went and worked on a friend's farm. And was walking dogs. Me and my partner moved to Florida in January, which is the middle of growing season, so you can get a nice job and get paid in veggies. I have done work trade and work shares since then. This spring there is a farm in Virginia that is livestock based that I want to work at hopefully.
I have a weird subset of skills, but what I want is one solid good season on a farm that is actually following the season and has a real connection to the earth.
At the previous farm, Little Wild Things, she talked about how she had to put $40k of her own savings into the business. And she would complain about it.
To be honest, she’s not different from most farm owners I’ve met, especially ones that tout how sustainable they are. We went through 100 papertowel rolls/week to keep microgreens dry. We used plastic clam shells, and she got so many grants about how she’s creating jobs in DC.
There weren’t any persons of color working on the farm. DC is not a white city. A South Asian Trans person applied and the hiring person didn't hire her because she was Trans.
I don’t have a truck at this time, so I worked there because the farm was accessible by metro.
WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?
When I was growing up, I lived in country with chickens and a garden. We were subsistence farming. My mom stayed at home, my father was in military and gone 6-8 months/year. We were an hour away from a town, so I spent my time running through the woods and cutting chickens’ heads off for dinner, slaughtering a hog at Christmas. The rural south is what it is and I went to college to do something far different from this because I’m so different from my family.
I went to school, got degree in psychology and sociology and was doing activism in Baton Rouge. We worked on a project to refurbish an African American history museum. I helped to build a community garden there. I went around collecting pallets, made container gardens for herbs, and built up beds.
The act of being in the dirt as an adult really just re-grabbed me. I love the soil. I love the fact that I’m putting seeds in the ground. This is what I want to do. This is my calling. This is what brings me joy and I can turn around and bring joy to other people.
I just need to learn how to do it. My partner had a friend who ran a farm where I could work there and learn. I didn’t get paid.
As a white masc person, I face far less problems than other people. I stick with things that could be worse.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
I’ve not gotten paid. I’m on payroll and usually get paid, but something happens and the boss asks, Can you wait a couple days? I don’t have a couple days: rent is due.
Or volunteers come out to the farm and there is classism and biases toward different people. When you’re the boss and you do a farm to table dinner at the farm, the people attending don’t care that you’re telling them about microgreens, the staff is seen as piece of furniture.
People are so far removed from the food system, and if you’re buying microgreens, you’re really removed. They sell this as sustainable farming or regenerative agriculture when I had to literally fight for cover crops.
My boss would always say, “Weeding doesn’t make money,” but that just doesn’t make sense. If you weed your stuff, it grows better.
There was the inconvenience of what farming really was versus the pretty picture or what could sell.
Disney came and filmed documentary at the microgreens farm and I had to clean the moldy warehouse. This farm isn’t helping people. Four people work here and get paid minimum wage besides farm owner. It’s not sustainable, there is no real water being saved, but that is not what people see.
When I quit, I talked about it on Instagram and multiple people reached out. The farm had three production managers in year and a half who all quit. For one, the owner had to settle out of court for $10,000.
People know to steer clear of this place if you farm in DC. It’s like a gear that is grinding up young farmers in a city that is accessible. It’s being marketed as sustainable, woman-owned, creating jobs, small carbon footprint, saving water, but tied to the devil.
CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?
My dream farm is a cooperative or collective. Not a single farm owner.
The focus is not so much on profit.
We believe in regenerative soil building.
We are feeding healthy food that is cultural appropriate to the community that you’re in.
We are respecting biodiversity.
There are regional food hubs - no one person can do it all.
I’m never trying to be a farm owner. Ideally I’ll be part of a collective of Trans and Queer farmers in the South. My friend has family land. It was reparations given to their grandfather back in the day. 80 acres.
Right now I am focused on getting the farm skills that I need to start that project.
“If you feel surprised that a Black person invented the CSA or cooperatives, then you should really think about why you think white people invented sustainability. Everything I know, a Black or Indigenous person taught me. I had to unlearn. I had to learn the truth and actively do the work. ”
WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?
Because I know it’s not the task, it’s not the work of it that is ever the problem. It’s the same systems that are in place everywhere else that make it terrible. White supremacy and capitalism.
This is what I’m supposed to do.
I can be tired, smell like fish emulsion, and I’m happy. I have depression, so when I know I’m happy, that’s good stuff.
I won’t ever stop farming, even if it doesn’t look like rows of veggies. I’m still going to be a soil worker and work with the earth and steward it and get to know it and learn what I need to do with it.
I hope that one day I’ll get a boss that’s not horrible.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?
I mean from my experience farm owners don’t do work. They take a picture on a tractor, but don’t do the day to day. There should be less difference in those words.
I also think there are racial connotations. A farm worker is thought of as a day laborer in California and a farmer is an old white man on a tractor.
DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A FARMER? WHY OR WHY NOT.
Yeah, I would call myself a farmer.
I use the words (farmer / farmworker) interchangeably for myself.
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?
Health insurance. Protections that would make it so you’re going to get a paycheck. Protections so you can go to the doctor if you need to.
I cut my finger off, a chunk of it. It was stressful because I didn’t have insurance. The owner did have workman comp insurance, but I had to take a month off and she complained about it the entire time. I had a cast on my entire hand and would be touching wet soil all day long. She kept saying, “As soon as you can get back.” Literally I get back to the farm and I’m told they aren’t going to pay me my bonus. I didn’t just cut off my thumb for this bullshit.
I want the total destruction of capitalism. We need things that would stop exploitation. Fair wages, to talk about sexual assault, all the things.
When you get on the DC metro covered in dirt, people are very much, “what the fuck.” Any time you tell someone you’re a farmer, they are like “There are farms in DC?!” DC is definitely the city I’ve experienced the most classism.
I was working 60 hour - 70 hour/week at the microgreens farm. I had to be in at 6am and wouldn’t leave until 6pm on a good day. We had the farmers’ markets on the weekend, a CSA delivery program, and the outdoor farm.
I would be doing weeks of work at a time at the outdoor farm in 1 or 2 days. During the hottest week in DC, they sent me out for the whole week to turn over beds for the next planting, and it was 105 degrees. It was a wild time, and also I would have to come in with the harvest to the indoor farm by the end of the day to put them in fridges. There was so much commute, back and forth. I was salaried, which was a trap. All that lost overtime. It was expected that I would do 60-70 hours/week because I’m salaried.
ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
I am always questioning why we hold those ideals. Old white men have never been the ones who are actual farming, besides fucking up the soil. Or growing rows and rows of wheat.
If you feel surprised that a Black person invented the CSA or Coops, then you should really think about why you think white people invented sustainability.
Regeneration is being repackaged and sold back to people. There is no communal concept or connection to the earth.
Instead of wanting to control nature, we need to start recognizing our part in it.
We are the same as the tree squirrel. We are part of the whole system.
Everything I know a Black or Indigenous person taught me. I had to unlearn. I had to learn the truth and actively do the work.
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....)
Luckily I never worked on a farm where I lived on it and had to be totally in it.
Often we would have a 30 minute lunch and often I would work through it. We didn’t have other breaks besides going to the bathroom. There was so much to do, so many daily tasks that you don’t stop. No one else is stopping, so it doesn’t feel comfortable to request a break like that.
We had forced socialization, like the boss would say, “Let’s go get a beer right now,” and we would have a staff meeting where you have to be here and she’s paying for beer and pizza and we are going to talk about work while we are eating. That doesn’t count as rest.
I think about how I was growing food for Michelin star restaurants, but I would have to pay for microgreens or get stuff that was a day from rotting. I could barely buy my groceries.
I wasn’t growing real food (at the microgreens farm) so I couldn’t take seconds home. I can only eat so many pea shoots.
I was on SNAP when working in New York.