SASHA JACOBO
COLORADO
Sasha has been farming and working at farmers’ markets since she was 15.
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
I've accepted an Americorps position in Montrose, Colorado. I’m a food access coordinator at the non-profit where I work at. I just graduated from college with my BA in sustainable agriculture and with a business minor. I wanted to be involved in non-profit work until I figure out where I want to farm next.
I’m promoting small local producers as well as trying to get a sustainable ag movement going here.
I’m also in charge of a nutrition program for lower income folks.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
I started working at farmers; markets when I was 15. I started out volunteering with local Double Up Food Bucs at farmers’ markets in Miami, Florida. I worked at farmers’ markets all the way up until I was 21 or 22. In between all of that I worked at farm stands. I helped out at some of my friends' farms in Miami and did logistics / office work at another farm that I worked at.
I went off to college in 2018 and I went a college in Asheville, North Carolina. During my summers, I worked for a for-profit farm in Asheville. I also worked at a non-profit farm where all of our produce went directly to non-profits that were redistributing food just for Covid. That farm was always designed to be a donation based farm. They were going to slow down production, but then Covid hit and they were utilizing all the land that they could.
WHAT INITIALLY BROUGHT YOU TO THE FIELDS?
I grew up very food insecure in Miami. It started with me wanting to lose weight in middle school and wanting to do it in a sustainable way. I realized that healthy food was for the wealthy. I looked for programs in my area that would do work trades, and that is how I found the first farmers' market that I worked at.
It was Legion Park and I pretty much helped this non-profit called the Urban Oasis Project. A year after that, they called me to do translation work for a market in a primarily Latinx area. I always try to incorporate language justice into market spaces because they are predominantly white spaces.
I also realized that food was really expensive and I should just grow it myself. Growing your own food is printing your own money.
Working at markets, I felt connection with people next to me and with the customers. It’s really rare to have a job where you connect with people you work near. I never want it to stop.
WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO FARM FOR SOMEONE ELSE (NOW OR IN THE PAST?)
Farming for someone else is literally the only way that I’m going to learn to do it myself. There is always a need for workers and honestly networking with farmers and apprenticing with farmers is how you get cheap land or given land. That’s just the way that I’ve learned how to do it. I networked and went to college and it was a waste of money. The only reason to go to college is to network and show that I'm willing and able to do work. I went to a small private liberal arts college. Going to college for sustainable ag, there are only a few that do it and have actual farms at their actual college. I got a scholarship to go to my school, and it was more of a waste because it didn’t have practical courses. They had theoretical courses. I supplemented by having internships and working as a seasonal worker on farms.
That’s the only way I was able to get the internship to go to the Soul Fire Farm this coming summer.
I’m an immigrant and I identify as Latinx. I was born in Argentina and immigrated when I was 5.
It’s unfortunate that there aren’t more Latinx people in regenerative farming. I want to have a farm for me and a farm to show that BIPOC people and Latinx people are leading the charge. I do plan to have my own farm. I’m trying to work on that soon. Hopefully by the time I’m 35, I'’ll have a farm.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
Lack of boundaries. I feel sort of indebted to the farmers, especially if you are living on their premises. You feel obligated to be available even when you are off the clock.
I have experienced sexual harassment just being female, as well. Obviously that is something I’ve experienced. It’s always something that I’m weary of. But the Last few farms have been all female.
I’m white passing so I don’t have the racial discrimination, but it is weird when I tell my farm bosses that I’m Hispanic and they try to relate to me in that way.
For example, the farmers’ wife was also a farmer and she had told her sister that they had an Argentinian person working for them and that’s the closest they will ever get to Argentina. In the institution where I work at right now, I’m the only Spanish speaking person and I’m pretty much pointing out all the racial disparities they aren’t addressing. That they aren’t addressing with the 24% of the population that is Latinx.
The first farm I worked at, I was WWOOFing when I was 19. The WWOOFing people don’t care.
If anybody gets anything out of what I say, it’s: DON’T GO WWOOFing.
They don’t do background checks on the people who host WWOOFers. I’ve had really bad experiences when I was WWOOFing. It devalues our work as getting paid as farm workers. It’s just a way for farmers to get free labor.
CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?
I definitely would want it to be a cooperative. If you’re there for two years, you could have a buy in and be a co-owner. I would want it to have a sliding scale CSA and be food sovereignty oriented. If it is Native land, they are able to get Indigenous people to come tend to the land and utilize Indigenous practices while also respecting it. Having a livable wage and having vacation time and health care and not having to worry about retirement.
Farms just need to be a little smarter. Our generation is realizing that. The older generation that has farmed where it is their livelihood, they don’t have healthy boundaries because it’s their livelihood, so it’s really blurred.
The younger generation has boundaries with work, and they take care of mental and physical health because farming is very strenuous. There are all these other issues that people don’t associate with farming.
“If anybody gets anything out of what I say, it’s: DON’T GO WWOOFing. They don’t do background checks on the people who host WWOOFers – I’ve had really bad experiences when I was WWOOFing. WWOOFing devalues our work as getting paid as farmworkers. It’s just a way for farmers to get free labor.”
WHAT KEEPS YOU COMING BACK?
Ever since I was little, I knew that I wanted to work outside and tend to the land. I, unfortunately, don’t have a tie to this land since I am an immigrant. Both of my family’s sides were immigrants from the Middle East and Germany and ended up in South America.
It’s more of the idea that farmers have this power to change the food system and solid health and, in turn, and have a hand in slightly reversing climate change and sequestering carbon. The way we farm is closely tied to the deterioration of the ozone layer and climate change. I have faith that the American farming culture is moving toward the Campesino movement. Most farmers in the world are landless. They work for others.
The landless farmer movement, and especially by this project of Not Our Farm, it shows that there are a lot of us out there. They are unionizing and working to acquire land as the landless and do what they will with it and not be told what to grow and how to grow.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?
I did a project in my last semester of college on racism in agriculture as we know it. In modern industrialized farming, there are parallels to nasty parts of regenerative agriculture. Farmer equates to farm owner. Farm worker equates to a person in the field.
Farmers are predominantly white, and farm workers are predominantly Mexican. They don’t match up with the population. You can trace it back to Homestead Act. You can also trace it back to the 6 million Black farmers whose numbers had drastically dropped due to discrimination. The USDA wasn’t giving Black farmers their loans so they slowly started losing their land. So many systems are in place to keep people away from land and allow people to have land, to keep land and not sell it. There are systems in place to make it extremely hard for people of color and undocumented people who have the farming experience to have their own farms due to legal status.
DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A FARMER? WHY OR WHY NOT.
I would consider it, but we all have that internal struggle: am I doing enough to be considered a farmer?
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?
I think it’s important to know that there are more of us out there and as the momentum continues to grow, we can always rely on each other.
Maybe Not Our Farm will become a place of networking and people can start co-owning farms together. There are people who want to farm, there just isn’t land that is accessible to us yet because it’s tied up in so many different things. I have faith that we may be able to become farm owners, but since we’ve experienced all these things and are self aware, we are not going to be the farm owners that we are used to seeing. We will be a new set of farm owners.
ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT YOURSELF & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
People need to stop gate keeping.
Stop believing because you have more experiences or are more seasoned in the occupation that you’re allowed to make judgement calls on who is allowed to participate in it or be called a farmer. I don’t know if that is a experience that everyone has had, but that was my experience. I felt like I wasn’t enough and I felt like I was slower than the rest of the people. I’m a bigger person. I’m not the stereotypical skinny white person farmer. I always felt like I’m moving too slow. I don’t look like what people think a farmer would look like. Just having those insecurities.
It doesn’t matter if you think you’re better than us. We’re all weeding, we're all out in the field digging potatoes. It’s an ego thing. It’s done to make people feel better about themselves.
It happens a lot in gardening groups, too. You always see it on facebook.
We all start somewhere. Because of people like that, people get discouraged from pursuing farming, husbandry, dairy, anything that involves years of knowledge. I’m not about that. We need more people to join, not less.
One of the farms I was on was very gatekeepy. I had worked on so many farms, but she thought she was our leader.
The whole crew was white and I was the only Latinx person there. Everyone had come from money and privilege and skipped semesters of college to go and farm. I think people kind of use farming, it has become: I’m taking a trip to Europe to find myself. And it’s so different. That was a for-profit farm.
At the non-profit farm, we all had a shared mission of being on the farm because we are addressing food justice and food sovereignty issues.
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....)
Oh man. I love this question.
Honestly when I was working 60 hours / week on a farm, I literally would scarf my lunch down and sleep the rest of my break. I never got to eat with my crew. I didn't like them for a myriad of reasons. Toward the end of the season, we had the interns from another farm come over and we had a little party and we were able to socialize there.
During the work week, I would eat a giant salad in 5 minutes, sleep for 45 minutes and then go back to work. My body couldn’t take it.
I think if you like your work crew, it would be fun. I wasn’t friends with them at all.
