I didn’t grow up in a farming experience.

I have autism. Growing up I didn’t have a focus or special trade that was I was focusing on. Growing up was having tantrums or being really sensitive or trying to find an outlet if I was angry, or trying to connect with people.

During my high school years, my dad started a non-profit farm. It was a sustainable farm that focused on providing a living for people with developmental disabilities. They get to be part of a larger community or shared work. I would want to say that was one of my first steps getting into farming, and even going to college, while I was interested in animals and the idea of it, I didn’t understand the full scope of why I wanted to go into farming.

In college, focusing on environmental studies and ag, it was also having attention of detail to work, the idea of tillage and cover cropping. I had never been around it before. The idea that working is not just going somewhere and weed-whacking, but that there is a specific way of doing things. That’s where I got a lot of work ethic from. Understanding farm management even kind of still at a student level, which was tough for me to grasp for awhile.

For people on the spectrum, there is this idea of being sort of sensitive. Especially in a farming environment, things are fast paced and you have to make decisions quickly and think long term and deal with good days and bad days. It was difficult to adapt to at first. But then I got to see things in patterns. I had a lot of anxiety and depression in the past, and putting my hands in soil was very tangible and started to make me feel at peace.

It gave me a place to be really creative. How to shape beds or plan out the rest of the season or how many different crops I want to grow, how to manage certain pest problems. There is so much creativity.

And working in a community driven environment, understanding the importance of community.

When I did the Peace Corps for two years, it was sustainable agriculture, but it’s difficult when you’re in a place that is no- tech. In Zambia, double digging. When you work in a culture that is strung together by monoculture, there is a lot of skewed outreach where we want to fix a problem, but just throw money at it, and don’t think about how to approach these things long term. It was difficult to grow. They were very arid areas. We would start a nursery and kids would burn it down or the village would steal my plants. I’m keeping this in mind while also keeping my privilege in check. The answers and questions canceled in my head to where I mentally gave up. I came out of that experience with a lot of depression.

I wanted to get into something where I could grow again. I went into the Food Corps. It was the first experience where I could manage an area again, 30,000 sq feet of growing space and greenhouses, a sizeable garden area, school gardens. I redesigned the greenhouse, deep mulched everything, got the compost ready, all in a teaching setting.

Management and teaching are so valuable, but it’s easy for them to be really separate. Sometimes you’re a better manager than a teacher. I felt like a better manager than a teacher. What were the needs for the schools? Sometimes you get caught up with doing it for yourself rather than the people you’re serving. It was an empowering experience but at the same time frustrating. It felt like I was doing the work on my own.

I thought I was going to work on a small scale farm in Tennessee, and the owners worked for Mars Candy Company in Russia. They bought this hydroponic farm. It was very different from what I expected. The biggest thing for me was that the farm had this big grey line, growing systems with a lot of the pipes and had salt built up for so long, everything you were growing in there would have pests or deficiencies. The scale was so massive, they were already selling to Cisco. A lot of the work was undocumented labor, they paid a little bit better than your typical conventional farm. I didn’t come in with a mentor or with shared values. The experience was that I was really exploited, doing work that was meant for at least 10 people, working in 100 degree greenhouses, constantly bending other channels, constantly undermined. I really pushed for long term planning, but when you work for people who come from a background of producing chocolate, they think hydroponic is a quick way to grow plants, it makes it hard for the planning process.

It was so disconnected from the soil, I wasn’t seeing changing of landscapes for the year. I didn’t feel like I was growing for a community or growing as a person. It wasn’t that connection with that work that I wanted to do.