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Small-scale organic farming excludes people with low-income or immigrant backgrounds.
The aspiring small-scale organic farmers has two options, neither of which preserve dignity or one's savings account: intern or enroll in an agricultural educational program.
As an aspiring farmer, what do you do? Buying or leasing your own farm would be too costly. Say you work as an intern for five years and received $500/mo, you'll have $30,000, assuming you didn't have to pay for car insurance, medical expenses, gas, clothes, etc.
Some farms hire employees for usually $10-12/hr without
housing. After five years of work, one can earn $115,200 before taxes. That's not enough to lease or buy a farm of one's own.
Robust ag education programs are expensive. The UC Santa Cruz program costs $6000, not including housing fees.
Who can afford the money and risk in becoming a farmer? People who are already rich in money or land. They can afford to spend a summer as an intern and not worry about having to pay for college once fall comes. This process excludes people who come from low-income or recent immigrant backgrounds. We're told that we're supposed to make something of ourselves and give back to the community we came from. Becoming a production farmer doesn't give you skills that are useful in inner city, low-income areas. It doesn't give people jobs that'll support their families, nuclear and extended. It's hard to go back to where you're from because you can't run a large-scale farm in a city.
When people talk about food justice and providing nutritious, culturally-desirable food, how can that happen if the diversity of consumers isn't reflected in the farmer population? A huge barrier to immigrants eating fresh produce, which is linked to good health, is familiarity with the produce. Who knows how to grow that produce, organically and on a production scale? People who can't get into small scale farming because of land access, financial risk, and discrimination. Community gardens provide one avenue for culturally-desirable food, but that isn't viable for people who have full time jobs, possibly multiple jobs. That neoliberal answer doesn't create jobs for low-income people of color. Instead, rich white people can grow it as a niche crop and charge more for it. White people win again. Certainly not the Latinos, Carribeans, and migrans who do the labor.
Divert subsidies and make farming a viable career choice.
I am talking with others to build a farm incubator that can be linked up with cooperatively run farms on land trust farmland.
Small-scale organic farming excludes people with low-income or immigrant backgrounds.
The aspiring small-scale organic farmers has two options, neither of which preserve dignity or one's savings account: intern or enroll in an agricultural educational program.
Interns can sign up to be seasonal labor on a farm with the promise of priceless educational opportunities. These promises are often broken and interns are mere labor. Understand something, interns don’t become farmers. This isn’t the business world where an internship is a lowly but necessary step on the path to fulltime employment. Farm interns are compensated only in food and housing (often just an uninsulated shack with insects and mice as housemates), and if they’re lucky a stipend of 300 bucks a month.
With this free flowing hose of happy rich kids ready to be sun burned and burned out before returning to soft handed intellectual work with a story or two of “roughin’ it,” why bother to pay a living wage? The economics are just too good on slave labor, especially if the slaves are shiny, happy and willing.
But even with the apparent historical aberration of happy and willing slaves (and even that is often not the myth, drop out rates on these projects are around 96% in Mendocino County) the old arguments made about extending slavery in the Northwest Territories and the persuasion of the Lincoln Douglas debates hold true — slaves compete for work with free workers, they depress the wages of free workers, and they place the plantation owner, or small farmer, in the bind of economic necessity. If he pays a fair wage he can’t compete with the wwoof slaver next door.
If you tune in, and turn your brain back on, and drop out of the hippie haze of good feelings, what are you gonna do about getting real farm work, and maybe one day being a real farmer, instead of a cultivator of farming anecdotes?
Farmers justify their low compensation saying that it’s a privilege to work on their operation and learn through hands-on experience. Repetitive tasks without context or explanation isn’t learning.
As an aspiring farmer, what do you do? Buying or leasing your own farm would be too costly. Say you work as an intern for five years and received $500/mo, you'll have $30,000, assuming you didn't have to pay for car insurance, medical expenses, gas, clothes, etc.
So maybe you try to be a farm manager instead. While you might get some extra agency and an extra dime or two, it’s still a dead end. Most small-scale farms are family run and the manager is the owner, so unless you marry in the positions are limited. If you’ve got the looks to go marrying into a farm, well, more power too you, but for the non-models it’s back to the fields.
Robust ag education programs are expensive. The UC Santa Cruz program costs $6000, not including housing fees.
Who can afford the money and risk in becoming a farmer? People who are already rich in money or land. They can afford to spend a summer as an intern and not worry about having to pay for college once fall comes. This process excludes people who come from low-income or recent immigrant backgrounds. We're told that we're supposed to make something of ourselves and give back to the community we came from. Becoming a production farmer doesn't give you skills that are useful in inner city, low-income areas. It doesn't give people jobs that'll support their families, nuclear and extended. It's hard to go back to where you're from because you can't run a large-scale farm in a city.
When people talk about food justice and providing nutritious, culturally-desirable food, how can that happen if the diversity of consumers isn't reflected in the farmer population? A huge barrier to immigrants eating fresh produce, which is linked to good health, is familiarity with the produce. Who knows how to grow that produce, organically and on a production scale? People who can't get into small scale farming because of land access, financial risk, and discrimination. Community gardens provide one avenue for culturally-desirable food, but that isn't viable for people who have full time jobs, possibly multiple jobs. That neoliberal answer doesn't create jobs for low-income people of color. Instead, rich white people can grow it as a niche crop and charge more for it. White people win again. Certainly not the Latinos, Carribeans, and migrans who do the labor.
Divert subsidies and make farming a viable career choice.
I am talking with others to build a farm incubator that can be linked up with cooperatively run farms on land trust farmland.
