Not Our Farm (NOF) is “a project and community of farmers who have chosen farming as a career but do not have their own farm business or land." The stories shared via Not Our Farm include workers exploring why they love farming despite the challenges, recounting poor treatment at past and current jobs, and dreaming of what truly sustainable farm work would look like. Participants come from farms across the spectrum—large, small, nonprofit, for profit, urban, rural. 

One important point the project makes is that unfair working conditions are an issue throughout agriculture. They can—and do—occur on small, family-operated farms as well as larger corporate operations. If we want to improve farm labor, we need to look in our own communities and not pretend that the issues all lie in larger farms outside of our region. As farmer Zel Taylor says, “the focus on sustainable agriculture also needs to include the sustainability of the people actually doing the work.” 

Better wages are one avenue toward improving working conditions on farms. Not Our Farm worked with Good Food Jobs, a farm and food job site, to change their policies on farm job postings. All jobs posted on the site must now include a minimum wage of $15 per hour. Good Food Jobs has also posted a series of stories from Not Our Farm, and is collecting information about farms who have improved their labor practices. 

Here in Massachusetts, the Fairness for Farmworkers Act is currently in the Committee for Labor and Workforce Development in the House. The proposed bill (H.1979, S.1205) would raise the minimum wage for farmworkers, require that workers be given one day of rest each week, and be able to earn overtime pay. This legislation isn’t going to solve the deeply-rooted issues that surround farm labor, but it would be a step toward lessening exploitation. Of course, the burden of higher pay for farm workers affects the bottom line for the farm owners, and eventually that higher cost is reflected in the cost to consumers, but without someone to sow, harvest and sell the crops, the food won't make it from the seed packet to the kitchen table.

A recent Berkshire Grown farmer workshop, “Building Capacity for Collaboration: Maintaining a Strong Farm Team,” aimed at farm owners and managers, addressing some of the issues that can arise as managers work with their teams. Farmers Claudia Kenney and Willy Denner of Little Seed Gardens in Chatham, NY discussed their approach to building strong farm teams and handling conflict on the farm over 28 years of farm management. Much of the focus was on how to accurately label the emotions and needs that come up, so that managers can have effective communication around those workers’ needs. Several participants shared moments of conflict that they’d dealt with on their farms, often resulting in a valued team member leaving the farm and/or continued feelings of resentment and frustration. 

2022 Guide to Local Food & Farms is here!

This 2022 Guide to Local Food and Farms is the region’s most comprehensive guide to local farms, farmers markets, and restaurants offering local foods - use it to find farm stands, CSA farms, pick-your-own farms and orchards, as well as locally sourced value-added products like charcuterie, preserves, and fermented foods and locations and hours of food pantries spread across the county. Within these pages and online at BerkshireGrown.org/Find-Food-and-Farms, you will find descriptions, addresses, and a detailed map.

Keep your Guide to Local Food and Farms handy and use it frequently!

By Errol Schweizer for Forbes

Errol Schweizer: What motivated you to write Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice and The Deep Roots Of Regenerative Farming?

Liz Carlisle: Food and agriculture is responsible for a quarter to a third of greenhouse gas emissions. And yet you can imagine a world in which it's actually a climate solution. And so I've always been drawn to farmers who are trying to make this shift. How do we take agriculture, which on this continent is so clearly a climate problem and shift it to a climate solution? But something that really struck me when regenerative agriculture started to get a lot of attention in the mainstream a few years ago is the response from the research community, from my colleagues in academic institutions and nonprofits that work on this and even a lot of the farmers engaged in it. On the one hand, you had some people who were so excited about regenerative agriculture as a climate solution. But then, on the other hand, I started seeing a lot of people in the research community saying, wait, hang on a minute here. This sounds like a lot of marketing hype, it might just be smoke and mirrors. So I was really puzzled and really curious. Why is there this big gap between some people who think regenerative agriculture is a really important part of the climate solution and other people who feel like this is something that the big food companies are using to greenwash their products? So what got me started researching this book is this question, is regenerative agriculture really a powerful climate solution?

Read the full interview here.

Find the fresh local food and food products around and about the Berkshires and our neighboring region. Visit berkshiregrown.org

for dates, locations and information. Watch for updates in indoor and outdoor farmers markets throughout the seasons.

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