Merrymeeting Farmer Training
Photography for the Merrymeeting Food Council of their Farm Skills Training Program during a couple of bright spring days at Growing To Give in Brunswick, Maine. It’s open to anyone over 16 in the Merrymeeting Bay region, part-time so you can keep your day job, March til June. Participants are paid $15/hr during training, and support with transportation, childcare, work clothing, meals, and language interpretation is available. Applicants who qualify for WIC, SNAP, TANF, or who have barriers to employment are given priority!
I was thrilled to learn of this program when I was hired to photograph it. When I found midcoast Maine vegetable farming community in the early 2010s, the only path I saw into it was not accessible to me (and I thought I was doing pretty well!). Beginners were supposed to do an apprenticeship, working for a small stipend and living and eating at work, often sharing the owners’ living spaces. That was supposed to lead to either paid seasonal farm work, or magically coming up with the financial capital and land access to just start your own farm.
I had an apartment with a boyfriend and a dog. Taking an apprenticeship to move in with people I didn’t know would mean giving up that meager security and the pieces of the life I was trying to build. The people doing apprenticeships all seemed to have new Subarus and no bills, and I had to make rent. If I could have landed a seasonal job on a farm, I didn’t have a family I could crash with in the winter while I waited for it to start back up, and lining up two separate full time jobs through seasonal timeframes was very tricky. So, I stuck with juggling multiple jobs while taking freelance photography work whenever I could.
A few years later I took a teaching job, and knowing that I had been living on much less than the $19,000/year it paid, I felt I had the financial freedom to make my own version of a summer farm apprenticeship. I asked my farmer friend if I could live and work with her until the school year started.. For two and a half months, I stayed with other workers in a trailer and went to the fields or the farmers’ market every day. It was the first time in my life I felt mentally well. My friend insisted on paying me a couple grand at the end of August and even helped me find an apartment for the winter through her network.
That was the real start of the life I have now. I knew what I wanted to do: farm vegetables. I tried for about six more years to find a way to do it at least as my main job, if not as my own operation. It didn’t happen, but I’ve found meaningful, fulfilling work in supporting farms and food access. I’m not a farmer, but I get to be in the farm world.
I still have a very bitter taste in my mouth about MOFGA’s apprenticeship model and the way it has shaped Maine farming over the last 40 years. Though intended to attract young people to farming, in my opinion it excluded many more, and created a classist closed loop in the meantime. Sending the message that it’s okay for the highly specialized work of commercial growing to be unpaid and underpaid has also built a culture of burnout. A program designed by privileged, poor on paper, back-to-the-landers in the late 70s should have been composted decades ago instead of being left to rot in place. The “just enough for beer and birth control” stipend they prescribed was never not exploitative. And yes, I’ve heard of and seen some pretty awful situations play out through farm apprenticeships in my 13ish years on the scene, running the gamut from general wage theft and emotional abuse to sexual harassment and predation. There are wonderful people who work at MOFGA and strive to steer the 50+ year-old institution in the direction of an equitable farming culture, but I think there are pressing traditions to break and serious amends to make.
The great news is, farm owners who want their businesses to be sustainable realize that working for nothing more than equity and using apprentices is not the way. They need to attract and keep skilled labor for economic viability, and the best way to do that is by creating real jobs with good pay, healthy boundaries, and realistic schedules. Dozens of vegetable farms now offer year-round full-time work, starting at $18/hr, and well above that depending on experience. As employee wages climb, many older farm owners are warming to the idea of treating themselves better too, through business models that let them pay themselves and hire more help instead of having to do it all. And nowadays there are people in organizations like the Merrymeeting Food Council who recognize the need for class-aware programming in our food system. Farming for food production is a skilled profession and our culture needs to treat it accordingly.
