Want to be a farmer? Former Trustees farm apprentices Melanie Hardy and Elizabeth Green offer insight and advice.
Ask the kid next door what she wants to be when she grows up, and “farmer” is not likely to be at the top of the list. Maybe the reason is that small farms, for a while, seemed to be going the way of the dodo. Mega farms bent on mega production were on the rise, far from the suburbs, and even further from the cities, and many kids (and adults, for that matter) had made little connection between what we eat and where it comes from.
Now, smaller farms are enjoying a bit of a Renaissance, thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of people who support them and the local food movement. Meet two of those people: Elizabeth Green and Melanie Hardy. Both women made the foray into farming as Trustees apprentices, and are now managing farms on their own today.
The (dirt?) road to becoming a professional farmer may be a little circuitous. Post-college, Elizabeth Green had a gig with a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., and found herself getting antsy for more hands-on work. Summer came, and she toured a few farms north of Boston, but was daunted because the life of a farmer’s apprentice, in her words, “seemed pretty hard core.” (Read: serious manual labor, long hours, not much pay.) But after giving it some serious thought, the next summer she decided it was now or never and began an apprenticeship at the Belmont Community Supported Agricultural (CSA) program.
“It was an amazing experience – every day I was coming home happy – which not everyone gets to say about their job.” The following year she worked as an apprentice at The Trustees’ Powisset Farm in Dover, under the tutelage of Farm Manager Meryl LaTronica. “It was a much larger farm, and more mechanized than Belmont. But one of the great things about apprenticeships is you get to figure out not only whether you like the work of farming, but what kind of farm you want to be at.” Today, Green is the first Farm Manager at Apple Street Farm in Essex, a chef-owned outfit that grows food for two Boston restaurants and a catering company.
When Melanie Hardy, current Farm Manager at Land’s Sake Farm in Weston, was eighteen, she went to work in the Hamptons for a landscape company on the weekdays, and then at a farm stand on the weekends. During this time, she “got comfortable with a very fast-paced, physical work.” It was after earning a degree in Agricultural Ecology at Prescott College that she started looking for an apprenticeship, which she found at Powisset, and later became an Assistant Grower there.
Although (aptly named!) farmers Green and Hardy manage different farms now, they both agree that the New England farming community is an unusually uncompetitive and supportive one. “Meryl has been such a mentor for me - I text or email her at least once a week,” Hardy says. Green agrees, “It’s just one more reason why I love what I do - I have at least ten people I can call on day or night. We support each other.”
Any more career advice for a would-be farmer? Melanie says, “This would definitely not be a good career for a perfectionist – a lot of it just isn’t under your control. You have to be pretty psyched for it - it’s a lifestyle, you know? But it’s the best job in the world.” |
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