Supporting your Farmers with Tools to Getting their Farms Ready to be an Attractive and Safe Place to Work!
Get familiar with the Agricultural Justice Project’s Farmer Tool-kit - https://agriculturaljusticeproject.org/toolkit/ . Although most new farmers may not be ready to hire workers, many of AJP’s resources are helpful to a farm whether run by a single farmer, a family, or a group of cooperators - creating an integrated health and safety plan, resolving conflicts, improving profitability. And when farmers decide to hire, they will be familiar with fair hiring practices to get them off to a good start with an employee manual adapted to their farm.
Some of the key questions we will explore this month:
1. Despite the cultural disdain for physical labor, what attracts many people to farming?
2. How can a farm preserve and maximize those attractive features and minimize the market pressures and history of exploitation that have made farmwork resemble slave labor?
3. How can a farm reduce the intimidating effect of At-Will law on farm employees?
4. Is there a role for networks like this one in supporting farmers who want to transform farm labor into a desired vocation?
We are open to a diversity of conversation topics – come ready to share and/or gain new perspective on some of your sticky programmatic challenges! If you have a question, quandry, existential inquiry, or specific topic related to running a beginning farmer training program you’d like to host at a future networking session, please email Colleen to discuss ideas: Colleen.hanley@tufts.edu
Conversation Host: Elizabeth Henderson farmed at Peacework Farm in Wayne County, New York, for more than 30 years. Peacework CSA was one of the first community-supported agriculture farms in New York State. She is co-chair of the Interstate Council policy committee of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), and represents the Interstate Council on the Board of the Agricultural Justice Project. Henderson is the lead author of Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (Chelsea Green, 2007), with a Spanish-language e-book edition in 2017. She maintains the blog The Prying Mantis.
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