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Greetings Book & Plow Farm Family,
Today is the last day of National Farmworker Awareness Week. I heard about this week via the Duke Campus Farm. National Farmworker Awareness Week is brought to us by Student Action with Farmworkers. The week is centered around education and actions to honor farmworkers contributions and raise awareness about issues they face. There are 2.5-3 million farmworkers in the country who are responsible for feeding us, and among other types of farm work picking 85% of the fruit and vegetables we eat in this country. Farm work is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and is also of course the work that feeds us all. Yet farmworkers are not granted the same treatment under the law (different minimum wage, no unemployment, no guaranteed protection if trying to form a union). I write thanks to all of the people who seed, plant, weed, harvest, wash and transport my food.
One great part of this Spring semester has been a partnership with the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, a group that does a lot of organizing with farm and restaurant workers in the area. Students have been coming up to farm for community work days to portion out dry good for the regular food distribution program that the Workers Center offers.
Up at the farm, our big project is Spring cleaning. We are basically applying the Marie Kondo method to the farm core site (author of the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up). We are looking at everything at the farm and getting rid of that which we no longer use. It is helpful to bring efficiency and tidiness to the farm before the inevitable chaos that summer brings. I can tell from the local farmer ListServ that we are not the only farmers doing this work right now. Highlights include tossing 9 year old greenhouse plastic (no longer useful) and setting up shelves to hold all of our tractor implement equipment. When something inevitably breaks on our wasco cultivator, it will be so easy to find out replacement part!
I am headed up to the farm now to move more round bales out to the field so the student farmer crew can mulch our no-till onions. Hope you are healthy and finding time for relationship-building and tidying up as needed!
For Book and Plow,
Maida
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We are hiring for our summer internship and have some events coming up! Stay tuned via the daily mammoth, our instagram, and our new linktr.ee/bookandplow
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