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"Dual-stack Career: Farm Operations Intern and Technical Advisor"

TL;DR

I’m going to make at least enough to survive via technical consulting, but also double-down on the value of my other/farm work to support the long-term goals of a meaningful agricultural startup.

What I Did with My Severance

Last year, I volunteered on a few farms. Some were non-profit, some not. For my efforts, I received:

  • Lots of fresh, nutrient-dense organic produce and other agricultural products
  • Aching bones and muscles, since repetitive work is hard and I didn’t yet know how to approach it right
  • A ton of context and experiences across vegetable, livestock, and operational management tasks
  • Ideas and information about how Growgistics could eventually help farms and their operations
  • Pictures, notes, comparisons, people connections and a sense of confidence about further efforts
  • Zero actual income, but that wasn’t ever a goal of the work

I appreciate the people I met at the New Entry Sustainable Farm Project (NESFP), various local farms, and throughout New England at regional grower conferences and events. Every farm business is unique, just like every plot of land. Without a diversity of people, experiences, and learnings, I wouldn’t have the peace of mind now about having burned down my cash reserves on a hypothesis and intentional timespend to collect evidence to underwrite my decision to dual-stack my career.

What I Am Doing to Keep Up My Tech Expertise

On the days I’m not on the farm, I’ll be devoted to contract work in various DevOps-y and cloud infrastructure things. I can’t talk too much about this now other than to say this work is financially imperative because my cost of living on the North Shore just can’t be covered by farm wages.

But for a kid grown up in a garden and who was prying chips out of XT clones in the 1980’s, the tech and farm work will always have some kind of overlap. Even if it’s simply applying Senge’s Fifth Discipline concepts of systems thinking.

Beyond that, I am materially involved in writing a follow-on standard to IEEE/IEC/ISO 32657 but about Observability with a bunch of other awesome tech people as well.

Because of these three major areas of effort, I have been rolling back much of my time spend with the local Boston DevOps community as an organizer. I now only really help to organize the monthly meetup and am an at-large director on the Boston DevOps Network board. At one point, I was the president (handed that off), one of three core organizers of DevOpsDays Boston for years, organizing the meetup, and moderating the community Slack. Stepping up sometimes means stepping aside and I knew I had to create a vacuum in much of these spaces to expect anyone else to fill them eventually. For five years, this volunteer work taught me a lot but ultimately I had to move on to new things.

A Quick Note on Volunteering

Volunteering with non-profits is usually taken for granted, particularly in agriculture and certainly municipal and federal oversight hardly questions when there are volunteers in play. But for-profit farms, even if they’re very small ones, are expected to confirm to the same labor and reporting requirements as any other business. Volunteering on for-profit farms is not only looked at funny, it often falls into legal grey areas that the farmers just don’t want to tread.

To be clear, equitable compensation is a problem in U.S. farm labor, so much so that great states like Massachusetts have CLEAR guidelines on the matter. However, there are well-known organizations such as WWOOF to help place people on farms in legal, safe, and short-term engagements.

Fortunately, there alternative approaches which agro-curious or otherwise interested parties can use to deepen their understanding and experience in farming. One is to become a CSA member and make themselves available to join occasionally as ‘educational experiences’ over low-complexity, low-risk activities such as veg harvesting and around-the-farm field maintenance.

Side-note: strangely enough, some white-collar corporations often contract with agricultural businesses to host on-farm team building experiences, “farm days” and meals afterward for a modest hosting fee from the farm. With contracts and libility shields and money exchanging hands in a way that governing bodies can tax, this apparently is okay. Though I won’t scoff too hard at this motion becuase it represents often necessary additional income, it does distract farm staff from their primary operations with ‘agro-glam’. People who are just visiting often do the work wrong or quit when it gets hard, so the work you assign them just has to start with low-complexity and low-risk activities (often repetitive like pulling beets or cleaning onions). They corpos can quit when they want to or mess up a bunch without it negatively affecting your bottom line on the farm.

My point is that finding the right-fit of farm and developing a relationship with its owners isn’t hard, but might take a while if you haven’t already done so by being a member of local CSAs and events.

Look Ma, I Got a Job!

So this year, I’m starting as part-time help at Marshview Farm in Ipswitch. Jamie the farmer, is the kindest and hardest working SMB owner I’ve ever met. The people he has on his crews are great folks too. His operations are well-designed and his approach to procedures includes a teaching element that I deeply appreciate.

But I don’t want to just work hard (which there will be plenty of), I also want to learn hard (deeply, rapidly, enduringly). So I’m approaching it as an internship in farming operations, or said another way, like a PhD student approaches their self-directed academic program.

I also want to bring more than just the labor to the crew. I’m developing my bread-making skills :D as well as a portfolio of CSA-focused recipes to help drive the demand for produce. In part, it’s because I subscribe to the mantra “create more value than you capture”; but more practically, my summer research proved to me that not marketing excellent farm work leaves money on the table and I want this crew to benefit as much as I can from my involvement as possible.

Notes and Sharable Info

Every day, I’ll be maintaining my own notes, future action items, and key takeaways. I’ll be taking photos of plants, their development, and what I do with my CSA share. I’ll be publishing my own summaries of the enduring values and experiences, what makes sense to publish, and only those that would be permissioned or appreciated by Jamie.

As a tech nerd, I’ve also built my own small feifdom of homelab services to:

  • Automatically transcribe and summarize my own voice notes, since I’ll be capturing thoughts while I work and my hands will be busy/dirty
  • Classify areas of focus and automatically generate research paths (questions, data lakes, common sub-topics)
  • RAG and langchain activities supporting the above (using local ollama on GPU-enabled Kubernetes nodes)
  • Interpret images, identify species and characteristics, and add that as timeseries associated metadata
  • Bucket, store, and dispose of various input data(s)

Ultimately, I want to develop a complete timeline from origin to publication of what I choose to share. I need to not only design the supporting pipeline for this, but understand and control how the data flows through it. This means NOT shipping it across cloud boundaries…rather run it with safe and air-gappable components in my own homelab.

At the end of the day (literally), I have reserved no more than 30mins at the end of each farm day to consolidate and publish this work.

Regular Review and Feedback

I’ll be reviewing key areas of further development with Jamie at appropriate times in the season, since the farmer life is terribly busy. I might even find ways to highlight and promote the work on that farm for their customers and the local market. My feedback will be focused on small but potent improvements, such as communications and possible tech improvements, but likely not the operational activities about which I am in pure learning mode.

My hope is to further develop my relationship with Jamie and the rest of the crew without being ‘intense’ about it. Feedback comes in all forms, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud, obscure and clear, so I’ll be “all ears” as they say, looking for ways to put the feedback into use in real-time.

Research Inputs

I’ll also be listening to a lot of content while in the field. Since wifi and cell signal is usually poor on farms, not to mention wasteful of data plan, I’ll have to be queueing up content that gets aggregated to audio sources. Youtube, audiobooks, articles, podcasts…it all has to be ‘hands off’ so I can work efficiently.

Fortunately, I have a small bank of old phones that I can use as my ‘field device’ so as not to damage my current phone. Even in offline mode, this can be used for listening but also photos/videos and audio recordings of my notes without worrying about too much dirt in pockets ruining a device.

I’ll also be looking for off-farm places to learn…farming moonlight sessions, local conferences, even the weekly farmer’s markets.

Research Outputs

As mentioned, I’m likely going to consolidate all my (public) notes to something like an Obsidian repo/site that’s easy for non-tech folks to navigate as well as reference from this blog. It will likely be a subdomain of paulsbruce.io because I like to have some providence over my information infrastructure and don’t trust ‘free’ services like Medium to not charge readers without my consent.

These notes will likely include:

  • information on varieties of crops I help to grow in New England Zone 6a/b
  • steps taken to protect outdoor crop production, such as Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and organic methods of disease prevention
  • combinations of system inputs and conditions to improve soil health and crop viability
  • recipes for CSA produce week-over-week
  • grants (particularly private ones), their sources, criteria, and other related considerations

Also this summer, I plan to take my friend Arnie’s offer up of using his theater space in Rockport to host meaningful farmer-to-consumer discussions, panels, presentations, maybe even a short documentary film showing or two. This will likely be tricky though as panelist farmers tend to be completely unavailable while the busy season is in effect. But people need to know what’s going on, what challenges we face, and how to do so together as a community.

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