Like all of our apprentices, there’s a bit of nomad in Olivia Hess. Shortly after graduating from Hiram College, the 25-year-old from Michigan started “woofing,” a term used by young members of Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF-USA). Between stints at a vineyard in Oregon, a goat dairy in New Mexico and a permaculture farm in Georgia, she kept gravitating back to New York’s Adirondacks–to Juniper Hill Farm, where she officially fell in love with farming. After completing an internship at The Rodale Institute, in Kutztown, PA, she returned one last time to Juniper Hill for a half season before joining Glynwood’s vegetable crew this year.
Our comprehensive farmer training program was the main attraction. “I was looking for more educational opportunities,” she said. “It’s good to be a farmhand but it’s also nice to have a structured curriculum, like tractor training and soil health. Learning to plan crops, in particular, is not training you always get on farms.”
The other major difference from Olivia’s previous farming experience is our mid-Hudson location in Cold Spring. “It’s the least remote location I’ve been. I can go to town if I want and actually see other people! The natural landscape is nicely balanced and so is my work-life. The farm is mid-size and we don’t have a crazy large CSA.”
Olivia’s least and most favorite parts of farming are two sides of the same coin.
“Farming is good, hard work,” she explained. “It’s rewarding to see the result of your labor fairly quickly, which you don’t get at a lot of jobs. Every week we harvest what we’ve sown just a few months ago, then we give it to someone and they eat it and there it is! It’s simple, yet meaningful.”
But with rewards come challenges. Farming is unpredictable by nature and Olivia is a self-professed perfectionist, which, she thinks, is not a good quality if you want to be a farmer.
“You have to be very flexible and open to failure. There are always things that don’t work out, especially when you’re trying new techniques like we are,” she said, using experiments in plastic mulching and cover cropping as examples.
“I’d maybe be more comfortable learning first from other farmers’ mistakes before making my own,” she said with a grin.