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jennahslocalagroadventure · 4 years

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My Experience Garlic Farming!

I just got back from working on an organic garlic farm and it was pretty epic! Let me tell you all about it!

On July 19th, my brother and I drove down an hour from where we live to the small town of Cawston. Cawston is situated in the similkameen valley of the southern interior of british columbia. The hot climate makes the area perfect for growing produce. Vineyards and orchards go as far as the eye can see filling every slope and valley with irrigated cash crops. My brother and I decided to go to a family friend’s farm where they grow organic red russian garlic alongside their airbnb and bakery business. Mid July is when garlic is ready to be harvested, and the past two weeks I had been harvesting garlic at the other two farms I volunteer at. With farming, all the action seems to happen for everyone all at the same time, with crops ripening at more or less the same time. This means that all the farms need a bunch of workers to work for a short duration of time, but work long hard hours to get the harvest done as efficiently as possible. At the garlic farm, we had the goal to harvest three acres of garlic in the span of five days.

We decided to camp for the week to save money which ended up being a mixed bag of beans. On the positive side, I love camping and we got to camp in a nice corner of the farm property. The early mornings and evenings were nice to spend outdoors and I really appreciated the break from wifi and social media. On the downside, this particular week was HOT. Like 35 degrees and over kind of hot. And so we ended up suffering through the long afternoons after work, trying to keep cool and hydrated.

For the actual garlic harvest, we had a team of ten people picking and preparing the garlic for storage. The day would start with everyone heading to the fields to pick at 6am. Olivia, the farm manager, would drive a tractor with a flatbed trailer in tow and she would move along with us down the rows as we picked. We would make large bundles and then put them on the flatbed trailer. As we went along, the garlic would pile up higher and higher on the trailer. By the end of a row, which took all ten of us about two hours to harvest, the garlic would then be taken to the barn where we would move on to the next step of harvest: bundling and hanging the garlic. With farmer’s twine we would take two large bunches and tie them tightly together so that they could hang from wooden beams. Securing the bundles hurt my hands a lot. As I pulled the twine tight, it would dig into my hand. Eventually I got some pretty nasty blisters from this and we all used medical tape to treat the blisters.

Once the flatbed trailer load was emptied and hung, we would return to the garlic fields to pick another row. Each day we harvested three and a half rows and ended around 2pm. It was hard work. The repetitive motions of picking and tying the garlic eventually began to cause aches and pains in my wrists. My whole body hurt from bending over and kneeling to pick. The hot sun was sweltering and made everything exhausting. I think the saving grace that made the whole experience positive was the great group dynamic we had and the people who were participating. Everyone worked hard and brought a positive and eager attitude. While we picked, we would chat and joke and get to know one another. It was relaxing mentally to have a repetitive task. We all knew what we needed to do and were all shown how it was to be done and therefore there wasn’t any anxiety about whether or not we were doing a good job or not. We just had to have a good attitude and a good work ethic and persevere the elements. It made me think about how many so called desirable jobs require specialized training and skills to do, like dentistry or engineering. I felt there was a special quality to manual labor that stripped all the social flourishes off of work. It brought it down to one’s character and strength, not their level of education, status, or wealth. I liked that part of it, we all felt like equals and our worth in the job came from how hard we worked.

The people I worked with came from all sorts of different backgrounds. Together our group consisted of me, Hudson (my brother), Steve, Garrett, Melanie, Desiree, Shayla, Kammal, Dimitri, Ash, and Olivia the farm manager. Steve was an art teacher from Vancouver. Garrett was a chef and Melanie, his girlfriend worked in law. They both come from Calgary and were visiting family in the area. Desiree did seasonal farm work full time and lived with her son in a converted bus. Shayla was a massage therapist from Saskatchewan. Kammal and Dimitri both came from Europe to do seasonal work and traveled. Ash was a student and helped run his family’s farm in the next town over. Olivia came from Montreal to do seasonal work and loved it so much she decided to make Cawston her home and work on the farm full time. What I found so rewarding about this week of work was that I got to meet and hear from people who come from so many different backgrounds. Nobody that I was working with was like me which gave me an opportunity to learn something new. As we picked garlic we conversed about our backgrounds, our interests, our families, our beliefs. Having the one week to work with these people was unique due to the time constraint of one week. I think that if it had been more than a week we would have begun to get on one another’s nerves, but working more than one day allowed us to get to know one another and share a little about our lives. In this sense, it felt like summer camp. Coming away from this week I feel like I learned a lot about my privilege. By hearing some of the background stories of some of my new friends, and hearing what they were currently going through, I had my heart and mind shift on how I saw myself and others.

One thing in particular that shifted for me was getting to know some young single moms. Oddly enough, I don’t think I’ve actually hung out with a young single mom before. They were sharing their experiences and struggles with raising kids alongside making a living for their family. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must be to do that all alone. I asked whether Cawston had any childcare options, and Desiree (one of the moms) said that there were no options in the tiny town. It got me thinking about how some communities don’t even have all the resources that I would consider are essential. What is a mother supposed to do if she needs to put food on the table but also needs to love and look after her kids? I felt convicted to do something and wished I could help in some way. They continued to share how essential it has been for them to lean in on their communities for support. They get friends or neighbours to help watch their kids. When there is a need, the community just does what it takes. This mentality of doing what it takes, taking action, and getting involved out of necessity doesn’t really present itself if bigger communities like Kelowna. All the essential services of the municipality become institutionalized and we come to expect these services without ever getting personally involved. The only way we get involved is with our wallets to pay our taxes. Thinking about this made me feel sad because I believe there is so much being missed out when we don’t enter into a relationship with our community. Being in Cawston, everyone knows one another, they have one another over for beers in the evening, they help one another complete harvests and they watch one anothers kids and they look out for one another. The community gets rooted into something deep and traditional about human civilization. I think we thrive best on reciprocity.

One of the most satisfying parts of working on a farm is seeing the fruits of your labor. Sometimes, they are literal fruits, but for us on the garlic farm, we would look at the shelves of garlic that reached all the way to the roof. It feels so good to see the result of a job, to feel the ache in your muscles and the fatigue of working under the sun. Well, it doesn’t feel good, but knowing that your energy and effort went into completing a task, and seeing and feeling the finished task right in front of you, that feels good. There are so many jobs where we don’t ever experience in a tangible way the fruits of our labor. Many jobs take up our energy writing emails which pile up in a digital database, never to be admired or enjoyed again. The nice thing about physical labor jobs is there is a tangible satisfaction of a job well done. I think that I would like to continue having jobs in my life where there is a tangible result. I think that is why the trades appeal to me.

Another topic that I wanted to write about was the way that foreign workers are treated. In Cawston I got to work with and observe many foreign workers in agriculture as well as ask questions about the local’s opinion on them. Some of the foreign workers I worked with were from wealthy western European countries. Talking to them revealed that they enjoyed living a transient lifestyle and their main goal was to travel. Doing seasonal work allowed them to travel more freely as well as travel as part of their work. The choice to do this work to accommodate a lifestyle isn’t always the case for foreign workers. Many workers who come from Mexico or the Caribbean apply for this work through the seasonal agricultural worker program (SAWP). They look for work in Canada for many reasons, one reason being that they cannot find adequate employment opportunities where they live. The guidelines of the type of work employees under SAWP must adhere to are strictly based around farming and agriculture, meaning that all their work will be laborious and time consuming. Many of the farms that host foreign workers must provide housing for them, and the standards for what constitutes housing is murky. I saw shacks without any air conditioning in the farm fields as housing for foreign workers. I don’t think that is right. They are our primary workers, they are the ones who process and overlook all the food and resources we produce. Why are they not given more respect and treated like the vital workers that they are?

The impression I got from the locals about foreign workers is that they rely on them to get their jobs done, and so they are accepted. At least that was the case in Cawston, on the particular farm I was on, which was run by very kind and ethical people. After the long days of work, my brother and I would go down to the river to cool down. It was the go to destination for farm workers after a hard day's work. All along the river were tailgate parties of men who looked to be from the Caribbean. As we walked by, I was greeted with cat calls and loud remarks. At first I was offended but then I began to talk with my brother and we wondered about how their culture is different. In relatively conservative Canada, it's certainly considered bold and rude to whistle at a girl walking down the street, but perhaps that isn’t the case in other cultures. I began to wonder what other cultural hurdles foreign workers must face when they come to work in a different country. How does cultural dissonance affect the relationship between farm workers and their employers? The local community? What mindset must a community learn to have when they have a diverse range of cultures and people coming to live in such a small and intensive place like Caswton? What areas would be positive and easy? What parts of that would be difficult? The impression I got of Cawston is that people take it in stride and have gotten used to foreign workers. But what would the response be like in my city of Kelowna? Foreign workers are invisible there, they are stuck on the farms which almost nobody is allowed to enter and they stay at their accommodations on site. How would the people of Kelowna react to sharing a community with foreign workers? Would they be accepted or dismissed?

My one week in Cawston really helped me unpack some of the ideas I’ve been trying to explore through this field experience. Before I started this course, I didn’t consider the people who raise our food. I was more focused on the environmental impacts of the food industry and was worried about the ethics towards the planet rather than the ethics for people. Now I see that growing food is a fundamental humanitarian act. We need to recognize the hard workers and farmers who dedicate their lives to serving our nation. It’s so easy to take food for granted in Canada, with our giant supermarkets overflowing with food options. What is easy to forget is that the food system is an incredibly delicate system and relies heavily on the underappreciated workers in the agricultural sector. I am starting to see the value in taking a pause before consuming a meal to give thanks, not necessarily for religious reasons, but to appreciate the people who tend to the land which our food comes from. Humanity and nature have a deep relationship we cannot break away from. The earth looks after us and we, in return, must look after the earth.

I’m going to post some more thoughts on Cawston as I process the whole trip, but these are my thoughts for now on my experience working on a garlic farm! Many pictures to come too!

#agro adventure #field experience #agricultural adventures #local farming

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