Farming asks a lot of us. We are rising with the sun, tuning into the ebbs and flows of the season, oftentimes prioritizing the farm’s needs over our own. How many times have you rescheduled plans because the farm took over your life or you were too tired to hang out? We give a lot of ourselves to farming, sacrificing social lives and sometimes even our physical well being. What can no doubt snap us back to off-farm realities is when we need to step up for someone else who is in need of care – a friend recovering from a car accident, an elderly parent, a partner struggling with long Covid, a neighbor with a broken leg, a sibling struggling with their mental health, a young child.

Carework is something that almost all of us participate in, in one form or another and at different points in our life. It is necessary and unrelenting work that can go unpaid and unseen by society. As farmworkers, how do we balance taking care of the people we care about while also balancing the all-consuming monster of farm work? How do we prioritize our time? How do we negotiate for time off or a more relaxed schedule? How do we have hard conversations with our bosses about what we are going through? And, maybe most importantly, how do we take care of ourselves amidst it all?

Join us at our upcoming Free School teach-in where Laura Fredrickson-Gosewisch, farmer, bodyworker and farmer mental health advocate, will help us answer those questions for ourselves. We will explore what can change for us when we think about finding balance as a practice rather than a state of being. We will also be joined by farmworkers who will share their own journeys with balancing farmwork with caring for others in their life and how that shaped their relationship with farming.

Register Now!

There will be time for Q&A and discussion so bring your questions!

Please note that Free School for Farmworkers sessions are a farmworker-only space.

*We define a farmworker as someone working on a farm they do not own, for or without pay, including interns, apprentices, cooperative workers and aspiring farmworkers. If you have questions about whether you are eligible to participate, please contact Anita Adalja at anita@notourfarm.org

Free School for Farmworkers strives to create pockets of opportunity to skill share, connect and learn about parts of agriculture that can be overlooked, forgotten or hoarded due to the nature of working on farms under capitalism.

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