Government Cracks Down on Organic Farming Internships

When someone without much agricultural experience decides that they'd like to be a farmer, it can be hard to locate educational opportunities to get started. An internship is a fantastic opportunity for folks to try their hand at the trade before diving in, both to see if this is something they really want to do full-time and to have a guiding hand to smooth out that learning curve.  Sustainable and organic farms have a long history of providing these internships because, let's face it, farming is hard work and farmers need all the help they can get. In exchange for a few days to many months of free labor, these farmers provide room, board, their accumulated wisdom, and occasionally a small stipend. It's the sort of exchange almost any college student is familiar with when they do a summer internship.

Recently, however, the government has been cracking down on these small and organic farms for these common internship practices. Farms like County Line Harvest have been fined thousands of dollars for payroll violations. This news blew my mind a little when I heard about it; I wondered how it was that such a mutually beneficial arrangement could be illegal. After all, my poor friends fresh out of film school were making copies and running errands for Hollywood execs, working long hours for no pay while getting nothing in return but the vain hope that someone might take pity upon them and offer an equally grueling, but paid job. It seems totally unfair that the latter internship could be considered legally sound, while the former is deemed a violation.

While I suspect a good number of these Hollywood internships would, in fact, be found illegal if the labor department came sniffing around, Triplepundit explains that farms in particular are vulnerable because they generally fail to meet two of the six criteria for a legal, unpaid internship. First, the law stipulates that "[t]he employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees." Many organic farms would probably be unable to stay afloat without interns and volunteers (and yes, volunteers are also illegal), so it's rather difficult to argue that they derive no advantage. Second, it is required that "[t]he trainees do not displace regular employees." Farm internships, although temporary, are usually a dawn-til-dusk affair, certainly full-time and certainly filling the role of an employee. Even if the farm wouldn't really be able to afford a minimum-wage employee, the intern is arguably taking the place of one.

The damage done by farms' failure to qualify for legal unpaid internship status is further compounded by the fact that farmers are technically required to purchase worker's compensation insurance, a very expensive proposition. Seabreeze Organic Farm, for example, reports having to pay the State Compensation Insurance Fund a rate of 13.45 percent of what each and every volunteer or intern would be making if they were working for minimum wages. Most small farms simply can't afford such a proposition.

Washington recently approved an exception in its labor laws for farms earning less than $250,000 a year, a move that many are hoping California will adopt as well. In the meantime, farmers are left finding loopholes, like hiring interns through non-profits like MESA, or else being suspiciously obtuse or silent about the whole topic.

America's farming population is aging, and not enough young people are rising up to take retiring farmers' places. We need to remove all the obstacles to entering this profession that we can. Beginning farmers need these internship programs just as much as the organic and small farms do, and we can't afford to lose either.

Photo credit: Ewan Traveler via Flickr