The curious case of ecological farm interns: on the populism and political economy of agro-ecological farm work

ABSTRACT

This article examines how farm interns, as a new group of non-waged agricultural workers, have come to support marginally or non-profitable agro-ecological farms in Ontario, Canada. Are farm interns potential agents of social change alongside farmers or are they being recruited onto farms because of the precarious economic situation of their agro-ecological farm hosts? I engage with this question through drawing on debates in agrarian studies arguing that farm interns should be understood as a contemporary manifestation and negotiation of the agrarian question that re-works a number of historical agrarian trends.

KEYWORDS:

• Farm internships
• agrarian question
• populism
• political ecology
• agro-ecology
• political economy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the three anonymous referees who provided such thoughtful reviews of this piece. I am also appreciative of Jun Borras’s and Jacqueline Morse’s work in supporting this piece through to publication. My collaboration with Charles Levkoe has been incredibly generative and informed this paper in any number of ways. I’m also very grateful for the farm workers, owners and others that took time out of their busy lives to thoughtfully answer our questions. I am thankful for feedback on the paper from audiences at the 2016 World Congress of Rural Sociology, the 2016 ASFS/AFHVS/CAFS Annual Conference and the Department of Geography at the University of Guelph. Ryan Isakson, Scott Prudham and Tony Weis provided indispensable commentary and guidance as this piece developed. Students in my graduate course on agrarian questions (co-taught with Isakson) provided insightful feedback on this piece. Sam Walker, Bryan Dale and Heidi Tripp provided key support as research assistants along the way. I accept responsibility for the final product, including any remaining shortcomings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Michael Ekers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His current research draws on debates on the political economy of nature and agrarian change to understand the role and significance of non-waged workers on agro-ecological farms in Ontario, Canada. He draws on these same debates in investigating the financialization and colonial enclosure of forestlands in British Columbia, Canada. He also has long-standing interest in the work of Antonio Gramsci and is a co-editor (with Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus) of Gramsci: Space, Nature Politics (2012). Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 A note on terminology: in the ecological farming sector, farmers and those seeking on-farm training use the terms internship and apprenticeship interchangeably. In the spirit of simplifying the language in this article I use the word internships exclusively instead of both descriptors.

2 This legislation includes the Government of Ontario (2000) Employment Standards Act, 2000, the Ministry of Labour’s (2011; 2015) regulations covering internships and exceptions to the Employment Standards Act (see Lambek 2017). Almost all internships that are not run formally through a college or university breach the Ontario Employment Standards Act insofar as the labour of interns almost always constitutes a net benefit to employers. In such cases, interns are legally workers protected by the full provisions of the Employment Standards Act (see Mandryk 2017). However the issue is that the Employment Standards Act is weekly enforced in terms of intern rights and legal protections.

3 For more detailed comments on the survey methods and results see Ekers et al. (2016).

4 I rely on these ‘older’ debates here as the focus on agricultural production in the literature from the 1970s and 1980s serves as an important rejoinder to many current debates on food that typically overlook the moment of production. However, deploying this literature here also raises some issues regarding terminology. While Smith uses the term ‘peasant’ here in relation to Bernstein, Smith's piece is focused on petty-commodity producers and as readers will know, for Bernstein, almost all peasants are petty-commodity producers and Smith (1989) himself suggests that the concept of petty-commodity producers is more analytically precise than that of peasants. So while some of the writers I draw on use the term ‘peasant’ to describe certain producers, they are often doing so, despite themselves, in a way that is synonymous with the term ‘petty-commodity producer.’ My focus in this article is entirely on petty-commodity producers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council [Grant Number 430-2014-01079].