Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - #FarmLife in Real Life with Sayer Palmer

00:00:00.000 i love today's episode and i think you're going to too today we are talking to a woman who wants

00:00:09.800 to pull back the curtain on a very specific kind of social media i'm a project manager community

00:00:17.160 builder and basically a never-ending problem solver um and i don't see myself in a lot of

00:00:24.880 these idealized, romanticized, nostalgic farming accounts online. A lot of things get fetishized

00:00:32.500 on Instagram. Motherhood is definitely one of those. Baking is another. Homesteading. And of

00:00:40.840 course, of course, farming. Farmlife on Instagram, or should I say hashtag farmlife on Instagram,

00:00:48.420 is seen as gorgeous and aspirational. We rarely, if ever, see the hard actual work that goes into

00:00:55.760 farming, the back-breaking labor, and the intense costs of maintaining a farm. We do see a lot of

00:01:02.580 chickens and beautiful blue eggs, but never the dirt under the fingernails or the fields that have

00:01:09.000 failed due to unpredictable weather patterns. We don't see these things because they aren't always

00:01:15.020 pretty and perfect on social media, and social media thrives on pretty and perfect.

00:01:21.980 Today we're talking about what it's really like to be a woman farmer, what it's really like to

00:01:26.920 work your land, and what it's really like to depend on your farm for a living for you and

00:01:32.180 your family. There's so much that we don't see on social media when we're served reel after reel

00:01:37.940 of hashtag farm life. Today we get to talk to Sayre Palmer. Sayre is a vegetable farmer and

00:01:45.620 farming is her sole income. It is not a hobby. She's also a mom who tries to juggle work life

00:01:52.260 with mom life. Sayre is on social media at Open Woods Farm, but she actually shows us the realities

00:01:59.640 of farm life and not just the dream of it. My name is Sayre Palmer, and I own a small

00:02:08.240 certified organic vegetable farm in New Hampshire called Open Woods. Most of my sales are direct

00:02:14.680 to consumer sales through a CSA and local farmers market. I do have a spouse and we operate under

00:02:21.140 the same business name, but he does tree work and I'm the farmer. He basically doesn't have

00:02:26.820 very much involvement with the farm, except for sometimes he helps me build greenhouses. I do

00:02:32.560 have a full-time employee and the farm is my sole source of income. So this is a job and it's not a

00:02:39.880 hobby. And we have a five-year-old daughter and she's really cool. Five-year-olds are pretty cool.

00:02:46.200 I have a four-year-old who I'm hoping is going to be cooler soon. Yeah, it's kind of my favorite age

00:02:51.560 so far. It's the first time where I've really been like, okay, time can slow down now. I'm good.

00:02:55.680 now is good. Totally, totally. My six-year-old is awesome. And I know that my four-year-old just

00:03:02.920 has to get her like four jiggles out. Like it's just, there's so many emotions happening all of

00:03:08.880 the time. And like once she chills, we're going to be in a really good place. Awesome. Definitely

00:03:17.140 relating. All right. All right. My next question is, we are living in a time when social media

00:03:27.300 makes farm work and the business of farming look beautiful and aspirational and strangely nostalgic

00:03:40.280 in a lot of ways. How is that not living up to what it is actually like to be working on a real

00:03:50.740 farm in the real world? I think that the biggest difference for me and the thing that's hardest for

00:03:57.300 me to be a person in the world with is the way it's portrayed as a hobby. I have to grow vegetables,

00:04:07.260 but I also have to sell those vegetables. I'm a marketing strategist and a payroll coordinator.

00:04:13.380 I have to maintain my organic certifications and produce safety requirements. I'm a project

00:04:19.000 manager, community builder, and basically a never-ending problem solver. And I don't see

00:04:25.300 myself in a lot of these idealized, romanticized, nostalgic farming accounts online. And that's

00:04:33.640 kind of hard and it makes it the way that I relate with people in a public setting, like a farmer's

00:04:39.160 market, a little bit different because they expect me to be more like what images they're seeing

00:04:45.380 online. I do think it's important to show the beautiful parts of farming. There's a lot of

00:04:51.380 really nice stuff here. There's a lot of really beautiful vegetables, but I do make a huge effort

00:04:56.760 to talk about the hard things and the ugly things and the devastating things and bugs having sex and

00:05:02.900 dead rodents. And I think it's nice to have that balance. I, you know, I, I think it's so nice to

00:05:09.980 have that balance too, because life is always somewhere in the middle. I say this all the time

00:05:16.140 that we get so many extremes about motherhood on social media. Like you're either the perfect,

00:05:23.120 beautiful, angelic, barefoot wearing white all the time, mother who somehow never gets dirty,

00:05:30.140 or you're the hot mess wine mom. And I think we all exist somewhere in the in-between

00:05:36.660 with the good and the bad and the ugly, but there's no place for the in-between

00:05:42.860 on social media. It is all these extremes. And I don't think reality gets amplified nearly enough,

00:05:52.600 especially not when it comes to farm life and farm labor. So I love what you're doing.

00:06:00.140 showing showing the reality of that what are some of the realities what are what are some of the

00:06:06.220 the harder things that you want to show people about what it takes to grow food it's easy to

00:06:14.200 talk about the physical aspect of it there's full days of work that require your body all day every

00:06:20.160 day I'm always covered in dirt I always have sunscreen and bug spray on which makes me more

00:06:26.440 covered in dirt. I do get to wear cute sun hats because if I wear a cute sun hat, I get to wear

00:06:31.800 less sunscreen, which means a little less dirt. But I think that the hardest thing for me to

00:06:38.340 reconcile in all of this is that this is just my job, just like anybody else has a job, just like

00:06:43.040 a teacher or a doctor or an electrician. And there's still a lot of expectation placed on me

00:06:49.820 that because I'm working from home and I'm working on what people see as a farm, they expect that my

00:06:56.280 daughter is with me all of the time and she's not. She's with her dad or she's at daycare.

00:07:02.300 And I think that it confuses my identity for me a little bit. And I don't ever really feel

00:07:10.300 comfortable in any of my roles. And so I've been working really hard on the gray area and allowing

00:07:16.760 myself to have several different identities. So I'm happy to let my work define me. I'm out in

00:07:22.400 the field all day, every day, or I'm at the computer planning spreadsheets every day. But

00:07:27.620 I can also be defined by my role as a mother. I mean, that's all I am to my daughter. And I think

00:07:33.540 I can continue to flow in and out of these several definitions that create my identity. But in

00:07:38.400 farming, it's hard to show that to people when you're working so hard all the time.

00:07:44.340 Right, right. And I do think that a lot of the hard work of farming, it's just missing from the social media. And I think it does a disservice to all of us, because I do think it's so important for us to know the labor that goes into the food that we eat.

00:08:06.640 And by kind of sanitizing that in these images that we see that are so influential, because a lot of these images on social media may be the only images that someone will ever have of a farmer, because we are so disconnected from our food. And yeah, it just it disconnects us even more from the from so much of the work that goes into it.

00:08:31.820 yeah definitely definitely you know i've done a lot of i have worked on a lot of farms where

00:08:39.700 the work day was supposed to go from seven to four but you were never let go until six or six

00:08:45.360 thirty and that's the other reality of it that you don't really see on instagram but because i

00:08:50.640 have those experiences i've done a lot of work to to balance that out i have an end time every day

00:08:56.780 i have a start time every day and no matter what i'm doing i make sure to stop and be done for the

00:09:01.800 day. That is hard to do when your paycheck revolves around whether or not your vegetables

00:09:09.180 are growing. But it's really the only way that I can reconcile farm life and family life.

00:09:15.500 Yeah, it's hard. It's so interesting to me what you said about how when people hear that you're

00:09:21.580 a farmer, they assume that your daughter is with you all the time. Number one, it's not an

00:09:29.700 assumption that we would make about a male farmer. And number two, in a lot of the farming

00:09:37.200 accounts that we see on social media, we constantly see children frolicking around,

00:09:45.120 again, because it's not showing the real labor. And I think that that makes people think, oh,

00:09:52.160 not only is this easy, but this is the kind of job where your kids can just be with you all the time.

00:09:58.960 It's so it's so idyllic. And it actually made me think I get the same thing a lot when people find

00:10:06.660 out that I'm a writer, you know, that I write books and they're like, oh, that must make it

00:10:11.880 so much easier to to have your baby home all day. And I have to correct them. And I and I try to set

00:10:18.780 the record straight as often as possible. I have full time child care because being a writer is

00:10:25.400 my full-time job. You know, when I'm not writing books or making podcasts, I'm doing all of the

00:10:32.080 administrative duties, all of the marketing and the publicity and everything that it takes

00:10:37.480 to get this content out into the world. And I don't think anyone would ever say to a male writer,

00:10:45.020 oh, it must be so easy for you to take care of your children. They would just assume you're

00:10:50.300 sitting in a room for eight hours a day, writing your novels. But for a woman, people see it as 0.99

00:10:57.160 just as a way to work and have a hobby and also raise your kids. And I think the added aspect 1.00

00:11:04.100 with farming is that it's just dangerous to have your kids around. It's not a safe environment for

00:11:09.440 a child to be in. And I talk about that a lot. I do not consider myself an influencer, but I do

00:11:15.420 rely heavily on my social media for business growth. And I'm pretty straight up with how

00:11:21.080 hard it is for me to be a mom and a farmer, simply because of the expectations that are

00:11:27.080 placed on me because of a woman. And even though I'm honest about this, I still have people show

00:11:33.040 up saying, oh, your kid is so lucky to grow up this way. And you're really raising her right.

00:11:38.620 Just I like shake my head. I'm like, just because I have a farm, I don't understand.

00:11:43.200 she won't even eat vegetables. Like, why is what I'm doing any better than what anyone else is

00:11:49.180 doing? And why is this all on me? She's an amazing person. And it's not because I have a farm.

00:11:57.200 Right. But there is this kind of cultural idea that that is the perfect childhood,

00:12:01.980 because we see these images that are that are not real.

00:12:05.540 You know, the reality of what I'm doing is does not involve sundresses. It does not involve the

00:12:12.080 color white. It does not involve cute baby animals. But it is beautiful. It's a lot of really nice

00:12:18.640 stuff going on. But I'm also farming and I'm not homesteading. And I think there's a really big

00:12:23.340 difference there that's not really talked about on social media. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's

00:12:31.460 something we're going to explore in this episode and even in further episodes because you are

00:12:37.720 farming, not homesteading, which means this is a business and you are running a business.

00:12:42.900 And that's very different from the accounts that just do hashtag homesteading, hashtag farm life,

00:12:51.520 for whom this is usually a hobby. Interestingly, we are also going to have someone on the show

00:12:58.520 who is legitimately homesteading and also wants to talk about how real homesteading

00:13:06.140 is nothing like the hashtag homesteading on social media. In reality, all of this is hard.

00:13:15.620 Like none of this is as pretty as the pictures make it seem to be. And yet, as you said,

00:13:21.740 it is beautiful. Growing food and raising food is beautiful and awesome. And I think your account

00:13:29.500 is so beautiful. I have a highly curated feed for someone who reports on social media.

00:13:39.480 I don't follow Ballerina Farm. Everyone always asks me that. They're like, oh my gosh,

00:13:43.800 if you find her irritating, don't follow her. And I'm like, I don't. People just send me things

00:13:48.180 all the time. But your account is one that I follow because I like seeing what you do. I like

00:13:55.680 getting a glimpse into your world. And I wish that more social media was legitimately getting

00:14:01.860 a glimpse into worlds that we don't usually experience, because that's cool. It is really

00:14:08.100 cool. And to be fair, I don't really follow any of those accounts either. But there is a really

00:14:13.660 amazing community of women led vegetable farms on Instagram talking about the business talking

00:14:19.640 about their daily lives. Some have kids, some don't. But I actually use Instagram as an 1.00

00:14:25.460 educational resource to that end, just because there's so many other awesome female farmers out 1.00

00:14:30.840 there willing to share their lives. Do you also feel like you have to be on social media to grow 1.00

00:14:36.840 your business? I feel like I can't get off. I would like to get off social media, but this is

00:14:41.820 how people find me and my podcasts and my books. And so it has become a necessary evil in a lot

00:14:48.060 of ways. Yeah. And I mean, that's the other undershared part of farming is that before I

00:14:54.660 grow vegetables before I'm a farmer, I'm a business owner. And I just don't, I live in a

00:14:59.340 very small rural community. And part of my success in farming is that I started right before COVID

00:15:05.240 and everyone was online. And having a social media presence and being honest with people is really

00:15:10.400 what created my customer base. I have tried to switch more towards an email platform, but I still

00:15:20.240 I still use the excuse I can't get off social media because my business needs it.

00:15:24.540 Yeah, same, same.

00:15:26.000 I have moved over to Substack.

00:15:28.160 The fact is the majority of my audience doesn't want to be on email or they want to be on

00:15:33.340 email and Instagram.

00:15:35.260 And you go where your audience is.

00:15:37.640 You go where your people are.

00:15:39.280 And for right now, that is where my people are.

00:15:42.860 So I will remain there and also on the emails and also, God forbid, the TikToks.

00:15:49.120 Time for a quick break.

00:15:50.760 When we get back, we're going to talk about what a day in the life of a real farmer actually looks like.

00:16:06.500 Can you tell me a little bit about what is a day in your life like as a farmer running a business?

00:16:12.800 What is your daily routine?

00:16:13.980 wake up and Annie wakes up shortly after me and we sort of all have breakfast and take care of

00:16:21.940 each other. And then my employee shows up at eight the night before I've sort of planned what we're

00:16:26.980 doing for the day. You know, if it's a Monday, we're going to be seating in the greenhouse and

00:16:33.720 transplanting in the field all morning. We'll have a half hour lunch, then we'll go back out

00:16:39.520 and we'll finish transplanting and irrigating. Same thing happens on Tuesday, Wednesday,

00:16:46.400 Thursday, Friday. There's a lot of fieldwork like weeding. I usually do a field walk to see what

00:16:51.960 needs to be harvested. On Fridays, we harvest and that takes most of the day. You can't just

00:16:58.500 harvest vegetables. You also have to wash them and pack them. I have record keeping requirements

00:17:03.540 because I'm certified organic. So everything that I harvest, I have a record of that. It goes into

00:17:08.980 my walk-in cooler. I do a lot of marketing on Fridays and Saturdays. And then I have my main

00:17:15.460 farmer's market on Sunday. I live where I work. So I say that I'm done at four o'clock or 4.30

00:17:21.020 in the afternoon, but that just means my employee goes home. I come in, connect with my family. I

00:17:27.000 might still be running out to irrigate. I might still be running out to put row cover on plants

00:17:31.720 if it's going to be cold. Basically, I spend December, January, and February planning what

00:17:39.480 my spring and summer is going to be like. Once the season starts, once we come to April,

00:17:46.000 I need to have everything that I need for the season purchased, all the tools and supplies

00:17:50.720 that I'll need because I know that I can't do anything except grow and sell vegetables.

00:17:54.820 I'm basically on autopilot and I rely on all the lists and spreadsheets and forms that I made

00:18:00.400 back in December to get me through the season. And I can probably pick a date and tell you

00:18:07.500 exactly what I'll be doing on that date this summer. There's a lot of planning.

00:18:12.480 Nowhere in there did you mention running barefoot through a field

00:18:18.200 in a flowered dress with a child on your hip. You didn't, amazingly.

00:18:25.060 I will say that I do wear Crocs. They're sort of my farming shoe of choice. So my feet are often

00:18:31.860 very dirty, but I would never be barefoot. Yes, yes, that is what that is what I hear

00:18:37.840 from a lot of farmers. And also, you know, the economic realities of farming,

00:18:44.880 because this is a business, there are lots of ups and downs, right?

00:18:49.800 Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I probably made 20% less income this year than I should have

00:18:57.880 just because it rained every single day and there's nothing I can do about it.

00:19:02.480 Right, right. And that's another reality that we don't see nearly enough. What are some things

00:19:09.900 that you want more people to know about being a farmer and about farm life generally?

00:19:15.880 when we were talking email i put farm life in quotation marks in the subject just because

00:19:24.460 for some reason i i hate that term so much and i think it's because this is really a job for me

00:19:31.480 it's not it's not some lifestyle that i'm aspiring to it's just what i do every day i

00:19:37.460 happened to decide that i wanted to grow vegetables for a living it's hard physical work

00:19:44.540 But it's just that for me. It's my job. It's work. It's my business. Hard stop, basically.

00:19:52.080 Yeah, I that I do not hashtag hashtag writer life. Writer life is a slog every single day.

00:20:02.300 Yeah, and I guess that's something I'd never really thought about and how

00:20:05.440 everything is presented on Instagram is that it's all this like aspiration to some other life, but

00:20:11.080 farm life is just my job.

00:20:14.540 Why did you want to be a farmer? What made you make this decision?

00:20:19.880 Oh, my goodness. It's probably a story that is pretty familiar to most other millennials.

00:20:27.920 I went to school for something entirely different than agriculture. I have a master's degree in

00:20:34.600 viola performance and Suzuki pedagogy. And at some point, I moved to New York City to teach.

00:20:42.960 and I worked in the music library at Juilliard and I was at a desk all day every day and I sort

00:20:51.520 of lost my mind and I think that I chose the most opposite direction I could think of to go in

00:20:59.500 besides sitting at a desk all day every day reading food blogs and so I moved back to my

00:21:07.660 home state of Vermont, and I started working for other farms. They don't pay very well.

00:21:14.860 There were a lot of hours. It's really not awesome to work for another farm manager oftentimes.

00:21:23.400 So I sort of decided that if I wanted my life to be sustainable or different,

00:21:28.860 that I was going to have to start my own farm business.

00:21:32.280 and the decision to start your own farm business it's not easy to get a farm off the ground right

00:21:40.060 what was the nitty what was the nitty-gritty of getting that done

00:21:42.900 that's a big question and I do want to say that I think a lot of that you know owning land being

00:21:51.280 in a position to feel comfortable enough to start your own business there's a certain amount of

00:21:56.740 inherent privilege in that. I happened to be with a partner who inherited a small amount of money

00:22:02.840 to buy a small piece of land in the middle of the woods. I did not get involved with a partner who

00:22:08.900 had lots of money to buy beautiful river bottom ag land. So we actually had to do a lot of the

00:22:14.880 land clearing here ourselves. Luckily, he does tree work. So that was within his skillset. But

00:22:21.480 it takes a lot of money and there's a lot of risk involved. I think one of the things that social

00:22:26.540 media overlooks is just how expensive it is. And you need to sort of be in a place where

00:22:34.180 you are okay taking on that amount of financial risk.

00:22:40.960 There's so many things social media overlooks. But one of the things that's really neglected

00:22:45.400 in the conversation is economics full stop, and also privilege, the ability to start a business,

00:22:52.420 and various levels of privilege when it comes to starting a business. Again, something that is not

00:23:00.420 easily encapsulated in a sexy picture, but something that is incredibly important for all

00:23:06.780 of us to see. So it is kind of a catch-22. And we know that the algorithm doesn't promote those

00:23:14.380 things the same way as it doesn't promote work. Yeah, definitely. And I think thinking about

00:23:20.760 levels of privilege is really interesting like I want to be transparent that I am a you know white

00:23:28.780 almost 40 year old woman and that comes and I have a male spouse and that comes with a certain amount

00:23:34.720 of privilege but I'm also not rich but I do think that that conversation around money is completely

00:23:41.280 absent in someone like Ballerina Farm or similar accounts they're just paying for things because

00:23:48.380 they have lots of money. Because they have money. Yes, yes, because they have money. I think that

00:23:56.200 there is a massive absence in talking about money generally in the world now, particularly on social

00:24:05.620 media. And it matters because social media is where so many of us are meeting and congregating.

00:24:12.000 And I think it is very important for us to talk about what things cost and where money comes from.

00:24:18.380 and how we get things done.

00:24:21.160 Otherwise, I think we lose touch

00:24:23.680 with what the real costs of things can and should be.

00:24:28.760 Yeah, definitely, especially related to food.

00:24:32.960 And the smaller scale you go,

00:24:35.260 the more expensive things are gonna be.

00:24:36.760 So I'm a relatively small scale farmer.

00:24:39.640 I don't have the economy of scale.

00:24:42.080 My product, whether organic or not,

00:24:44.780 has to be a little bit more expensive

00:24:46.360 to meet my operating costs.

00:24:48.380 Right. Exactly. Exactly. I really I think that this we need to have more conversations like this. What is reality? And what do we see on social media? Because they're not the same thing. And so the more that we can just talk to real people about their real lives, I think the better we're all we're all going to understand each other and the images that we're consuming online.

00:25:12.560 And it's so fascinating. Not every Instagram post of mine is some personal essay. But when I am

00:25:20.460 just honest about how I'm feeling about something, I have better engagement and better conversations.

00:25:25.360 And I'm just a happier person. Yes, yes, yes. And yes, yes, yes. Where can people find you

00:25:32.840 online? I'm on Instagram at openwoodsfarm. Wonderful. And I highly recommend everyone

00:25:40.260 and follow you because I enjoy all of the parts of your account, especially the dirty ones and

00:25:47.000 dirty in like a good like dirt way, not like filthy. There is bug sex. Okay, before we go, 0.99

00:25:54.600 before we go, you have to tell our audience about the bug sex. This gets really nerdy, 0.80

00:26:00.240 but I do a lot of beneficial insects in my high tunnels. And so I purchase ladybugs or green lace

00:26:06.840 swings and I get to watch them reproduce and it's really fun. It is fun. And frankly, you know what

00:26:13.840 I want more of on social media? Bug sex. Me too. And now that I said that out loud, Instagram's 0.99

00:26:22.660 going to serve me some real weird shit. I know it. I just... Oh, all right. Sorry. Sorry. Not 0.99

00:26:31.260 sorry. Don't listen to me, phone. Oh. And that's all we've got for today. Make sure to follow

00:26:40.420 Sayre at Open Woods Farm. You're going to love it. Sayre said this, and I want to say it again.

00:26:46.180 There's a wonderful community of real farmers on social media who show the actual realities

00:26:51.060 and the ups and downs of farm life. And as Sayre said, it is beautiful because real life is

00:26:57.880 beautiful. Now go have a great day, order a copy or two of The Sicilian Inheritance, invite me to

00:27:04.300 your book club so I can make you cannoli and get your mom drunk on limoncello. And, as always,

00:27:10.260 do not forget to do something nice for yourself. You deserve it.

00:27:27.880 Transcription by CastingWords

00:27:57.880 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - March 19, 2024

#FarmLife in Real Life with Sayer Palmer

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