Will Work For Food: Agricultural Interns, Apprentices, Volunteers and the Agrarian Question Forthcoming in Agriculture and Human Values Michael Ekers, Charles Z Levkoe, Samuel Walker, Bryan Dale Abstract Recently, growing numbers of interns, apprentices and volunteers are being recruited to work seasonally on ecologically-oriented and organic farms across the global north. To date, there has been very little research examining these emergent forms of non-waged work. In this paper, we analyze the relationships between non-waged agricultural work and the economic circumstances of small- to medium-size farms and the non-economic ambitions of farm operators. We do so through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of farmers’ responses to two surveys we conducted of farmers using non-waged workers in Ontario, Canada. We situate our analysis within debates on the agrarian question, which we contend requires an account for both the economic and non-economic dimensions of new forms of non-waged work on farms. We suggest that many ecologically-oriented farm operators are struggling financially and report low gross on-farm revenues and personal incomes. We argue that in addition to relying on off-farm incomes and self- exploitation, many farms are managing to persist in a challenging economic climate through their use of intern, apprentice and volunteer labour. However, we also suggest that the growth of non- waged work on farms is not simply being driven by economic processes but also a series of non- economic relationships focused on non-institutional farmer training, the pursuit of sustainability and social movement building. We suggest, the ‘economic’ and ‘non-economic’ dimensions of internships, apprenticeships and forms of volunteerism sit uneasily alongside of one another, generating questions about the politics, ethics and sustainability of non-waged work and ecological farming. Acknowledgements This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge support from the organizations that supported the distribution of our survey and the farmers and farm operators that completed the survey. Heidi Tripp’s work as a Research Assistant was also invaluable in preparing this article. Introduction Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of non-waged seasonal internships, apprenticeships and short-term volunteer positions on small- and medium-size ecologically- oriented farms across Canada, the United States and Western Europe. Although unpaid family labour has historically been a central feature of many farming operations, there is a growing trend of non-family members working seasonally outside of a formal wage relation. In a typical non-waged farm internship, individuals provide their labour with little or no monetary compensation, but are often given some combination of training, accommodation, meals and a small stipend in return. These internships are growing increasingly prevalent on small- and medium-size ecologically-oriented farms1 that adhere to a wide range of ecological principles in their design and management of food production. On-farm internships, apprenticeships and volunteer experiences are increasingly a hot- button issue amongst farmers, activists and organizers within ‘food movements’ and the agricultural sector. In part, this stems from the uncertain legality of non-waged labour arrangements, especially after a 2013 case in British Columbia, Canada where two non-waged farmworkers submitted a formal complaint to the Ministry of Labour claiming that their work arrangement did not meet provincial employment standards and were awarded several months’ worth of back wages (Arnason 2013; there have also been similar cases throughout the United States). In another telling case, WWOOF, the international volunteer farm network, decided to change the meaning of the association’s acronym from “Willing Workers on Organic Farms” to “World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.” The change came from concerns about using the word “workers” and ways it might be perceived as contrary to labour regulations set by various governmental authorities in affiliated countries (see Yamamoto and Engelsted 2014). Beyond these cases, in both Canada and the United States (US) legal debates are underway examining the legality of unpaid internships in the context of deep agricultural exceptions to labour laws that exist across North America (Endres et al. 2010; Endres and Armstrong 2013; Hamilton 2011; Kalyuzhny 2012). Furthermore, farmers and rural activists have begun to debate the ethics and 1 In this paper, we use the term “ecologically-oriented” to refer to farms that adhere to a wide range of ecological principles in their design and management of food production, and that have adopted various philosophical and practical applications of technical, generational and experiential knowledge (e.g., politics associated with farmers’ use of intern labour and the absence of a formal wage afforded to interns. These debates have included the viability of internships as a means of farmer training, the potentially exploitative character of non-waged work and the long-term sustainability of such a model for on-farm labour (for example, see Marr 2012a, 2012b). Given the proliferation of new forms of non-waged work on farms and the popular and legal debates regarding this work, it is surprising that this growing issue has not garnered more scholarly attention. What literature does exist focuses on travel and leisure (McInstosh and Campbell 2001; Miller and Mair 2014) and new farmer training (McIntosh and Bonnemann 2006; Kalyuzhny 2012). However, we lack substantive research on the scale of internships, apprenticeships and volunteer positions, the economic and non-economic processes driving this trend, and the social, political and environmental dilemmas these forms of work might pose for farmers and non-waged workers.2 In short, there is very little substantive data of any kind focused on internships, apprenticeships and volunteer work and their significance for ecologically-oriented farms. This is in contrast to the excellent in-depth studies examining the racialized, and precarious forms of work on conventional and ecological farms (for example, see Barndt 2002; Brown and Getz 2008a; 2008b, Gray 2014; Guthman 2004; Levitte 2010; Mitchell 1996; Sachs et al. 2013; Wells 1996). In this paper we seek to provide a sustained empirical and theoretical account of the scale and manifestation of farm internships in Ontario, Canada and the co-mingling of economic and non-economic factors at play in the growth of non-waged work and the contradictions therein. We report on the results of two provincial-wide surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015 of farmers utilizing intern, apprentice and volunteer labour in Ontario, Canada. We outline and discuss the reliance of producers on non-waged labour, which has allowed many farms to reproduce themselves despite being largely unprofitable. We argue that the reliance on non-waged labour in the ecologically-oriented farming sector should be understood as a contemporary negotiation of 2 We use the term “non-waged labour” and “interns” (as well as apprentices and volunteers) interchangeably in this paper to refer to farmworkers that are not immediate family and are compensated for their labour in ways that can be described as non-conventional and quasi-legal. For example, non- waged farm workers in Canada are frequently considered interns, apprentices and volunteers and are paid less than minimum wage. However, at times they are treated as employees insofar as contributions are made to Employment Insurance, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and the Canadian Pension Plan. In other cases, farmers have more informal relationships with their non-waged workers, in which the legal requirements of the Employment Standards Act (in Ontario) are not met. the agrarian question, which focuses on how petty commodity producers are able to persist within a dominantly capitalist farming sector and the associated competitive pressures they face (Kautsky 1988[1899]; Guthman 2004; Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010a; Bernstein 2010). Ryan Galt (2013: 346) suggests that ‘the reserves of resistance’ that allow marginally profitable Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms to exist “include the ability to self-exploit, including [through] ‘underconsumption’, or forgoing the basic needs of the individuals in the family.” To this, we suggest that enrolling interns, apprentices and volunteers on farms represents another means - or temporary negotiation of the agrarian question - through which ecologically-oriented farms can survive in the context of an industrialized and corporatized agricultural sector. However, we also argue that the emergence of internships on farms cannot simply be understood as a narrow ‘economic’ issue as this growing phenomenon is partially being driven by a series of non-economic relations that include a non-institutionalized approach to farmer training and the pursuit of environmental sustainability and alternative modes of food production. In advancing this argument we build on studies of alternative agriculture, which suggest that although farms are entangled within a broad set of political economic processes, such forces are mediated through a series of non-economic relationships that shape production practices in ways that create both opportunities and challenges for progressive forms of ecologically sustainable agriculture (Buck et al. 1997; Brown and Getz 2008a, 2008b). We argue that the the co-mingling of economic and non-economic motives and relations creates a series of contradictions that farmers and interns must negotiate around the effectiveness and dependability of interns, apprentices and volunteers, associated ethical and political questions, and the challenge of interns accessing land in their drive to continue to farm in the absence of a substantive wage. We begin by elaborating on our contribution to the literature and our understanding of the agrarian question. Next we discuss the methods underpinning this study. We then present a brief discussion of some general trends in the Ontario agricultural sector, which acts as a foil for our discussion of some of the counter-trends among our sample population of ecologically-oriented farms. Reporting on the results and our analysis of our survey data and comparing them to broader provincial trends, we provide a quantitative context regarding the types of farms making use of non-waged labour. Next we examine the dependency of farmers on intern labour, and their motivations for bringing non-waged workers onto to their farms. We close the discussion by examining the contradictions and dilemmas that interns, apprentices and volunteers pose for farmers and the farm sector. Farm work and the agrarian question Finding and maintaining dependable farm labour presents a challenge for farm operators due to the intensive labour required for small- and medium-sized farming (e.g., limited mechanization), and the nature of farm work (e.g., seasonal fluctuation, long hours, physical labour, specific skills and knowledge requirements, and negative cultural attitudes). Further, the low profit margins from fresh produce and livestock (Qualman 2011; Wiebe 2012) can make it difficult to employ workers on a full-time basis. In attempts to find reliable and ‘affordable’ agricultural labour, many farmers have sought support from state-led temporary migrant worker programs and have hired undocumented workers. The historical roots of these practices and precarious conditions of the workers are increasingly being documented and critiqued (see for example Estabrook 2011; Gray 2013; Holms 2013). Some farmers and many industry groups have been at the forefront of exerting downward pressure on farm wages and advocating for continued agriculture exceptions to labour law, health and safety regulations and collective bargaining (Faraday et al. 2012; Mitchell 1996, 2012). As Margaret Gray (2013), among others (Guthman 2004; Press and Arnould 2011) have suggested, agrarian imaginaries emphasizing bucolic family farms and the assumed virtues of local food often hide the precarious, migrant and racialized labour that underpins organic food production. This point also possibly holds true in the context of intern labour, which is largely obscured by images of small organic farms and the imagined ‘families’ running these operations. And although many farmers are very upfront about the pivotal role that non-waged workers play on their farms, there is little public knowledge of these work arrangements. However, to fully understand the growth of non-waged internships on farms, we suggest that it is necessary to engage with debates on the agrarian question that highlight how precarious family and peasant farms manage to reproduce themselves despite normative expectations of their decline. The agrarian question, as Kautsky (1988[1899]) initially wrote, involves accounting for the persistence of small-size farms in the face of capitalist-led industrialization and the significance of this phenomenon for socialist and communist political projects (also see Bernstein 2009). Although we cannot do justice to the extensive and varied approaches to the agrarian question in the confines of this paper, we want to signal several points that are germane to our argument (for useful summaries of these debates see Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010a, 2010b; Bernstein 2009, 2010; Deere 1987). Many accounts of agrarian production highlight the difference that ‘nature’ makes in the capitalization of agriculture and the adoption of wage-labour in the sector (Mann and Dickinson 1978; cf. Henderson 1999; Kautsky 1988[1899]). As Mann and Dickinson (1978: 465) suggested in a seminal piece, non-capitalist farms (which they describe as “family labour farms”) in which there is no clear separation between capital and labour, “continue to exhibit a remarkable vitality precisely in those countries where the capitalisation of industry has progressed the furthest.” They argued that distinctions between working time and production time associated with agricultural production have resulted in farmers relying on creative forms of labour recruitment, retention and compensation as they seek to meet their variable and seasonal labour demands (see also Errington and Gasson 1994; Henderson 1999; Mitchell 1996, 2012). Many of these issues and processes are at work on both ‘conventional’ and ecological farm operations but, as Buck et al. (1997) suggest, ecologically-oriented farms have unique production demands as labour is used to complete many tasks such as pest-control, weeding and composting that are accomplished by chemical inputs in the conventional agriculture sector. In this respect, labour needs on ecologically-oriented farms are more intensive than on conventional farms, which makes the ‘labour question’ even more important. The agrarian question is not simply about how the specificities of nature shape on-farm production process, as attention is paid to the social relationships that shape farm operations. To be more specific, numerous scholars have suggested that the perseverance of family farms stems from the endurance of non-commodified labour and the persistence of the peasantry (Akram- Lodhi and Kay 2010a; Bernstein 1979; Friedmann 1980; Goodman and Redclift 1981). The central point of this debate is that peasant and family farms are able to exist alongside their industrialized counterparts because of their use of familial and community-based labour, and through self-exploitation (Friedmann 1978; Shanin 1973; Thorner 1986). Feminist interventions have focused on women’s unpaid and domestic labour on farms, which has allowed for the social reproduction of those farms and the farm families (Collins and Gimenez 1990; Friedmann 1990). More recently, Galt (2013) has suggested that CSA farmers in California navigate the agrarian question through processes of self-exploitation that is partly driven by an ethical commitment to alternative agriculture and a sense of obligation to their members. These bodies of literature illustrate that inherent to the agrarian question is the comingling of political economic processes with relations of gender and kinship situated within a broader moral economy. To this literature, we add the issue of non-wage labour to the debate revolving around the reproduction of farms through both economic and non-economic means. Our findings confirm some of Galt’s and other’s conclusions about the importance of self-exploitation, but we also stress how farmers are negotiating the agrarian question through a reliance on non-waged interns, apprentices and volunteers. The final point we want to highlight from the literature is that many small- to medium- size farms are not seeking a return on a significant outlay of capital, which is perhaps a phenomenon somewhat unique to the agricultural sector.3 The literature discusses how some farmers tend to be most concerned with annual and generational reproduction, which allows such operations to survive on much slimmer profit margins than would be possible in the conventional agricultural sector (Chayanov 1966[1924]; Scott 1977; Van der Ploeg 2013). However, Harriet Friedmann’s (1978) early work suggests that unpaid work on farms, and specifically kinship labour, was not simply a means of reproducing the farm in the face of market pressures, but also allowed specialized household wheat producers to outcompete larger and explicitly capitalist farms. While it is true that non-waged labour on farms cuts both ways, the specific functioning of non-waged labour - as a means of reproduction or as a competitive advantage - will partially be a historical and empirical question. As we suggest below, in the context of alternative agriculture in Ontario, non-waged internships is one of the principal means through which marginally- or non-profitable farms are reproducing themselves. To summarize, the agrarian question entails accounting for the specificity of nature-based forms of production and the unique forms of labour performed on farms, including unpaid family and community work and the self-exploitation of farmers. Here we want to flag that the rise of non-waged work on ecologically-oriented farms is no aberration but rather reflects a history of 3 It is possible to overstate the uniqueness of agriculture, as many small businesses have both social and environmental motives that they attempt to support through their marginally profitable business operations. non-commodified labour on farms. It is our contention that, despite this enduring phenomenon of non-waged agricultural work, current trends reflect a contemporary manifestation of the agrarian question in which interns, apprentices and volunteers represent a source of non-commodified labour that allow farms to reproduce themselves and establish a niche within the broader agricultural sector. Methods This study is based on two online surveys that we conducted between December and March in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 that targeted small- and medium-size ecologically-oriented farms in Ontario using non-waged labour. With over 50,000 farms in Ontario, we elected to focus on farms that were using non-waged labour instead of establishing a representative sample of all farms in Ontario, which we judged as prohibitively time- and resource-intensive. In this respect, our study has focused on non-waged workers in a specific segment of agriculture rather than throughout the entire sector. Survey respondent recruitment was both targeted and based on open invitations. We sent the survey to a list of 240 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in Ontario (retrieved from http://csafarms.ca). Additionally, the surveys were distributed through a number of listservs hosted by non-profit organizations that focus on training new farmers and facilitating non-waged farm experiences. While some farms received the survey multiple times, the final data was adjusted to include only one entry per farm (taking the most complete response). In total we received 200 unique responses, of which 139 were complete. We also drew statistical data from the Canadian Census of Agriculture to augment our own data set and compare responses to our survey with broader trends in the agricultural sector. The surveys were comprised of a mixture of closed and open questions. Closed questions focused on: (1) collecting information about farm characteristics (on- and off-farm income, farm size, types of farm production and marketing strategies etc.); (2) the different types of workers on farms (‘temporary foreign workers,’ workers receiving at least minimum wage, workers receiving less than minimum wage and non-waged workers) and the identity of workers as reported by farmers; and (3) whether or not farms were dependent on non-waged workers. Open questions focused on: (1) the benefits and challenges associated with using non-waged workers; (2) the reasons for being dependent, or not, on non-waged workers; and (3) farmers’ perspectives on whether they would be willing to pay workers a minimum wage if they had the financial resources. Quantitative survey responses were analyzed by producing descriptive summary statistics to provide an aggregated account of the scale, prevalence, characteristics of farms and non- waged work on farms and the question of dependency. Our quantitative analysis is based on farmers that use non-waged workers and a smaller number of respondents that completed the survey that do not have non-waged workers on their farms (n~29). We performed correlations between responses related to farm size, annual gross revenue, personal on- and off-farm income and the number and percentage of different types of waged and non-waged workers. We also completed t-tests to determine if the mean values for variables were statistically significantly different between those that self-reported dependency on non-waged labour and those that did not. Finally, qualitative survey responses based on open-ended questions were coded and organized into emergent categories based on commonalities between the responses. Setting the scene To begin, we want to signal several key trends in the Ontario agricultural sector, which provide a backdrop for some of the developments on ecologically-oriented farms that we discuss. The pattern for decades in Ontario has been one of consolidation of small farms by (and into) larger, more heavily capitalized farms. This pattern is consistent with trends taking place throughout Canada (Qualman 2011) as well as in the US and many other countries (Weis 2007). To take just a twenty-year period, from 1991 to 2011, the number of Ontario farms smaller than 560 acres decreased nearly 28% while those 560 acres or larger increased over 23% (Statistics Canada 2011a). The number of farms making less than $500,000 in annual gross farm receipts (all currency in CAD) decreased nearly 30%, whereas those taking in $500,000 or more nearly doubled (Statistics Canada 2011b). Aggregated data indicates that Ontario farmers face serious financial challenges. For example, on average they are spending 84 cents in expenses for every dollar of receipts (Statistics Canada 2011c). The National Farmers Union (NFU) (2011: 11) points out that Ontario farmers’ incomes from the market are not only low but are actually falling, stating that, “[a]djusted for inflation, the realized net farm income today is less than it was during the Great Depression.” These financial challenges can be attributed to rising costs of agricultural inputs (such as fertilizers, fuel and seeds), stagnating farm-gate income and retailers capturing an increasing amount of profits that have come with rising food prices (NFU 2011; Statistics Canada 2011c). This “cost-price squeeze” is having a detrimental impact on farmers’ livelihoods worldwide, and is a common feature of the contemporary global food economy (Weis 2007), compelling farmers to “get big or get out” of agriculture. Yet, as the NFU (2011: 11-12) argues, Ontario farmers who remain small also face inequity in terms of government program payments disproportionately subsidizing larger farms. These trends are paralleled by increasing debt loads among farmers, with Canadian farms on average facing a 1:23 ratio of net dollars earned to dollars owed in debt (NFU 2010). The systemic pressures to scale up mean that farm operators are often forced into debt, incurring not only hefty operational costs but also increasing capital costs, as they must purchase expensive farm machinery and larger parcels of land on credit to remain competitive. High prices for arable land in Ontario, brought about through urbanization and financial speculation, mean that not only are large-size farmers going into debt, but smaller-size operators are being driven out of farming altogether. In light of the consolidation and capitalization of agricultural in Ontario, it is important to explore how a new generation of small- to medium-size farms are emerging given the conjunctural challenges they face in the agricultural sector. With these contextual considerations in mind, we turn to our survey results on the use of non-waged work in Ontario agriculture. Farm characteristics Overall, the farms in our sample diverged significantly from the average Ontario farm (see Tables 1 and 2 below). In terms of farm size, the mean cultivated area was 69 acres, with the maximum being 950, showing the relatively small size of these operations. Comparatively, across the province there are only 29.7% of farms that are 69 acres or smaller, whereas 16.4% of farms are over 400 acres (Statistics Canada 2011a). 16.8% of farms in our sample had free or