Apprenticeships and internships offer an outstanding opportunity for people to learn about the practical realities of farming. Existing programs and offerings are more various than the regions they stem from, and along with notable successes there are far too many failures. This is perhaps because there is an absence of cohesive approach towards farmer/student relationships. Impatience and failed expectations contribute to most unfortunate outcomes from a system which should work better. But “system” may be the clue because what we frequently see is a glaring lack of specific contractual preparations, just the sort of back-grounding that would help to prevent many of the misunderstandings. We at the Conservancy do not pretend to fully understand these issues but we do recognize that this is an area which can benefit from a concerted effort to improve standards and practices.

Lynn Miller is working to gather materials about and from a wide variety of apprenticeship programs. A distillation of this material will be presented to a SFC working group on apprenticeships and on-farm education with the hopes that a beginning set of questions and answers might result. These would go toward  SFC’s goal of ‘suggesting’ a standardization of apprenticeship contracts.

There are other important aspects to the apprenticeship question, none-the-least of which are state labor law applications. The SFC has the seed of an idea to address this but requires the preparations which will come from the working group’s conclusions.

Small Farms Conservancy is also interested in ways to formally dovetail apprenticeships with intense and targeted clinics and workshops and as precursors and followups to the outstanding Farm Beginnings programs originally implemented by Minnesota’s Land Stweardship Project. This would be an excellent way to intelligently grow the educational process for the next breed of small farmers.

If you have a strong interest and information to share, or wish to be considered as a volunteer participant in the apprenticeship working group please go to the contact us page and send us an email or phone us 800-876-2893