Who works on NOFA organic farms? Becca Berkey PhD Candidate, Antioch University New England

The Survey Tool (Survey Gizmo) Creation Distribution

Prioritizing Areas for Analysis Alignment with Research Questions market for organic products, pay for workers, housing, and policies feedback about the types of membership & benefits farmers’ values and practices Prioritizing with NOFA’s Interstate Council

Methods of Analysis Excel & SPSS Thematic Coding of Qualitative Data

Response Rates

% Respondents Based on Farms in State

Types of Workers on Farms

Workers by Type, Raw Numbers- Paid

Workers by Type, Raw Numbers- Unpaid

% of Workers in 1st Year on Farm

Pay Mean, Median, and Mode of Lowest & Highest Paid Workers, Hourly Rate; N = 124 for lowest paid (Standard Deviation 2.84), N = 118 for highest paid (Standard Deviation 4.62)

Benefits by Type to Benefits-Eligible Workers

Retention Converted to Categorical Data Farms categorized as: Low Retention (if more than 31% of their workers were in their first year on the farm) Medium Retention (11-30% of workers in their first year on the farm) High Retention (less than 10% of workers in their first year on the farm)

ANOVA- Wage & Retention No statistically significant relationship found between lower- paying jobs & retention Highest Paying Farms + Retention

Looking Closer. . . 3 = Low 2 = Medium 1 = High The statistically significant relationship here indicates that medium retention farms are paying an average of $2.65/hour more than high retention farms.

ANOVA- Benefits & Retention

Looking Closer. . . 3 = Low 2 = Medium 1 = High Here there are several significant relationships where medium retention farms again offer on average 1.79 more benefits than high retention farms, and in addition offer 1.27 more benefits on average than low retention farms.

Unemployment Insurance

Unemployment Insurance by State- NH, NY, and ME

Labor challenges in retaining a stable workforce Emergent Themes money constraints, pay, and wages housing the availability of reliable, experienced, and qualified workers the seasonality of the work problems with H2A, tax, and insurance paperwork

Supports & constraints in enacting values NOFA & MOFGA Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and local markets customers and consumers other grants, organizations, and workshops off-farm income family Constraints money, costs, and finances government and regulations (both federal and local) capital and costs of inputs (labor, seeds, irrigation, soil) getting a premium in the market and consumer knowledge of the product lack of infrastructure and inability to secure grant funding time

What does other research tell us and how does this data compare? The National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS)- data collected 2005-2009 (looking at poverty among farmworkers) United States Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture, 2007 (covers types of agriculture and information about operators)