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Hello Aspiring Farmer,
I’m a small farmer and a retired agriculture teacher who is seeking an aspiring farmer interested in a stay at my farm starting in spring or summer 2025. I am open to working with an inexperienced person and acting as a mentor. I feel flexible about the length of stay, could be as short as a few weeks or long term. My motivations to open my farm are that I want to empower an aspiring farmer with access to land and guidance, to see my land feed my community, and I hope to recapture the warm mentoring relationships I enjoyed with students from my past.
I currently keep 12 sheep and 30 laying hens year round. In the warm season I also raise around 30 lambs, 6 pigs, and 50 broiler chickens. I practice multi-species rotational grazing. I have a productive hobby scale fruit orchard and tend a big personal vegetable and flower garden. An intern here is welcome to express their interests and passions; I will be happy to discuss how an intern driven project might fit.
I am open to a shorter term arrangement similar to World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, WWOOF for someone wanting to fill a volunteer intern role. I am open to negotiate a profit sharing agreement with an intern who makes a season-long commitment. I am not offering a salaried position. To be transparent about money, under my solo, part-time management the farm financially does slightly better than break even. The majority of my farm income comes from selling sheep breeding stock, eggs, pork, chicken, and lamb meat. I am not marketing crops. The farm has room to expand both the number of livestock and area in crop production. I see potential for increasing farm income by a motivated intern expanding production and marketing efforts. In the long term there is potential to have this intern position grow into a business partnership co-farming the land together.
This position could be residential. An intern living here will share the farm with my family including my 12 year old, 4-H member child, and my life-partner Josh, who works off farm full time. All our past farm helpers have shared the kitchen and bathroom in the main farmhouse with my family. We often share meals with our farm helpers. My family eats gluten, meat, and dairy. For a farm intern with their own tiny home or RV we can offer a private space to park with water and eclectic hookup, but we do not have a wastewater/septic dump. We don’t currently (Autumn 2024) have a room available but could offer a furnished room the the farmhouse starting spring or summer 2025. We have had farm helpers in the dry season stay in a large tent we provided with a robust camp kitchen/private hang out area and can offer this to someone comfortable in rustic living conditions. The farm has good internet with Starlink and is on-grid for electrical power.
More about projects here, the area, and my background: The farm location is about 50 miles southwest of Portland, between McMinnville and Sheridan, Oregon. The setting is rural and natural, one neighboring property is a 400 acres of forest open for hiking and another neighbor with 80 acres offers permission to graze livestock, tap maple trees for syrup, mushroom hunt, and more. The farm has a productive well with a domestic water right, a spring, and two creeks, but no agricultural water right. I worked with Natural Resource Conservation Service, NRCS, on planting hedgerows, riparian native plant restoration, pasture renovation, and more. I could help an intern learn to navigate the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, EQIP. I manage parts of the farm organically and am familiar with the USDA organic certification process, but am not certified organic and have very selectively used herbicide for noxious weed control.
I do lots of “Homesteady” projects for self sufficiency such as milking sheep and cheese making, canning to preserve the bounty of the garden, tapping maple trees for syrup, baking from scratch, hunting truffles with my dog. Most of this is for on-farm use only and not a profit driven venture. I will be happy to work on any of these projects with an intern interested in learning. I graduated from University of California at Davis in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and a specialty in organic vegetable production. During my career I was an employee on several non-profit educational farms where I taught agriculture classes and led internships at the community college level and managed school gardens at the K-12 level. I also have been an employee on for-profit farms. I hosted through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, WWOOF, for many years. For continuing education I have completed a permaculture design course, grey water installer course, and natural building courses in several modalities such as cob and straw bale building. I achieved my dream of farm ownership in 2019.
I can also share that I am a science nerd, straight but not narrow, politically left leaning, not religious. An intern sharing our home doesn’t have to be the same. I share my views to help a potential intern make an informed decision about fit. I would like us to match in that we both have no criminal record, light to no alcohol and 420 use, and no tobacco.
Thank you so much for your time reading please feel free to reach out to introduce yourself or ask questions.
Ann Partridge – Owner Operator at Wee Family Farm LLC