Company description

Yurtstead Farm is an all-season off-grid family-owned operation balancing vegetable, meat, egg, and flower production on 10 acres on the western slope of Colorado.  We follow the guidelines specified for organic production, but are not certified.  We grow all the vegetables (except stalk celery, because, yuck); raise weaner piglets, heritage turkeys, and broiler chickens; maintain a flock of about three dozen egg layers; and, through the main summer season, provide fresh-cut poison-free flowers.  Our products are sold mainly at the Ridgway and Montrose Farmers’ markets, a winter CSA, a co-operative farmstand where we work with three other local farmers and orchardists, and occasionally wholesale clients including middle-marketers, local retail stores, and chefs.  Above all, we are obsessed with tilth, environmental conservation, and healthy growing environments.  Working with our regional markets helps to keep healthy, local food production alive in the central Rockies, and avoids the fuelishness of shipping food from distant growers to local eaters, and keeps accountability for high quality safe product at the forefront of our operation.

Job description

Yurtstead Farm is searching for two full-time, paid workers for the main growing season (April 1st ish through November 5th ish).  You will have two consecutive days off in a row each week, and if you let us know well in advance and work around our main harvest days, a handful of extra vacation days can be taken during the year.  The vegetable portion of our operation is probably 80% of your expected workload, although routine daily animal care for broiler chickens and hogs (moving chicken tractors, in season, and watering and feeding) are expected to be part of your workload.  Our goal is to share our farming knowledge and tactics in exchange for a self-starting worker with a strong work ethic who can accomplish vegetable farming with all the joys that that entails: routine, often tedious, sometimes heavy, repetitious tasks in all the weather.  Montrose is a very dry environment, and while we have never endured temperatures above 100, things can be in the upper 90s with very low humidity for several weeks.  Some portions of our work involves machine tilling, and maintaining driplines is a routine aspect of the job that can be something you learn.  Generally, all aspects of bed prep, seeding, cultivation, pruning, thinning, harvesting, washing, and packing will be skills that you acquire.

For an interested individual, assisting with flower harvest can be a component of your weekly workload.  Flowers constitute about 10% of our business, but the harvest time is disproportionate for its earning potential.

Helping cheerfully staff one of our two farmers markets (though not alone) would be great, but if you would prefer not, we can work around that. 

We butcher broiler chickens and turkeys on site, and if a worker is interested, butchery skills will be taught, but this is in no way mandatory.  Ethical friendly care for animals to be harvested for meat is an expected duty, so if that will trouble you, it likely isn’t a good fit.  Animal harvesting is, regardless, an infrequent event.

We are actively building infrastructure: this year we will be progressing on a packing shed with an off-grid heating and cooling system, doubling our solar array, and laying foundation and blocks for a two room semi-subterranean root cellar (and surely a few other things will come up).  Folks who are interested and competent in building and interested in learning about these structures could assist with the building process. We have built, wired, plumbed, dug, carpentered, designed, and jerry-rigged this farm from the ground up, so at least one of us can remember – and likely teach you – how we did it.

We host a couple of small events with other farmers during the year, and we generally take time to introduce our seasonal heroes to folks of similar ilk at other farms, so you can compare experiences and network.  Jenn wildcrafts things for the farm (wild-mushroom gathering, collecting and processing medicinal plants, for example) and if outings of these sort are your jam, you could probably talk her into accompanying her.

On-site housing is included (a small, furnished, off-grid cabin) for one worker, or for an established and fully functioning couple.  It has a stand-alone 12-volt solar system, wifi, and a separate heating system.  We have a shared bathroom in the “barn” including a clothes washer, and evening meals are shared “family dinners”.  Food for all workdays is provided; most meals are consumed in our house (the yurt), although if an individual wanted to cook meals alone, we could establish an outdoor kitchen (an outdoor kitchen worked for us the first year, maybe it will for you too).  Tobacco smoking is not permitted on the farm property (Jenn’s mom died, emaciated from lung cancer, and she’s really firm on this).

Compensation this position is : hourly Work visa This employer is willing to sponsor a work visa for international applicants Application instructions DeadlineMarch 01, 2019