The Northeast Harvest Manual
"In the 1990s, when Roxbury Farm (now known as Roxbury Farm CSA) was in its pioneering phase, apprentices were a key part of our workforce. One of our apprentices, Katie Smith (currently the co-owner of the Farm at Miller’s Crossing in Hudson, N.Y .), complained, correctly, that it was difficult to learn how to farm through on-the-job instruction alone. Her sentiment reflected a broad dissatisfaction among apprentices with the lack of intentional training within apprenticeship programs. During my own farmer training in the Netherlands, our apprenticeships were guided by our schools and were supported by a strong theoretical foundation, so I knew we could do much better. In response, David Inglis of Mahaiwe Harvest CSA and I called together 13 other farmers in the Hudson and Pioneer Valleys for a meeting to reflect on what should be offered to an apprentice working on our farms. As our collective knowledge proved greater than what we could offer individually on our farms, the Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT) was born.
To provide our apprentices with better guidance, I decided to write down all the daily instructions for growing and harvesting our crops. This process spanned several years, and resulted in the first edition of the Roxbury Farm Crop and Harvest Manuals, published in 2001. Because I wrote them for our apprentices and employees, they referenced tools and methods specific to our farm. At the end of their employment, apprentices kept their own copies, which helped them during their own pioneering phase in building a new farm."
