What is the Labor Ready Project?

Introduction

The Labor Ready program is a subdivision of Cornell’s Small Farms Program, an organization seeking to improve the development and success of farms at all levels through research, extension, and education projects. They’ve partnered with CALS and CCE to gain assistance from educators, faculty, and staff of Cornell who serve as both teachers and organizers for online and in-person farming education programs as well as positioned people on an advisory board who consults Labor Ready on larger decisions. Learn more on Labor Ready’s website or their YouTube channel.

Who is the target audience?

The audience of the Labor Ready Project is the orchard farmers themselves, who consist of owners, managers, and field workers on fruit and vegetable farms in upstate NY (with a focus on the Lake Ontario Fruit Region).
Many farmers in the region are Hispanic and serve as the middleman between workers and owners, demonstrating a high- level knowledge of farming yet still being taken advantage of by being held to lesser roles. These farmers all prioritize their farms as businesses, focusing on generating revenue through farming practices. Because of their labor-intensive work, they don’t often have time to send employees to training courses. Labor Ready is aiming to succeed in educating these farmers for the long-term benefits of that understanding farm management and communication skills are essential for their career success and farming business. By listening to audio interview recordings, we were able to gain a better understanding of the topic and build our empathy with the stakeholders. We expressed the interview stories in the project deliverables.

Research & The Design Process

The Design Challenge

How might we help increase awareness of the complexity of agriculture and making accessible resources to promote new farm ownership and better opportunities for the existing employees?

In order to understand and achieve our partner’s goal, we break down the scope into a strategic sparkline with a What-How-Why Method.

Our anticipated media cascade begins with note-taking and listening in the hear and empathy phase of the design process. We aim to gain a greater understanding of small farms, opportunities in agriculture, our partner, and stakeholders. The process of doing so involved communicating with our partner Nicole and reviewing master class materials. The goal we wanted to carry out at this very first stage is to help with existing projects rather than immediately creating our own. For example, we have interview audio providing feedback about the past master classes which can be used to develop an organic evaluation where future goals come from graduates who also have Latino/a agricultural experience.

Media Cascade Framework

Meeting Mario Sazo

Meeting Mario Sazo, a Master Class partner who helps transfer research to practice in the apple industry was central to our current understanding of the design challenge. He described his own connection to the Hispanic community in addition to the strong presence and importance of Hispanic farmworkers. He stressed simplicity and honesty as a way to emulate the openness valued in Latino communication culture. He posed the question “What does it mean to be an orchard worker?” in the greater context of someone’s willingness to work, loyalty to a farm, goals, and dreams for their children. Hard work and commitment can be reinforced by meaningful gestures such as providing technology to call home, soccer jerseys, or a barbeque instead of just money. He also sees the positive side of owner-farmer relations where owners ask about the family show that he or she values the worker. He reminded us that the Master Class graduates were selected because their management saw potential in them.

Interview from the Orchard: Jose & Jeff

We also held a conversation session with one of the Master Class graduates: orchard manager Jose, and his mentor farm owner Jeff. We believe this was a meaningful conversation that helped us better understand the experience of past graduated orchard workers from the master class.

Conversations with Nicole, Miguel, Mario, Jose & Jeff helped us define our goal of being more focused on appreciation, starting with the orchard workers themselves. We hope to help create greater orchard recognition through the expanded project scope.

Goals

We define our “call to adventure” to produce media artifacts for the Labor Ready farm project that improve their marketing efforts and increase their understanding of their target audience (Latinx farmers) in order to improve upon their previous masterclasses. Specifically, we hope to produce:

An orchard video to show people’s appreciation toward farmers’ work. By showing appreciation for graduates, we could utilize their positive experiences to showcase the benefits of the class to potential new members.
A poster placed to be placed in workspaces and sent to Master Class graduates via WhatsApp.Posters will hopefully be placed in supermarkets, campuses, and other public spaces to educate consumers about where their apples come from.
A second video that captures the experience of the Master Class while highlighting community, confidence, professional development, and skill-building.

In the longer term, we hope that Master Class graduates and their instructors can have open conversations about their experiences through a Story Circle.