Mid-August. Watermelon and peaches are in, corn is in full swing, red peppers are finally ripe and Ag Fair excitement is surging around the Island.
For many college kids, mid-August is also back to school time.
It’s a tricky thing, to interrupt August like that. At many universities, classes start mid- to late-August, and orientation is even earlier. My back to school was just after Labor Day, and I was almost always one of the last college kids still working at my summer job. What this means for the Vineyard is a labor vacuum during the single busiest month of the year.
I felt this at Morning Glory when I worked there last summer. August is peak season: the farmstand is bursting, there is everything to pick and there are not enough hands to pick it, even when fully staffed with college kids. I remember being exhausted — farming takes a physical toll — and still kicking it into a higher gear to cut arugula as fast as I could. By the time squash and pumpkins rolled around in September, we had lost half a dozen crew members to college.
Beetlebung Farm’s field manager, Ethan Buchanan-Valenti, remembers the same thing happening a few years ago.
“That was scary. That was a big deal. It was such a radical change,” he told me.
This year, Beetlebung’s field crew is set for the fall, but the farmstand and kitchen are losing employees.
“Farming doesn’t slow down, but you lose all this extra help that you have for weeks and months,” he said.
Simon Athearn, CEO of Morning Glory Farm, agreed. It’s the mid-August dropoff that in the past has caused founders Jim and Debbie Athearn to head out to the fields themselves to pick cherry tomatoes.
“We lose four people just on the 15th for that early wave. They’re going to be missed,” Simon said of this year’s crew. “They’re there every day, and you get used to them. But it’s expected.”
Labor on the Vineyard’s farms is demographically distinct from most of the rest of the country. A few years ago, I reported on labor practices in Virginian viticulture (the growing of grapes), where the vast majority of work is done by Mexican migrant workers. They receive H-2A visas, a temporary agricultural visa that helps farms fill labor gaps in the absence of American labor.
Americans don’t want to do that work, the Virginia managers told me. That’s the trend around the country, too. According to the 2019-2020 National Agricultural Workers Survey, 70 per cent of agricultural workers were foreign born and the average age of farm workers was 41.
My experience on Morning Glory’s field crew last summer was radically different. Most of the two dozen field crew members were American, and the majority were in their 20s-30s. My foreign-born coworkers were also students — mostly of agriculture and soil science — here on a J1 visa, a work- and study-based cultural exchange program.
While there’s nothing wrong with either way to staff a farm — it’s a product of what kind of labor is available — it is wonderful to see young Americans interested and participating in the food system. Both Simon and Ethan helped me answer why that’s the case on the Vineyard.
First and foremost, the Vineyard is a beautiful, safe place to live and work, and many farms provide summer housing. Massachusetts government and residents, and especially Islanders, also support agriculture in a way that allows it to blossom.
“We have customers that value quality, local food grown thoughtfully, and that in turn makes the children of those people say I value it…I want to see one year on a farm, I want to feel it, I want to be close to it, because I know that I’m too distant to it in my life,” Simon said.
When interviewing to hire new staff members, he looks for that kind of individual. It’s an intentional type of hiring that you see all around the Vineyard. Morning Glory has shifted to a year-round model, which attracts full-time, skilled Americans who are the backbone in the fields and who can quickly train the seasonal employees. They also look for individuals with diverse “exit dates” to blunt the end-of-summer labor cliff, Simon told me.
But despite the challenge, Morning Glory embraces providing opportunities for college students, eager to learn about farming. I applaud that decision. Farming in the way the Vineyard does it — in a highly diversified way, cycling through many different crops throughout an extended season — is an invaluable glimpse into the intricacies and challenges of growing food.
Expose more young people to this type of local food system, and it just might pick up momentum in other places around the country, begetting innovative solutions for scaling sustainable American agriculture.
This article appears in August 14, 2026.