Farm Worker Job Description

Interview With a Farmer

Like Ag is in everyone's blood. We're all born with it. This is the best field because you literally get to watch what you do every day growing, and you get to see it. And when you sell it and you see the smile on people's faces, it's awesome.

How I Became a Farmer

I grew up on a ranch and our family farm. My dad taught me at a young age. I was driving tractors, not this big, but a lot smaller. At a young age, like 12, I was doing irrigation and pipe moving and stuff. So I was basically born into it.

How You can Get Into Farming

Find a farmer in your region and ask them if you could come to work for them, express an interest, and then try to do every job. You want to do moving pipe, you want to do all the irrigation. You want to learn how to inject fertilizers and chemicals. You want to learn how to plant. I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff. 

Valuable Career Tip

You want to start from the ground up to be successful in this business, because if you don't know how to do it, then you're always going to rely on asking other people how to do it. And that's always going to cost you. Instead of paying for it, in my opinion, you want to learn it. After a season or two, you'll have it under your belt. 

Recommended Education 

You want to take some soil science. You want to take some agronomy. You want to take some water science, maybe a little bit of engineering. You know, everything is going to help you figure it out, like how to spatially plan a field and figure out how to plant the right amount of seeds per acre.

A Farmers Schedule

Get up in the morning, hydrate, drink a ton of water. Try to get out here at a reasonable hour, preferably before the sun comes up if you're working with a lot of people so that everyone is coordinated. If there's not a lot of people working, like in the wintertime, sometimes we screw off and play cards in the morning, talking shop, like farm talk, and then come out later. Wintertime is beautiful for farmers. Everyone thinks we're kind of lazy in that aspect because they see us at the farm shops. But normally, we've already coordinated with our guys what they're doing for the whole week.

Because normally when you're on a tractor like this, you're doing it for a month or two. You're disking straight, then you're ripping, and then you're plowing. You know, it's pretty seasonal what we're doing. Each job changes every week to two weeks. Then it'll be a different implement on the back of the tractor, and it'll be either planting or harvesting. Every week is technically different throughout the year. But once you figure that out, it's really not that complicated.

Farming Pros

The pros are, when you're good at it, there aren’t many of us left. Ag is farmers. We're less than 1% of the population in the United States. So we are the last of the Mohicans, so to speak.

And the pro to me is, right now, you could get a lot of contracts. Like, there's a lot of companies that just want—they want tomato sauce, or they want ketchup, or they want carrots, or they want potatoes, or they want garlic and onions. And it's like, there's not a lot of guys doing it because most guys have retired and got out of it, and their kids are all in town doing something else.

I mean, I think it's something like 75% of all private pesticide applicators that have that license are over 70 years old right now. So that's a huge amount of people that are basically able to spray chemicals, that are not gonna be here in 20 more years.