In December our Farmers Market Manager Adam Daesen will be moving on after 3 and a half years at Deck Family Farm. He is set to go abroad with his Danish girlfriend for more farm work in Chile and Denmark.
Adam began as a student in 2021 during the Covid lockdown. He had been on the path to becoming a chef, but that was interrupted when the restaurants were closed.
“I had just gotten a promotion to sous chef working at a nice restaurant in Portland,” he said. “I was interested in farm-to-table restaurants as well as restaurants situated on farms. So it made a lot of sense when culinary opportunities were thin or non-existent in 2020 to transition into the fundamentals of producing food.”
After finding us on ATTRA, Adam spent his first year doing chores around the farm like everyone does, learning the ins and outs of caring for a diverse array of animals.
“My motivation for working on a farm lay in seeing the farm as a place where good work was being done,” he said. “Producing high-quality food and doing it in a sustainable way. I hadn't heard of regenerative agriculture before coming here but by the first 3 months I was pretty well versed in it.”
At the end of the first year, most students either move on to their next thing or they decide to apply to be an apprentice farmer at Deck. Adam said he wasn’t ready to go back to the city and an apartment, and had lost the zeal for restaurant work. But by then he had become very interested in warehousing, markets and sales.
“I thought the most fruitful place for me to be was here at the farm,” he said. “I put together a proposal about education for the market reps, customers and anyone who would email in… I eventually functioned as the answer guy.”
Farm owner Christine Deck said Adam’s passion for engagement with customers was a real asset for the team. “He has helped us get much better at educating about what we do while we sell our products,” she said.
In the third year, Adam I got more engaged with the business of farming. “I was learning to conceive of our interactions with CSA customers and markets as ways of building a strong business that would have reliable regulars,” he explained. “I wanted to understand the dollars and cents in a fundamental way, and how to work with all that.”
He doesn’t know exactly which way his professional life will go, but Adam has planned out the next few years with his girlfriend Johanne. They are heading to Chile where Johanne, who is currently an agriculture studies student in Denmark, will be doing a farm-based internship. After that, they’ll return to Denmark for the continuation of her degree studies and then hope to go work again in another country before settling down in Denmark or Sweden together.
Adam, who grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts, advocates strongly for everyone to get closer to farming because it changes your perspective in important ways.
“Until you work on a farm or are directly familiarized with a farm, it's very difficult to understand where your food comes from and you don’t even know how little you know until you learn even a little bit,” he said. “So for people who might be thinking about doing WWOOF-ing or ATTRA programs, I can’t recommend it enough because understanding the fundamentals of where your food comes from really informs your understanding of cycles of life and may well better root you no matter what your ultimate professional goals are. Understanding animals, husbandry, and working with the land can really profoundly inform the way you interact with the world and understand yourself.”