In one of the first seasons Roots Rising crews worked here, we were prepping a bed when one of the girls screamed. A large earthworm had wiggled out of the soil, and she was horrified.
I told her what worms do. They digest the soil and leave it better than they found it. I told her how they reproduce and how many live in a healthy bed, which is more than you’d guess. She listened. That was all.
The next session she walked up to me holding one out in her hand.
Compost went the same way. A pile of dead plants and manure is not an easy sell to a teenager. So I told them it’s how we grow vegetables without chemical fertilizer, pointed to the steam coming off the top, and asked where the heat was coming from. Nobody knew. I had them put their hands in. The pile was warm all the way through, from millions of microbes breaking down the plants and manure.
By the end of the day, some of them were lying in it.
Every crew meets the pigs, and what they meet depends on the season. The spring crew sees piglets racing around their pen. The summer crew sees adolescents. The fall crew meets pigs close to 200 pounds, still as rowdy as kids. The big ones sniff at the teenagers and take their shoes in their mouths. At first the kids hang back from animals that size. Then they get comfortable, and before long they’re scratching the pigs behind the ears.
Roots Rising is a Pittsfield program that hires teenagers to work on local farms, and ours is one of them. Most of the teenagers know nothing about a farm. They don’t know how vegetables grow or how animals are raised. A few have worked a garden with a parent or grandparent. The rest arrive the way teenagers arrive anywhere, missing their phones and a little uncertain.
Then they’re standing in a field with bugs, dirt, and a carrot that tastes like something, and the questions start. What’s this bug? What does that taste like? Why do you do it that way? They ask why we don’t till the soil. They ask why the pigs get moved to fresh pasture. Explaining my answers to a fifteen-year-old has made me a better farmer, because I find out quickly which answers I haven’t thought through.
Some of them go looking for a challenge. One day we needed to move a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood across the field to the next bed. We lay it under the tractor bucket to catch stray compost as we scoop it into buckets. Emilio, one of the Roots Rising staff, was pairing kids up, one on each end. Dara had watched me carry the sheet, and she asked me to show her how to do it alone. I showed her the trick: lever the sheet up, one hand low, the other balancing. The plywood was bigger than she was and probably half her weight. She carried it 100 yards across the field with a smile and set it down at the next bed, right beside the one two strapping boys had carried between them.
The Roots Rising mentors who come with the crews are supportive, firm, and caring, and the kids respect them. They teach a short list of rules. Show up consistently. Be prepared. Keep a positive attitude. Work hard. Be a team player. Pick up after yourself. Be respectful. Ask questions. Be willing to take a risk and make a mistake. It’s the list any employer would give you.
Several of those teenagers have since worked here, on our payroll.
Crews come back to the farm several times, so I get to see the change from one visit to the next. I watch them grow one by one and come together as a team, and they leave with skills that last a lifetime. I get as much out of it as they do.
I spent 26 years in Pittsfield schools as a teacher, coach, and administrator, and I’ve never changed my mind about a farm being the best classroom a young person can have. The biology is in the soil, the math is in the planting plan, the business is at the register, and the art is in the field. Roots Rising built the program that puts teenagers in that classroom, and pays them to be there. We host a crew, and the teenagers do the rest.
Eight years later, I still remember Arnell walking up with that worm in her hand and the pride on her face.
Come by the farm store on Route 7 in Lanesborough, or join the CSA to shop with us all year. More stories like this one are in Field Notes.
The 2026 Fall Roots Rising Crew.
