Employment Opportunities for 2008 Season

We have filled our intern positions for 2008. If you are interested in a future intern position, the description follows. You can also get a jump on ’09 and visit us this season when the farm is in full swing. Spend a few hours, work side by side and see if we’re a good fit for each other!

Blooming Glen Farm is excited to provide interns with the opportunity to learn the inner workings of our diverse agriculture business. We are a young ambitious farm, small enough that your presence will really have an impact, but large enough that you will get a diversity of experience. It is our belief that the farm has to be economically sustainable yet also provide a good quality of life for its workers (limits on work hours and stress) as well as nurturing the soil, environment and community.

As an intern you will experience many aspects of our commercial produce farm. Learning is achieved through experience. You will realize 10 hour days seeding flats, bunching greens, sitting on the transplanter, thinning carrots, trellising tomatoes, amongst dozens of other tasks over the course of a full season on a farm. You will experience the excitement that occurs when things do not go as planned (as they almost never do in farming), as well as the satisfaction of the harvest of a crop you have been a part of nurturing and sweating over every step of the way. You will return home each night with a feeling of exhaustion and gratitude with all that occurred throughout the day. You will walk away from Blooming Glen Farm with the knowledge of whether farming is the life for you, and well on your way to acquiring the skills needed to start your own farm.

Following are examples of possible activities:

  • Field work: harvesting, transplanting, weeding, pruning, trellising, thinning, managing irrigation systems, pest control, and other tasks
  • Tractor work: cultivation
  • Pack-out operations: washing and sorting harvested crops, quality control, and packing/storage requirements of all crops
  • Greenhouse operations: seeding, potting-up, irrigation, pest control, fertility, as well as other tasks
  • Marketing and Sales operations: working with the CSA and Farmers market
  • Bi-Weekly readings: farming topics like weed and pest control, irrigation, soil fertility, greenhouse operations, marketing strategies, equipment and implements, and CSA will be explored
  • Field trips: Opportunity to participate in Sustainable Agriculture Internship Training alliance of Southeastern Pennsylvania (SAITA-PA). Required to attend at least one SAITA workshop at a local farm.

In addition to the hands-on education the following forms of compensation are offered:

  • Housing- in a large, beautifully restored farmhouse within walking or biking distance of the farm.
  • Stipend- $800 monthly stipend
  • Farm Grown Produce- food from Blooming Glen Farm is available to interns for their personal consumption.
  • Education- we have prepared an educational workbook of reading materials relevant to organic food production and also have a number of reference books available for your use.

Blooming Glen Farm is interested in providing a quality practical education through an apprenticing method. Interns will be given responsibilities that will enhance their ability to think like a farmer in addition to the opportunity to learn about growing produce commercially. We are looking for candidates who are willing to work hard when required and enjoy the benefits of being a farmer.

As an intern at Blooming Glen Farm, on your days off, should you desire, you have the added advantage of being centrally located near a diversity of activities. The farm itself is situated in the rolling hills of northern Bucks County, surrounded by hundreds of acres of preserved farm land. It is minutes away from hiking and biking at scenic Lake Nockamixon and Peace Valley Park, 20 min. to the Delaware River and its canal trails and quaint river communities, or an hour to beautiful Delaware Water Gap and the Appalachian Trail. It’s also an hour to downtown Philadelphia and 2 hours to New York City, or just 15 min from historic Doylestown and its movie theater, museums and restaurants.

Finding a match between our farm and our interns is extremely important. We can still vividly remember what it was like to be interns ourselves, and we bring these past experiences to Blooming Glen Farm as we continue to develop our intern program and evolve as a farm. Without a symbiotic relationship between the farm and its interns, a drastic decrease in performance and overall satisfaction will occur on behalf of both parties. We try to give an accurate description of Blooming Glen Farm and present the internship responsibilities in a straightforward manner. We ask that you complete the application carefully, paying particular attention to what you would like to accomplish from an internship at Blooming Glen Farm. We will follow up with a phone call after we have reviewed your application and schedule an on-site visit. Hopefully this process will assist both of us in determining if our farm is the right place for you. Please call or email us if you have any questions. Thank you for your interest in organic agriculture and in our farm.

Click here to download an Intern application for Blooming Glen Farm.