Marya Merriam
Wood Frog Flowers & Rockbottom Dairy Farm

Marya is a dairy farmworker as well as a certified organic flower and wholesale vegetable farmer in central Vermont. They grew up on an organic vegetable farm in Brookfield, returning to the state after studying Environmental Biology at Columbia University. They now work for Rockbottom Dairy Farm, while growing flowers and making dried arrangements for Wood Frog Flowers. Marya is excited to tackle issues related to climate change resilience, farmworker justice, small dairy viability, and decolonizing land access.

To learn more about Marya and her work as a citizen/farmer activist, please watch the video below:

To read the edited highlights of Marya’s interview, see below :

All right, big picture. How did you get your start in farming and then how did you become connected to Rural Vermont? 
I grew up on a certified organic vegetable farm. So a lot of my chores as a kid were being part of the farm and it was something that no child likes the chores that they do when they are a kid.  But when I went to college, I realized how much I missed it and how much I missed being part of a community that cared about where their food came from and cared about the ethics of food. So when I was in college, I started to realize that I really wanted to be involved in agriculture and I tried a couple of different agricultural research jobs. And then I was like, you know, I really just like hoeing, I really just like weeding stuff, I think really all I wanna do is farm.  And I had one summer in college, I worked on a neighbor's dairy farm and fell in love with working with cows, but realized that I did not want the responsibility of taking care of my own cows. So, right now I'm a combined part time dairy farm worker so that I can spend time with cows because I really love them.

And it's a really important industry in Vermont. And part time I vegetable and dried flower farm for myself. 

How did you become connected to Rural Vermont? 
I first learned about Rural Vermont the summer that I was working on this dairy farm - I interned for them back in 2016 and was just so impressed with all of the work that they're doing to really make a viable agricultural economy in the state.

And not just an agricultural economy that exists for tourists to come and look at, but an agricultural economy that actually feeds people and supports the people's feeding and supports the people who are growing that food. And I've just always been so supportive of everything they've done and the way that they understand that creating a vibrant agricultural economy is necessarily connected with, you know, making sure we have a higher minimum wage, making sure people have affordable health care, making sure that internationally we have a good food system.  So I joined the board three years ago and I'm just always so thrilled to be more involved in their work. 

What are current challenges farmers are facing in your area and what specific policies are impacting you for better or worse? 
So I would say the two things: it's all under the umbrella of climate change for me. Climate change is certainly lacking policy that is responding to climate change and is really doing anything about curbing greenhouse gas emissions or creating a resilient environment to this crisis. And so the way I'm seeing that impact is that the act of farming is just getting harder. I just did a tour and I just showed you the fields that flooded last summer. I was saying that the reason I had crops in the field that flooded is because when I planted those crops last May, it was a drought. And I was like, well, if it's going to be another drought summer and I don't want to have to water this stuff all the time, I'll plant it in my wettest field. And then three months later, the wettest field was literally underwater.

So, just the complete unpredictability makes a stressful job where, you know, you already don't have control over things even more stressful.

I'm farming on land that my parents have been farming for 34 years, and you'd think that, oh, well, we have 34 years of institutional knowledge like when's the last frost date, when's the last hard freeze date? But, you know, we had that hard freeze last May that was just so unpredictable. So there is the part where climate change just makes the day to day activity of farming so much harder. And then there is the pressure that I feel like climate change is putting on land access, which is the thing that I'm having trouble with, that every young farmer I talk to is having trouble with, which is like we are in a state that is going to do better than most in the climate apocalypse. And what that means is that we have to think we have a duty to accept a lot of people who are going to be in unlivable locations. But unfortunately, I see the state's development priorities are not, you know, building affordable housing for Syrian refugees or building affordable housing for people in Barre whose homes flooded this summer. The state's priorities are, how do we make it a more attractive place for people to come summer in, instead of living in New York City, because New York City is going to be too hot? And so it feels like there's a lot of development pressure for second homes and climate escape homes that then makes land just completely unaffordable. I was just complaining to my mom this morning, because she was like, oh, I'm so sorry that all of the systems we have set up here are just like 34 years old and not the most ergonomic, not the most efficient. And I was like, I literally could not afford this place right now. Like, what is the other option? I try to buy this place or the equivalent of this place for $2.5 million? Like you can't do that on $19 an hour. There's just nothing. So I just think that for me, the policies need to stop and reverse climate change as fast as possible. And certainly working with farmers to do that and supporting small farmers who are doing great climate work is part of that. And we also need to really shift our development priorities as a state - how are we going to feed people? How are we going to sustain people and not how are we going to become a really beautiful playground for wealthy people to summer in?

What is your utopia? What do you dream the future of farming could look like? Are there any steps you see that could move us closer? 
My dream for farming and especially farming in this state, but globally too, is a system that is healthy for the land, is healthy for the people doing the work both emotionally and physically, and is creating healthy food that is affordable for people in the state. You know that we're not just growing food for upper middle class people, we're really growing food for everyone and for schools and for hospitals and nursing homes. I think the steps to get there are that we need as many farmers as possible, because that's how it's going to be resilient. You know, I'm on pretty dry soil. So it means that last year when it was raining constantly, I had squash. And a lot of people who are in wetter soils didn't have squash. And three years ago when it was a horrible drought, we basically had no squash because it's, you know, on gravel and it was a drier soil. So as we're dealing with weather impacts of climate change, I just think we need as many small farmers, as many diversified farmers all working together to feed the state and regionally as well. I think also something that doesn't get talked about a lot are food processors and that we really need to support our local bakers, our local millers. Dairy processing is a huge bottleneck in this state. And we saw that when Horizon wanted to drop a lot of small dairy farmers, that there was just no place to process that milk if we wanted to keep, you know, there was this conversation like, oh, can we put this milk in schools? And really the problem was that there was nowhere to process it. So I think as a state, we really need to invest in processing infrastructure: food hubs, food distribution networks,etc… so that we can create this beautiful future where we're all feeding ourselves and we're all able to afford to feed ourselves this way.  

Marya’s interview was coordinated and administered by 2024 Rural Vermont Communications Intern, Melissa MacDonald.