Internships

We have offered a Sustainable Ag Internship program at FARRMS for about a decade. We place interns on farms and FARRMS pays the interns a stipend and provides education in the form of a weekly zoom class and monthly field days.From conversations with Rachel Armstrong and with our HR Consultant we knew that internships are a particularly tricky area of employment law. For the past three or four years we have mitigated risk by treating the interns as employees of FARRMS. They fill out a W4 and I9 at the beginning of the season, they submit timecards to FARRMS, and we pay them a wage at $15 an hour. However we lost the federal grant that has  funded this. We’re considering a model where the farmers who host the interns are responsible for paying them and we know that will mean a lot of education to ensure the farmers are adhering to employment law. I’m looking forward to learning more from this community.