Meet our interns: Kate Darlington

25 Jun Meet our interns: Kate Darlington

Each year here at Blooming Glen Farm we welcome from 3 to 4 new interns into our farm community. They come from different backgrounds and locales, but they all share a curiosity for learning sustainable agriculture. Tom and I started our journey in farming 11 years ago as interns, and we strongly believe the best way to learn farming is by doing. We have had over 30 different folks pass through the farm over the years, all bringing their unique perspectives and individual energy to what is very much a team effort in accomplishing all that we do here in a single season, and year six at Blooming Glen Farm is no different. Over the next few weeks via the blog I will introduce you to a few of the faces you’ll see around the farm, whose hearts and hands are intrinsically woven into the physically demanding, very often challenging, but wonderfully and entirely rewarding, process of putting food on all our tables.

Kate Darlington, 24, grew up in a small Colorado mountain town called Steamboat Springs. She studied International Political Economy at University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, focusing on global poverty and development.

“I never had a great sense of what I wanted to do when I ‘grew up,’ so when I graduated, I didn’t really know which direction to head. I thought I would try my hand at addressing some of the big problems I studied in college — like poverty in Africa — so I moved to Kenya to work with a non-profit organization. It was a great experience, but it was also overwhelming and frustrating. After doing something so foreign and broad in scale, I realized I needed to do something more local and tangible when I came back to the U.S — to literally get my hands dirty.

I have always been interested in food from a culinary point of view — taking joy in cooking from an early age. In the past several years, though, I have come to see how food is about more than just eating and cooking. Understanding how important our food systems are for our physical health, environmental health, and societal health was what directed me to a job in sustainable agriculture. Eventually, I hope to bridge my interest in organic farming and social justice. I’m passionate about the use of organic agriculture as a social justice and community development tool — both in the US and the rest of the world.

Working on the farm is proving itself to be both rewarding and challenging. It has definitely given me a greater appreciation for all the hard work that goes into producing the food we eat. Being here during this unusually wet spring has also been a good reminder of how intimately our sustenance is connected to nature.”

Kate Darlington

Photos and text by Tricia Borneman, Blooming Glen farmer and co-owner.