Not currently accepting applications:
Positions Available:
Learning
We often hire people who would like to make a career of farming, either as a farm manager or on their own farm. We are happy to show you as much as we can about how our farm works so you can apply it to your future farming business.
Learning how to start a farm is very difficult and one of our goals is to produce a few farmers with new farms of their own. We are relatively new to farming ourselves, having been in this business since 2010. We have built up our infrastructure over the years, installing 5 high tunnels, a deer fence, irrigation, and built a walk in cooler.
Much of farming is best learned by hands on work and observation. A lot of farming is in knowing what things to do when during a season and learning to fit all the pieces together. Working on a farm with existing systems gives you a starting point for production techniques. Our way is not the only way, but it works for us. We grow a diversity of crops and you will learn about each crop and how it grows, what it should look like and often, how to prepare it. The learning is slow but by the end of a season you will have absorbed a lot. You will have experienced how hard farming is and will have a feel for what needs to be done when during the season.
We love farming, being outdoors, and growing vegetables. Some of the challenging parts of farming is the planning, record keeping, bookkeeping, and marketing. However, these are essential skills that are critical to the success of a farm.
We have participated in the Future Harvest: Beginning Farmer Trainee Program as mentors (a local program to train new farmers) including this year. We know how hard starting up can be and we want to offer encouragement to other new farmers.
Overview of Job Description and Qualifications for ALL positions:
At Love Dove Farms we try to find enthusiastic, motivated, hard-working, dedicated help. Attitude is everything. We need people who can bring a positive attitude to our farm.
Previous farm experience is preferred but not required. Every farm is different, and we may have a different way of doing things than your previous experience.
We are looking for people who can work quickly and efficiently, but who are also careful and able to follow directions. It is essential that you can work well with others and independently. The work is physically demanding (you must be able to lift at least 50 lbs multiple times every day) and attention to detail is critical. We have a strong emphasis on quality at Love Dove Farms and you must be able to help us maintain this high level of quality.
Work varies with the season but can often be repetitive. (Can you pick peas, green beans, or cherry tomatoes for an entire day?)
You must also be punctual and be able to work in all weather conditions. Be prepared for rain, hail, intense sun, wind, and heat—every day of the summer!
If you are not a morning person, a farm job is probably not for you. This is very different from a traditional job and you must realize that the farm has demands that are sometimes out of our control (for example, we may have to work into the evening in order to get transplants into the ground or to get everything ready on Friday for the Saturday market.)
In short, you must be reliable and the farm must be your primary commitment throughout the growing season.
Compensation will vary based on experience.
Tasks for Farm Manager:
Application
Before submitting an application, be sure to review the general overview of our farm season below:
There is no smoking or drug use permitted on our farm or at markets.
We do not have employee housing or camping available.
If you’re interested in working at Love Dove Farms, please respond by e-mail with the information requested below. We are looking for people who are thorough and follow directions. Please keep this in mind when responding.
Send all applications to [email protected].
Thanks for your interest in Love Dove Farms Farm!
What follows is a general overview of our farm season:
Weekly Schedule
This is our weekly harvest schedule. Harvest days start at 7:00am on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, beginning in the middle of May.
Monday: Field Work, focus on planting, reseeding, maintenance, etc.
Tuesday: We harvest for our Miller Library Market on Wednesday
Wednesday: Harvest in the AM, Afternoon Market, must leave by 12pm, setup at market by 1pm for 2pm-6pm market.
Thursday: We harvest for our Thursday CSA in the evening and prepare for Harvest for Saturday Market.
Friday: Harvesting for the Saturday farmers’ market.
Saturday/Sunday: We have a Saturday Farmers Market, and Sunday CSA Dropoff.
Seasonal Schedule
Employees will work from March or April into October or possibly November. Hours will change as the season progresses.
March: Greenhouse work: to begin seeding our trays for all the summer crops. We will also direct seed in our High Tunnels greens for early spring production.
April: A time for planting and maintaining the fields. Keeping weeds down as new seedlings emerge. April is a light harvest month which allows us to focus on planting and weeding. We also start additional seedlings such as cucumbers, squash, zucchini, sunflowers, herbs, etc.
May: We begin harvesting many of the crops planted in March and April. Our CSA and farmers markets begin in early May,
The middle of May is the start of the extremely busy and important planting season. All of the summer crops need to be planted between May 15th and June 10th. This means harvesting several times a week while planting in every spare moment, sometimes until late in the evening. Thousands of vegetable transplants need to be put in the ground during this time. More than ten acres need to be transformed from bare soil to irrigated, growing plants in 25 days.
June: In June the harvest increases. We start picking sugar snap peas (which can be brutal) as well as all the spring greens and we are harvesting 4 days a week. We commonly harvest 20 plus items in a day. It is a struggle to ensure that everything gets done and nothing is forgotten. Most crops have been planted by early June and the focus is on weeding, watering and harvesting.
July: By July most crops are planted and need to be maintained. We will still continue to harvest for market, CSA, and restaurants. We will also have a lot of weeding to do, which can be really unpleasant in the July heat. By mid-July it feels like you have run a marathon but you have just arrived at the starting line. We also harvest our garlic, and onions, as well as begin to harvest Potatoes.
August: In August more new crops are ripening every day. Summer squash and cucumbers are prolific. Tomatoes begin to ripen. By the end of August the amount we harvest is overwhelming. We are no longer harvesting as many greens with the heat of the summer and this means that we do not spend as much time washing vegetables after harvesting. Instead we spend much more time out in the field picking green beans, cherry tomatoes, etc. In mid-August more greens are planted for the fall. They need to be weeded as we try to keep up with harvesting.
All the months earlier in the season are used to train people for August, when the race really begins. The farm is at peak production for the next few months. We need to harvest all the crops (like tomatoes and peppers) that we planted and took care of earlier in the season.
September: September days can still be really hot, but with the shortening day length and cooler nights our crop diversity peaks. All the summer crops are trying to ripen before the frost, while cooler weather crops make a reappearance and traditional fall crops like winter squash start to come out of the field. We will harvest thousands of pounds of winter squash for the fall during the month of September. We continue to plant and weed successions of greens for the fall. By now most workers are bone tired, but we still have one more really busy month left.
October: October comes and the days get shorter and we have less daylight to work. The number of hours worked is less but it feels the same to tired bodies. It is also a struggle to harvest everything with the reduced number of daylight hours. We continue to harvest 4 days a week. We try to bring as much as we can to each Saturday market so we can sell all the food we have left in the field before the end of the season.
The end of our CSA means that we have a little more time for cleanup and other fieldwork like planting our overwintered garlic.
November: The last Saturday farmers’ market is in mid-November, and the final CSA is at the end of the month. November is important for cleanup, we have to pull plastic mulch and drip tape out of the field, and put away the rest of the irrigation and tools and implements.
During our entire season there is always something to do, and usually too much to do. We have never gotten everything done. Every day is an important day. If that day’s work is not done it becomes hard to catch up. Crops get lost to the weeds if we are not careful. Our success and ability to farm from year to year rests on having hard workers. I’ll work about 80 hours a week. Most the farm workers work 40-50 hours throughout much of the season.
Farmers’ Market and CSA
A typical Wednesday market day starts off at 7 am harvesting for the day. It’s important to work quickly and efficiently, and to follow procedures that we repeat each week, the market opens at 2 pm. Through out market you will remain busy bagging, stocking, cashiering, organizing, or doing a combination of all these things based on your experience level at market. We work hard to keep our stand stocked until the end of the selling period; after this we clean up and load our vehicles and typically leave Ellicott city around 6:30 pm.
Our CSA pickups are similar to market but not quite as complicated, and are managed by our CSA Coordinator. If we have 50 members picking up, we already have harvested 50 shares of 7-10 different products. These products are laid out on a table similar to the farmers market, than CSA members come by between the allotted time and pickup their share.
Community
We have many demands on our time during the farm season and need to be aware of where we put our energy. We enjoy getting to know our employees, CSA members, and market and farm stand customers. However, we view our farm as a business, not an educational outreach center. We have found that it does not work for us to have volunteers at the farm. We have found that it is too distracting to have visitors and volunteers at the farm during the work day.
Personal Life
We know that each employee has a personal life outside of the farm. However, farming takes a dedication to the job that is often not required at other jobs. Farming is all-consuming and does not allow for much of a social life or other recreational activity during the farm season.
The season is long and brutal and very few people have experienced physical work like this. You must make sure to get enough rest or by the end you will not be able to go on. We cannot have people leave work early. Workdays are often over by 4 pm which should allow time for your personal life.
Positions Available:
Learning
We often hire people who would like to make a career of farming, either as a farm manager or on their own farm. We are happy to show you as much as we can about how our farm works so you can apply it to your future farming business.
Learning how to start a farm is very difficult and one of our goals is to produce a few farmers with new farms of their own. We are relatively new to farming ourselves, having been in this business since 2010. We have built up our infrastructure over the years, installing 5 high tunnels, a deer fence, irrigation, and built a walk in cooler.
Much of farming is best learned by hands on work and observation. A lot of farming is in knowing what things to do when during a season and learning to fit all the pieces together. Working on a farm with existing systems gives you a starting point for production techniques. Our way is not the only way, but it works for us. We grow a diversity of crops and you will learn about each crop and how it grows, what it should look like and often, how to prepare it. The learning is slow but by the end of a season you will have absorbed a lot. You will have experienced how hard farming is and will have a feel for what needs to be done when during the season.
We love farming, being outdoors, and growing vegetables. Some of the challenging parts of farming is the planning, record keeping, bookkeeping, and marketing. However, these are essential skills that are critical to the success of a farm.
We have participated in the Future Harvest: Beginning Farmer Trainee Program as mentors (a local program to train new farmers) including this year. We know how hard starting up can be and we want to offer encouragement to other new farmers.
Overview of Job Description and Qualifications for ALL positions:
At Love Dove Farms we try to find enthusiastic, motivated, hard-working, dedicated help. Attitude is everything. We need people who can bring a positive attitude to our farm.
Previous farm experience is preferred but not required. Every farm is different, and we may have a different way of doing things than your previous experience.
We are looking for people who can work quickly and efficiently, but who are also careful and able to follow directions. It is essential that you can work well with others and independently. The work is physically demanding (you must be able to lift at least 50 lbs multiple times every day) and attention to detail is critical. We have a strong emphasis on quality at Love Dove Farms and you must be able to help us maintain this high level of quality.
Work varies with the season but can often be repetitive. (Can you pick peas, green beans, or cherry tomatoes for an entire day?)
You must also be punctual and be able to work in all weather conditions. Be prepared for rain, hail, intense sun, wind, and heat—every day of the summer!
If you are not a morning person, a farm job is probably not for you. This is very different from a traditional job and you must realize that the farm has demands that are sometimes out of our control (for example, we may have to work into the evening in order to get transplants into the ground or to get everything ready on Friday for the Saturday market.)
In short, you must be reliable and the farm must be your primary commitment throughout the growing season.
Compensation will vary based on experience.
Tasks for Farm Manager:
- Planning out and prioritizing the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks
- Supervise and manage Farm Helpers
- Planting (transplanting with water-wheel transplanter, hand transplanting, seed starting.
- Irrigation set-up (drip tape and overhead sprinklers)
- Trellising (mainly tomatoes)
- Cultivating (wheel hoes, stirrup hoes, linear hoes, hand weeding, thinning)
- Harvesting (All harvesting is done by hand)
- Wash area work (washing, bunching, quality control, packing
- Attend 3 Farmers' Markets each week, Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday.
- Manage CSA dropoff and work with Farm manager
- Exceptional customer service is required
- Wholesale orders and delivery- Work with wholesalers to establish and maintain relationships
- Take direction from Farm Manager
- Harvesting veggies for markets
- Assist in transplanting and seed starting
- Maintenance of fields, including trellising, cultivating, and cleanup
Application
Before submitting an application, be sure to review the general overview of our farm season below:
There is no smoking or drug use permitted on our farm or at markets.
We do not have employee housing or camping available.
If you’re interested in working at Love Dove Farms, please respond by e-mail with the information requested below. We are looking for people who are thorough and follow directions. Please keep this in mind when responding.
- Name
- Address
- Phone # (preferably a cell phone number)
- Please attach your resume if you have one.
- Availability (dates, days, times)
- Past job experience including any agricultural experience
- Position(s) you are interested in
- Why do you want to work at Love Dove Farms?
- Do you live within 30 minutes of the farm?
- After reading the job description, what makes you think you would be a good fit at Love Dove Farms? What do you think you would contribute to our farm?
- Do you have any management experience?
- What are your goals in agriculture?
- Will you be able to commit to the entire farm season?
- Can you work long, hard hours and still have a good attitude?
- Are you able to work outside in all weather conditions?
- Do you have anything we should know about that would prevent you from doing physical work? Are you able to lift 50 pounds?
- Do you have a valid driver’s license and a good driving record? If not please explain.
- Do you have reliable transportation?
- Do you have health insurance?
- Please provide three professional references with a description of your relationship with the people you list.
- Tell us anything else you care to share about yourself.
Send all applications to [email protected].
Thanks for your interest in Love Dove Farms Farm!
What follows is a general overview of our farm season:
Weekly Schedule
This is our weekly harvest schedule. Harvest days start at 7:00am on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, beginning in the middle of May.
Monday: Field Work, focus on planting, reseeding, maintenance, etc.
Tuesday: We harvest for our Miller Library Market on Wednesday
Wednesday: Harvest in the AM, Afternoon Market, must leave by 12pm, setup at market by 1pm for 2pm-6pm market.
Thursday: We harvest for our Thursday CSA in the evening and prepare for Harvest for Saturday Market.
Friday: Harvesting for the Saturday farmers’ market.
Saturday/Sunday: We have a Saturday Farmers Market, and Sunday CSA Dropoff.
Seasonal Schedule
Employees will work from March or April into October or possibly November. Hours will change as the season progresses.
March: Greenhouse work: to begin seeding our trays for all the summer crops. We will also direct seed in our High Tunnels greens for early spring production.
April: A time for planting and maintaining the fields. Keeping weeds down as new seedlings emerge. April is a light harvest month which allows us to focus on planting and weeding. We also start additional seedlings such as cucumbers, squash, zucchini, sunflowers, herbs, etc.
May: We begin harvesting many of the crops planted in March and April. Our CSA and farmers markets begin in early May,
The middle of May is the start of the extremely busy and important planting season. All of the summer crops need to be planted between May 15th and June 10th. This means harvesting several times a week while planting in every spare moment, sometimes until late in the evening. Thousands of vegetable transplants need to be put in the ground during this time. More than ten acres need to be transformed from bare soil to irrigated, growing plants in 25 days.
June: In June the harvest increases. We start picking sugar snap peas (which can be brutal) as well as all the spring greens and we are harvesting 4 days a week. We commonly harvest 20 plus items in a day. It is a struggle to ensure that everything gets done and nothing is forgotten. Most crops have been planted by early June and the focus is on weeding, watering and harvesting.
July: By July most crops are planted and need to be maintained. We will still continue to harvest for market, CSA, and restaurants. We will also have a lot of weeding to do, which can be really unpleasant in the July heat. By mid-July it feels like you have run a marathon but you have just arrived at the starting line. We also harvest our garlic, and onions, as well as begin to harvest Potatoes.
August: In August more new crops are ripening every day. Summer squash and cucumbers are prolific. Tomatoes begin to ripen. By the end of August the amount we harvest is overwhelming. We are no longer harvesting as many greens with the heat of the summer and this means that we do not spend as much time washing vegetables after harvesting. Instead we spend much more time out in the field picking green beans, cherry tomatoes, etc. In mid-August more greens are planted for the fall. They need to be weeded as we try to keep up with harvesting.
All the months earlier in the season are used to train people for August, when the race really begins. The farm is at peak production for the next few months. We need to harvest all the crops (like tomatoes and peppers) that we planted and took care of earlier in the season.
September: September days can still be really hot, but with the shortening day length and cooler nights our crop diversity peaks. All the summer crops are trying to ripen before the frost, while cooler weather crops make a reappearance and traditional fall crops like winter squash start to come out of the field. We will harvest thousands of pounds of winter squash for the fall during the month of September. We continue to plant and weed successions of greens for the fall. By now most workers are bone tired, but we still have one more really busy month left.
October: October comes and the days get shorter and we have less daylight to work. The number of hours worked is less but it feels the same to tired bodies. It is also a struggle to harvest everything with the reduced number of daylight hours. We continue to harvest 4 days a week. We try to bring as much as we can to each Saturday market so we can sell all the food we have left in the field before the end of the season.
The end of our CSA means that we have a little more time for cleanup and other fieldwork like planting our overwintered garlic.
November: The last Saturday farmers’ market is in mid-November, and the final CSA is at the end of the month. November is important for cleanup, we have to pull plastic mulch and drip tape out of the field, and put away the rest of the irrigation and tools and implements.
During our entire season there is always something to do, and usually too much to do. We have never gotten everything done. Every day is an important day. If that day’s work is not done it becomes hard to catch up. Crops get lost to the weeds if we are not careful. Our success and ability to farm from year to year rests on having hard workers. I’ll work about 80 hours a week. Most the farm workers work 40-50 hours throughout much of the season.
Farmers’ Market and CSA
A typical Wednesday market day starts off at 7 am harvesting for the day. It’s important to work quickly and efficiently, and to follow procedures that we repeat each week, the market opens at 2 pm. Through out market you will remain busy bagging, stocking, cashiering, organizing, or doing a combination of all these things based on your experience level at market. We work hard to keep our stand stocked until the end of the selling period; after this we clean up and load our vehicles and typically leave Ellicott city around 6:30 pm.
Our CSA pickups are similar to market but not quite as complicated, and are managed by our CSA Coordinator. If we have 50 members picking up, we already have harvested 50 shares of 7-10 different products. These products are laid out on a table similar to the farmers market, than CSA members come by between the allotted time and pickup their share.
Community
We have many demands on our time during the farm season and need to be aware of where we put our energy. We enjoy getting to know our employees, CSA members, and market and farm stand customers. However, we view our farm as a business, not an educational outreach center. We have found that it does not work for us to have volunteers at the farm. We have found that it is too distracting to have visitors and volunteers at the farm during the work day.
Personal Life
We know that each employee has a personal life outside of the farm. However, farming takes a dedication to the job that is often not required at other jobs. Farming is all-consuming and does not allow for much of a social life or other recreational activity during the farm season.
The season is long and brutal and very few people have experienced physical work like this. You must make sure to get enough rest or by the end you will not be able to go on. We cannot have people leave work early. Workdays are often over by 4 pm which should allow time for your personal life.
