Apprentice Profile: Lilia Machado

To say that farming is in Lilia Machado’s blood would not be saying quite enough. Farming is in her heart.  

Against the Grain Farm has been Lilia’s home for the past four months, part of a gap year between high school and college. Arriving on the farm on a cold and rainy February day, Lilia set to work with a will, raising seedlings, preparing ground, planting and tending and harvesting crops that would one day arrive in the first CSA shares. As well, she has tended the livestock, raising layer chicks, tending to the goats and dogs and whatever else walks about the farm on four legs or two.  

Descended from coastal Portuguese farming folk, the sights, sounds and rhythms of farming come natural to her. Having spent every summer on the family farmland in Portugal she is well used to early mornings, the sound of the tractor, the memory of her grandfather paring peaches to eat, vinting his own wine, infusing the family aguardente (home made aperitif), while Uncles sprayed crops or made compost. All these experiences made her into the warm, kind person we have come to know and love to share farm life with.  

What brought her to ATG? A lot of hunting online, an interest in ATG’s posting on the ATTRA website—and a bit of luck. Her time here is sandwiched between work on a previous farm and her next gig at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, a place whose luxuriant flower beds and opulent greenhouses are familiar to her from frequent family trips she took there as a child.  

As for her favorite place on the farm, it’s the pack shed. There in the bustling focal point of the farm, harvest becomes produce, work is spiced with conversation and order appears out of chaos. “It’s like a wrap-up of your homework,” she says with a teenage grin.  

Though Lilia is the youngest of the farm apprentices this season, she fits well into the farm where she is appreciated and in turn appreciates the opportunity to experience a sense of community, not to mention farming knowledge! And perhaps it is a matter of her Quaker values, of which community is of great importance, but she appreciates the openness and even the vulnerability that comes with learning to live well within a small group. We are sure she will bring her loving attitude into the future!  

We wish Lilia well as she continues her education by attending College of the Atlantic in Maine. There she will major in the single discipline the college provides, human ecology. How that will play out in her future remains to be seen, but she says it will include food—its history, justice, politics—and of course its taste!