Carrie Nemec left her family business in Upstate New York and she needed a new job when she moved to Virginia with her partner. She applied to a farm with no knowledge of farming, but she told them she came from a family business and they hired her. “After three weeks here I thought, oh maybe I wanna do this for the rest of my life,” she said.
She has been farming for at least fourteen years and enjoys growing lots of vegetables while managing the Potomac Vegetable Farm.
Nemec is one of the owners of the farm and main cultivator who handles the direct seeding into the ground, and uses a machine to go over the plants afterwards to remove the weeds. As a Community-Supported Agriculture Coordinator, people prepay for vegetables from her farm in February and they distribute them weekly throughout the summer.
“Supplying food to people is like the coolest thing you get to do, ” she said.
Feeding people and developing plants that live for a really long time is something she is proud of. “Watching them be so grateful for all of the hard work you put into it is worth every second of it,” she said.
A challenge that Nemec faces is understanding what her job is at any moment. She is the owner of the farm along with two other people. One of the owners is 83 and starts all of the seeds inside the greenhouse that don’t require a vacuum seeder. It is not always clear to Nemec if she needs help or wants her independence.
One of the things she likes the most about her job is the social interaction that comes with being out in a field with a group of people, and looking back and seeing everything she has accomplished at the end of a task.
Nemec works seven days a week and she is looking forward to incorporating her kids into her routine at the farm on the weekends. Her proudest moment at her farm is when her five year old daughter had her wife call her after she had just picked her up from the farm, to tell her she forgot to tell the workers they were doing a good job.
“It was one of the coolest moments and where your kids understood you have to tell your workers they are doing a good job,” she said.
