To cultivate a love of agriculture, sustainability, and food systems, Jeremy Oldfield ’01 works the land—at Yale.

On a June day when a heat wave is blanketing the East Coast, Jeremy Oldfield ’01 is working with Yale students to stop high water pressure from flooding the Yale University farm, a one-acre rectangular plot of land tucked between Yale’s Forest and Divinity Schools.

They fix the problem, but it could have been much messier. Even so, Oldfield enjoys those “teachable moments” working with the students on the “messy parts of farming that cannot be swept under the rug.”

Oldfield’s formal title, manager of field academics, means that he’s in charge of the daily practice of farming at Yale University. The farm Oldfield oversees is open workdays, when volunteers come to farm; he connects with local mutual aid organizations to donate food; he teaches students at every level about food sovereignty, Indigenous practices, and the resiliency of rye; he grows hops vines for Yale Ale; and he organizes weekly student food talks that happen while the attendees eat 50 to 70 pizzas fresh from the farm’s wood-fired oven. Yale’s farm grows more than 40 market vegetables—tomatoes, radishes, carrots, eggplants, zucchinis—as well as herbs, flowers, and even Japanese indigo. The process of farming and the crops themselves intersect with various academic subjects across the university, including science, economics, foreign languages, and history.

It’s like dozens of jobs in one, which for this wanderlust feels right.

Oldfield does not measure time in years but, rather, in “growing seasons,” and he’s been managing Yale’s farm for 13 of them. His journey to find work that reflected the values he learned at Sidwell Friends required a “meandering” decade of exploration and experimentation from coast to coast. After graduating from Williams College, Oldfield felt like most of his classmates wanted to become “consultants.” But Oldfield wanted to tell stories about modern labor movements in Mexico and the United States and the lives of migrant workers by writing a great American novel like John Steinbeck or by telling those stories through rock ‘n’ roll. “My ambitions were really high,” Oldfield says.

Fortunately, one of his best friends from Sidwell Friends helped Oldfield find his way when the pair moved to northern California after college to work on a produce farm in Petaluma alongside migrant workers from Honduras and El Salvador. Oldfield interviewed the workers about their lives thinking he would share their stories à la Ira Glass in This American Life. But questioning migrants about their lives was as uncomfortable as it was revealing: He was asking vulnerable workers to become even more vulnerable, which made everyone involved uneasy. And he began to find that he enjoyed working on the farm—and not just as a means to mine stories.

He questioned the path he had taken. The motivations that brought him to the farm were driven by literary ambition and political idealism, but he realized his true passion was agriculture itself. “It becomes a tiny bit addictive when you start to see the physical landscapes that you have contributed to transform every day,” he says. “There’s a bit of charm that starts to sink in, and you don’t want to stop.”

It becomes a tiny bit addictive when you start to see the physical landscapes that you have contributed to transform every day. There's a bit of charm that starts to sink in, and you don't want to stop.

So, he kept going. He got married and moved to a farm near Blue Hill, Maine, where he found a mentor and role model. Elliot Coleman, the owner of the farm, is a writer-farmer and the author of six books, including the seminal Four Season Harvest: How to Harvest Fresh Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long. The job with Coleman turned out to be more than agriculture; it was writing, communicating, and educating. He glimpsed a way to farm and to share his passion for farming that felt authentic.

Oldfield and his wife, Emily, later moved back to the Bay Area. Oldfield worked at the Cultured Pickle Shop, which sold kombuchas, kimchi, and pickles, and Emily worked at the Buy Right Market in the Mission District in San Francisco. Together, they saved up and founded The Freelance Farmers, a company that taught homeowners, schools, and restaurants how to start and maintain organic gardens. Oldfield joked that there was one problem with the business model. “If we really wanted to make a career out of that,” he says, “we would have found a way not to teach so much,” so that the customers would rely on them on a more permanent basis.

Oldfield credits his Sidwell Friends education with instilling in him a profound respect for the dignity of labor and the art of a craft. That was the common theme throughout his courses in literature, history, and even mathematics, as well as Meetings for Worship.

When Emily decided to attend the Yale School of the Environment, Oldfield followed her and continued teaching people to garden through The Freelance Farmers in New Haven while waiting tables and working on an MFA in writing and literature at the Bennington College Writing Seminars. But he was still looking for his role in a world that too often decouples erudition and farming. So, when Yale went looking for someone who could both oversee its farm and explore the intellectual threads that connect agriculture to a multitude of topics—immigration, the environment, urban planning, heritage crops—Oldfield found a place to stop and stay a while. Like his mentor, Elliot Coleman, Oldfield had discovered a way to educate and farm.

Oldfield has now spent more than 13 growing seasons at Yale sifting through big questions “about power, representation, and culture, and who is included and excluded from certain altruistic conversations in American culture.” There, he coordinates on-farm academic programming, works closely with undergraduate and graduate students on agricultural and pedagogical projects, and directs study initiatives for the Lazarus Summer Internship, which helps interested students add tenets of sustainable food and agriculture to their coursework.

Each day, he’s part of a live—and growing—conversation. One that nourishes his passion.