Cassie Burnside, Wild Willow Farms

I’m a student here at Wild Willow Farms. I started about two weeks ago. I’m doing the Sunday only class because I have a full time job, so it’s all day on Sunday and then I’m just volunteering today. Monday through Friday I’m a manufacturing engineer. I work in manufacturing. I’m a mechanical engineer by trade. So that’s why I was really excited about the program that’s on Sundays because it’s the only one that I could’ve done. I’ll show you in here. I think this is where they do the sprouting of the new plants. Yeah, I don’t really know a lot about this because this is only my second week, but yeah, this is where they start the new seedlings. This is where they’d start off and then they’d eventually be moved out to the fields to be planted. Yeah, that’s it.

I’m an engineer but after working long hours and being inside an office five days a week. I realized that there has to be more to life. So I decided to go for a tour at one of the local organic farms here in San Diego. This is how I actually started off getting interested in farming. The tour I did was over at Suzie’s Farm. They do free tours on Saturdays and I’d been looking for a program like this that fit into my schedule. There are a lot of e-programs online that’s fully online. They’re expensive. They’re like $1,000. But I was really looking for something like that to learn about farming and animals. Then the guy who did the tour over at Suzie’s had explained to me that, “Oh, they have this class over at Wild Willow,” so I came and asked about it. It was perfect timing because the class started like a week later. So I came and I talked to somebody and I signed up and it’s history from there. I’m really interested. It’s very different from my day job, but it’s really interesting to me and it’s something I want to – I want to get involved with growing my own food and having animals one day, maybe homesteading eventually. I don’t know. I don’t really know what my plan is for the future with it, but I just know that I’m really loving learning about it right now.

I’m really glad I came today to Wild Willow Farm because I haven’t gotten to get hands on with the chickens yet and this is really fun. I like plants, but I’m more excited about the animal aspect. I’m really excited to be doing – this is cool to be so hands on with the chickens today.