- Activities that you're doing are real.
This is how it works.
Perfect.
There goes all the oats.
That was a lot of work for 250 bucks.
(upbeat music)
I'm Kathleen, and I'm an urban farmer.
I live in an underserved neighborhood of Los Angeles
and support youth and families
in the surrounding neighborhoods
to have access to healthy food and wellness.
Today, if it goes anything typical, we had 10 youth arrive,
and we worked on social/emotional learning,
spent time milking goats, made a from-scratch lunch,
and did an art practice,
all focused on Meso-American history.
My favorite thing is actually getting my hands dirty
and having my hands in the soil.
I'm ready to get going.
Show me this thing.
(upbeat music)
I'm wearing baseball hats?
Come on.
Ooh, what about gender fluid?
I don't see the gender, do you?
Oh, there.
All right, great.
I'm good with my farmer.
Hire a worker.
Yeah, I'm gonna hire a worker to do this for me instead.
I know what a Holland Harvester does.
I know it's a very dangerous piece of equipment, actually.
Those blades are moving very rapidly
and cutting all the grass.
I think if you're trying to fix it,
they're extremely sharp,
so people lose their hands and arms.
One of the more dangerous activities on the farm,
from what I know.
I'll use cruise control.
Didn't know it had cruise control.
Usually, you have a lot to do,
so it makes sense to hire people, see?
Gotta get myself active here.
"Fields that have been harvested need to be cultivated
"before they can be sown anew.
"This field has been harvested recently
"and now needs somebody to cultivate it."
Well, I don't have my weight on the front of this.
There we go.
Now I have my weight.
That tool is so heavy
that that little tractor would just fall over,
or you'd kinda be cocked back in the seat
and not be able to run the thing.
And now, lower the cultivator.
Ooh, except I don't want it there.
I just put it in the road,
and then the owner would be mad at me.
Okay, now I'm going to my green thing.
"Fields have been cultivated are ready to be sown.
"For this, you need a sowing machine.
"Get back in the tractor and attach the sowing machine
"that's placed behind it."
So I have entered the vehicle.
Oh, select the seed.
I'm going for oats.
Our sower is going to put the seed down in the field.
And so we tilled it and made the top six inches
of the soil all loose.
If we were really smart farmers,
we would've applied compost or vermicompost
or some kind of biostimulant
so the seeds would have a kick-start
to get them germinated as quickly as possible.
"As soon as the harvester's tank is full,
"or even before that,
"you can unload its contents into a trailer."
Oh, that's very straight, that.
That's very unusual.
Activities that you're doing are real.
This is how it works.
That's why they call it Big Egg, right,
because it's all this big equipment,
and it's a lot of petroleum being burnt up.
Perfect.
There goes all the oats.
My money's still okay?
Yes.
I'm definitely a businesswoman.
(laughs)
I'm a little worried I might hit this thing.
No.
Okay.
All right.
We're ready to move on.
For me, it's kind of fun, because I'm not a big gamer,
and so this is something that holds my attention.
And so this one I could see playing.
When?
In my retirement?
I don't know.
It's not like I have a lot of time to do stuff like this.
I would actually pay money
and go get training and drive a tractor.
That seems cooler.
I wanna, you know, a branching, round up the cows.
- [Producer] You missed the question mark.
- I did!
Yes!
You know, driving that bloody tractor with my fingers
isn't very easy at all.
You know, I've had to back up trailers
and driven boats before and things like that,
so driving with my fingers
is really doing a number on my brain.
Okay, the Guided Tour says,
"This unloading station is one of the places on the map
"where you can sell your harvest.
"You can check the current prices of all products."
Okay, here we go.
I like the business part.
Plus 197 euros.
What is that?
250 bucks.
That was a lot of work for 250 bucks.
Again, we don't pay enough money for food because it's all,
this particular kind of stuff is all subsidized,
this Big Egg.
It really makes things uneven.
Well, I have more money than I started out with,
so I suppose I'm doing something right.
"Nicely done!
"Selling your crops is the main way to earn money
"as a farmer."
I like how there's no other traffic on the road.
I don't need to be worried about killing children
or running into a bull or anything like that.
When I'm in the city, it's incredibly crowded,
and there's never enough space.
Oh, I almost went off the road.
There's traffic.
Ooh.
Sorry.
Oh, biogas?
That's cool.
That is a regenerative practice.
So you can grow material to then turn into gas.
I would if this would keep your brain exercised
as you age, though, 'cause they do have games like that.
This is a nice farm, too.
If you drive through the cornfields of the Midwest,
it does not look like this.
Oh look, they grew.
- [Producer] I think you need to move out of the way
so he doesn't run you over.
(dramatic music)
- Oh.
(laughs)
What to plant would be my first thing.
Like, what am I gonna plant?
Where am I gonna plant it?
Make sure I had the right equipment to plant with.
We have to learn how to be more resilient.
Farming is very subject to things that we can't control,
like the weather.
Okay, now I'm gonna harvest the rest of my wheat
so I can make some money.
Don't want to go through the whole field
and get myself all messy before I have to do this job.
I think 400 acres is the average size of farms
in the United States.
A lot of farms are family-run.
Corporate farms, they're going to hire workers to do this.
The hard part for rural folks is,
this isn't going on all the time, right?
So they don't have constant work.
It's just one session of the planting.
There will be little bits sometimes left in the field,
but this is my money,
so I don't want to leave anything good in here.
Oh, I left a big swath, though.
I'm sorry.
Finger driving.
They would fire me.
I might be able to get a job as the bookkeeper.
I think if I played more video games
and was better at my fingers, they would hire me.
Oh look, it's very slow too, 10 kilometers an hour.
So you've gotta have patience as a farmer
on a lot of levels, don't you?
I'm wasting a lot of money right now.
They'd be furious.
Driving like a madwoman.
(machine whistling)
All right, I'm gonna unload my wheat harvest into the tipper
and hopefully, I've made some money here.
All right, I need some driving lessons.
Let's hope that I've got some money in the bank.
I guess I only have 50% of my field, though.
This is probably the life of a farmer too, huh?
Just driving along.
The wheat was worth quite a lot, 1,680 euro.
I would do it for two grand a day.
The harvesting, I need some improvement.
The selling, not so bad.
Actually, it was really fun.
It seems pretty realistic, actually,
in terms of all of the steps you have to take,
the driving, the difficulty maneuvering that big equipment.
I didn't know what to expect, and I'm not a gamer,
but actually, I had a lot of fun playing the game.
(upbeat music)