Backyard Farms promotes Brady Sinclair to Assistant Grower

Brady Sinclair is the first "homegrown" Assistant Grower in the history of Backyard Farms. Brady began his career at Backyard Farms in the summer of 2008. During the hot summer months, the heat loving tomato plants grow even faster than their normal foot per week pace. So much so, Backyard's personal gardeners need help in order to keep up with all the extra pruning and deleafing required to keep the plants' energy focused on producing tomatoes. To make sure this essential work gets done, they hire anywhere from 30-50 temporary employees each summer and that's exactly how Brady started working at Backyard Farms. "I thought it was just going to be a summer job," Brady says with a grin, "but I fell in love with it."

Within 2-3 weeks of starting his part-time job at Backyard Farms, Brady moved into crop care where he began to learn how to care for plants beyond pruning and deleafing. When summer ended a few months later, Brady stayed and became a full-time employee. He'd spend the next three years as a crop care worker before working as a picker. While he enjoyed picking, Brady realized crop care was his true passion. Brady specialized in maintaining the irrigation and fertilizer systems before being promoted to Assistant Manager. His eventual promotion to Crop Care Manager came with some weekend duties where he supervised the local high school students who work for Backyard Farms on Saturdays doing the same deleafing and pruning work that Brady did when he started.

As Crop Care Manager, Brady also had the opportunity to supervise Kelsey Fabian from WCSH Channel 6 Portland when she spent a day at the greenhouse for her "Kelsey Lends a Hand" segment.

Read more about Brady at the Backyard Farms blog.