Since it came up in some threads recently, I thought I'd share my experience doing some volunteering on organic farms through http://wwoof.org/. Basically, you trade labor on a farm for training, housing, and food.
It's working out well for me to try out the self-sufficient rural ERE lifestyle to see if I like it. In addition, most of my expenses are covered and I still get to work my full-time telecommute job so I can save a lot of money. The downside is, I do nothing but work all day (7am-3pm online job, 3pm to after dark farm chores plus weekends). DH is doing chores dawn to dusk with a midday break for 3-4 hours. For now I don't mind because I'm learning new things that are completely different from my usual job (programmer). We're also living a simple, frugal lifestyle just eating from the garden with a few staples from the grocery, line-drying clothes, driving old beater pickups, etc.
Some things I've done/learned: lots of weeding, split wood for the winter, prepare grape vines for harvest, drive a tractor, can/freeze/dry food for winter, worked on the septic, build a greenhouse, scooped cow poop, sold veggies at the farmer's market, picked fruit trees, cleared/prepared beds, various pruning/watering/harvesting tasks, and generally getting a taste of what it's like to live in the country.
We're still tending more towards living in the city with a large garden eventually, but I think some of what I'm learning will translate well. I should also mention that some farms are just looking for free labor sleeping in tents to pull weeds dawn to dusk, so you won't learn as much at these places. If you're also an office-dweller hoping to escape to a more hands-on existence someday, this is a way to try it out which is working for us.
wwoofing as rural ERE training
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Mr. Overlord
- Posts: 48
- Joined: Tue Sep 07, 2010 6:17 pm
S, thanks for posting your experience. I'm really impressed by the list of tasks that you've learned while volunteering.
Did you have any trouble finding a place to volunteer at? I've heard many places don't respond because they're overwhelmed with applicants or they don't like to take people without any farm experience. Also how did you screen potential sites to make sure it wasn't a farm that was just looking for free labor?
Did you have any trouble finding a place to volunteer at? I've heard many places don't respond because they're overwhelmed with applicants or they don't like to take people without any farm experience. Also how did you screen potential sites to make sure it wasn't a farm that was just looking for free labor?
I sent out a lot of emails (50ish?) with the time I was looking to stay, a list of useful skills I already had, and asking questions about things like where we'd be sleeping, how many volunteers were there at any one time, what we'd be doing/how many hours a day. Because of my restriction of needing to work online during the morning, I think that filtered out a lot of places that had a set schedule. For this fall, I ended up doing phone interviews with 5 places and actually setting up a time to stay with 2 of them. I stayed at a farm that had 15ish volunteers mostly just pulling weeds and milking cows last spring and to be fair it was a nice place with kind people, but it didn't seem like an opportunity to learn as much as if you're the only volunteer just shadowing the farmer helping him do what he does all day.
