How an inner-city kid is becoming a farmer

Written by Adam Mohammed Thursday, 22 April 2010 01:23

How an inner-city kid is becoming a farmer
There exists in Canada and about 90 or so other countries chapters of an organization called WWOOF, which stands for either ‘Willing Workers On Organic Farms’ or ‘World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms’ depending where you are. In each place, it is a networking organization of sorts: WWOOF-Canada is a database of 4-500 rural households who take in interns/apprentices on a transient basis. On par wwoof-hosts ask for a 30-40 hour-work-week in exchange for meals, housing, the opportunity to learn ecological gardening and farming techniques hands-on, and the value of being out in the countryside or small towns with tonnes of fresh air. Wwoofers, people who enter into these usually unpaid arrangements, spend anywhere from a 4 days to 8 months on individual wwoof-farms; time-commitments vary depending on the wwoof-host and the wwoofer. Some of these places are real commercial farms; some are other types of rural homesteads which have on-site food production but are not “farms” per se.

I have gone out on two wwoof “circuits”: in the time period of mid-January to early-March 2006 I was in New Zealand and spent 6 weeks total on 5 different properties; and more recently I spent two-and-a-half months in the summer of 2009 on 6 wwoof farms across southern Ontario, strung out between Ottawa and Guelph. During my first experience wwoofing I was pretty new to gardening/farming, and wasn’t even really sure if it was my niche; half my reason for wwoofing around NZ was as a way to travel around that country cheaply. I learnt much about permaculture / ecologically-informed food-growing, and had such a fun time hanging out in the country that in ’06 I knew I would have to wwoof again.