How an inner-city kid is becoming a farmer
Written by Adam Mohammed
Wwoofers, people who enter into these usually unpaid arrangements, spend anywhere from a four days to eight months on individual wwoof-farms; time-commitments vary depending on the wwoof-host and the wwoofer. Some of these places are real commercial farms; others are 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 six weeks total on five different properties; and more recently, I spent two-and-a-half months in the summer of 2009 on six wwoof farms across southern Ontario, 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 a way to travel around that country cheaply. I learned 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.
Hence last summer, when my goal was to see multiple permaculture projects, spend at least eight days at each place (except for one) which in general was enough time to get to know the farm and farmers decently well; and I bike-toured between them all, getting to further explore and experience the countryside. Between six hosts, I saw multiple successes and failures in terms of the ecology of food production, and in terms of the economic and social conditions of these households. I learned that farming is a very hard business to make money in, and families usually need a member to work off-farm for extra income; but I also learned that people will put up with financial poverty in order to live in productive, healthy, diverse, beautiful and “rich” landscapes.
Last summer, three of the places I wwoofed at were commercial / surplus-producing farms. Of the other three hosts, one is an 80-acre property which is home to a “tree farm” / nursery; one is a two-acre lot in a small town that hosts a bike shop, with a big garden; and one host is the five-acre “Earthwalk Eco Education Center” with demonstrations of different building, gardening and dietary systems that promote healthy and sustainable lifestyles. Of these three non-farms, each is home to people who probably could be farmers (in terms of their knowledge as gardeners), but who have devoted their careers and homesteads to other ventures. The tree nursery raises 100 species of native, edible (fruit and nut), and ornamental trees, and thus contributes in some way to food production by giving people the seedlings to grow nuts and fruits with. The bike shop perpetuates active transportation and recreation, and was a great example of smaller-scale gardening techniques applicable for more urban settings. The Earthwalk Eco Education Center brings people together in workshops and courses that opens their minds to ways of living, producing, and consuming which are more sustainable than our societies’ status quo.
Of the three real farms, none of them are “certified organic” although they all are designed and operated using ecological growing techniques, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and minimal machinery (push rototillers). They all have three to five or so acres in vegetable/”market” gardens; some kind of animals on pasture; and an evolving interest in perennial cropping systems (/forest gardens/ polyculture orchards / food forests), with one farm having nine acres established as a fruit-nut-berry-herb-etc. “forest garden,” one farm having only a couple of acres in that kind of system, and one wherein all their perennial plants are still young and don’t take up much space yet. All of these farms use interplanting and crop rotation methods to keep soil healthy and pests in check. Earthwalk Eco Education Centre gave organic produce to the local food bank each week. And they all sell their produce locally: booths in nearby farmer’s markets and through ‘community supported agriculture’ or CSA schemes. These are arrangements whereby a farm sells shares in their yearly output; for example a farmer might decide they can supply one hundred families with all of their fresh produce over a spring-summer-fall season; each family will pick up or get delivery of a collection of in-season food every week or two. The farmer is guaranteed income for a year at it’s very beginning; and the consumer receives a good deal on fresh food and a variety in their diet based on the time of year, real world conditions (greens in the spring, berries mid-summer, apples and potatoes in the fall, never anything out of season).
One of the farms I wwoofed on in 2009, the operation with 9 acres in perennial cropping systems, I am going back to for five months this summer. The 50-acre property has close to two hundred edible species on-site! They grow almost any kind of vegetable, berry, herb, edible flower, fruit, and nut (and animal) that your average urbanite consumer would want to eat and that can be grown in southern Ontario’s climate. They also grow some tropical fruit trees in a greenhouse too, but not any more than what they eat themselves. Their high level of diversity, and the fact that the farmers have been there for 22 years, is pretty much why I am going to apprentice with those folks for this 2010 growing season. Amongst six wwoof hosts, this place has the oldest, largest, and most established garden and orchard systems, most number and variety of farm animals, most number of farm-hands, most amount of food production (I assume considering their size and workload), and in general provide a great example of a sustainable greenbelt farm.
By modern/ conventional/ western-world economic standards, wwoofers are awfully under-paid; working as a fruit-picker on a commercial monoculture farm pays decent amounts of money, whereas most wwoof hosts don’t “pay” anything (besides room and boards, and potentially a small stipend). But wwoofing is certainly not about capital accumulation: it is a much older sort of ‘worker-employer’ relationship; it is about people putting themselves in new situations, new landscapes, and in new duties; it is about learning how food is grown, and becoming connected to food-production in a way that most people in a place like Canada or New Zealand aren’t. Even when it’s not called wwoofing or on farms who take transient interns who are not part of wwoof, working on a diversified organic farm is a life-changing experience in that you never look at food in the same way ever again. Once a consumer has crossed the line into the world of being a producer, they can never fully go back again.
Wwoofing, or working on any farm for either short vacations or as multi-month interns, is something I would recommend anyone and everyone do at some point in their life. Especially for young people like me, still in or recently done some post-secondary schooling. It’s a great way to spend one’s summer, not having to pay rent or buy food, but instead living on someone’s homestead and eating free fresh food out right out of the field (or even still on the vine, and you want). For people interested in ecology/ environmental science, landscaping, horticulture, arboriculture, working with animals, or even for people with other random entrepreneurial goals, picking the right wwoof host to spend a season with could be one of the best apprenticeship opportunities out there.
Plus, farming is a line of work which is going to be in high demand over the next decades in North America: farmers are aging (average Ontario farmer is 55) and their kids are mostly in cities. As it stands now in Ontario, migrant labourers are imported to pick our fruits and veggies. Simply speaking, we need a new generation of farmers to be ready and able to contribute to some form of food security/self-sufficiency - - this much is unarguable, that any urbane nation needs at least one to two per cent, but ideally 5 to 20 per cent, of it’s populace to reside in lower densities and grow food for everyone else. The only way that we North Americans will be able to maintain the two per cent figure (based on our mechanized farming system), and/or feed ourselves for generations to come (based on “sustainable” farming techniques would require farms with more hands and fewer machines) which would require that 5-20% figure, is if people who aren’t otherwise raised on farms have the opportunities to experience farming. The only way North America could maintain a steady food supply is if the process of middle-aged or ready-for-retirement farmers passing on their knowledge and their land to people willing to take farming, and ecology, seriously. People willing to work hard without promises of instant financial gratification, but rather, feel satisfied after a day in the field that “today I did something useful and necessary to society” and for whom that ‘feeling’ is soul-sustaining. Farmers, and gardeners, need to be open to finding out who these potential food growers are and training them; these potential food growers, they need somewhere to learn and expand their skills and knowledge.
Wwoofing is “the wave of the future” in my opinion, for all of the above-listed reasons. As the global human community is facing challenges like peak oil, climate change, species extinction and economic hiccups, we all need to be ready to pass onto new generations the lessons most valuable rather than the ones most destructive. I think that localized and diverse farming systems are more important to first-world’ers now than they realize; people in the third world know all about how life-sustaining small farms and gardens are. In the west, we cannot assume that the world we have now, one where we are buffered from scarcity, can go on forever. We cannot assume that our one-man-with-a-tractor-growing-500-acres-of-corn farming model can go on forever. We have to recognize that for reasons ranging from soil conservation to equity to food security to the price of oil (now and later), urbanites becoming more in tune with their local hinterlands and buying from small diverse farms is a necessary process. We have to realize that more city kids need to be exposed to the countryside and where their food comes from (and/or where it could come from), and how it’s grown; when we live in a society where school-kids answer “The grocery store” to the question “where does food come from,” we have problems. And we have to realize that in instances where people do become interested in farming, but have no starting point, no means to go down that road, we also have a problem.
Wwoofing is a way to help solve some of these problems: by at least giving people the chance to work on farms for brief weeks, let alone giving them access to multi-month apprenticeships, wwoof is helping to ensure that people will continue to eat wholesome and fresh food well into the future. And...wwoofing is a lot of fun too! Waking naturally with the sun; eating peas fresh off the vine; picking raspberries and being able to act out “three for box, one for me;” befriending chickens and being entertained by pigs; figuring out that many ‘weeds’ are edible; these all brought me lots of joy, and I’m not alone in this boat.
Try it out, what have you got to lose?!
