Tag Archives: WWOOF

Lessons from a Small Farmer

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Clockwise: aubergine growing in the garden; Barbialla Nuova’s lake; a spider makes its home amidst the blackberry brambles; drawing on the car’s dusty rear window for kids by kids

Over the last couple weeks while WWOOFing, I weeded a pumpkin patch, staked tomatoes, cleaned and revitalized a garden bed, created and turned compost piles, sanded and painted wood beams, and helped measure and construct a pergola. All these were activities I’d never done before. They were only the tip of the iceberg in what I learned while in Tuscany.

The thing is, volunteering with WWOOF is not simply a job or a means of traveling cheaply, it is adopting a lifestyle and exploring a set of values. I did it because I was interested in learning about sustainable agriculture and the rural lifestyle of a farmer, but I ended up getting crash courses on Australian folk music, parenting small children and welding. I was lucky to find a family who welcomed me into their daily routine, included me in meals and activities, and were genuinely interested in getting to know me. And although I initially wanted to live with an Italian family to improve my Italian, I am very happy that my host family was English-speaking because I wouldn’t have been able to connect beyond a superficial level otherwise.

A few lessons from an agrarian lifestyle:
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Anatomy of a Well-Constructed Pergola

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My dad has quite a lot of handyman experience (he has built swimming pools, renovated houses, fixes cars) but with the recalcitrance and aversion of children to anything their parents do, I never really bothered paying much attention, and so my brother was the one who learned the ins ands outs of fixing a washing machine. Just as I was ruing my inability to solder stuff though, Ken announced that I’d be helping him build a pergola, a porch-like extension to the Vallibonci house without the floor. Brilliant, now we’re cooking with power tools!

Having never done any construction work before, it is quite fascinating to see the building process from the ground up. I am now quite proficient at sanding wood beams, and know the proper building specs for rafter dimensions for a 3 m span. Also, I have strong urges to go out and buy a DeWalt impact drill, laser level and a chalk line. We just finished putting up the frame of the pergola yesterday, and though it might not look like much, a tremendous amount of calculation was done for this to happen.

A crash course on the techniques of good construction:

  1. Rafter is drilled into a bracket with four bolts with the strength to support a floor. Beam extends from the wall at a perfect right angle (we invoked Pythagorean theorem to accomplish this, which is harder than it sounds because the wall is not totally straight).
  2. Rafter is flush against the top beam since a 15 cm wedge has been sliced out of the bottom.
  3. Front post is held perfectly perpendicular to the ground with a stay post, which will later be removed when the final bolts are put in place.
  4. Two top beams dovetail and overlap neatly over the center post for added strength (you never want to simply butt the ends together).
  5. Since the ground is not level, front posts are cut to different heights (ranging from 2.005 to 2.095 m) so that the top beams are completely level.

I am pretty sure that Ken is highly amused at watching me fumble with a level (“It’s upside down”), but I appreciate him letting this city slicker newb act as his gopher. When I asked him how he learned to weld, he simply replied, “I grew up on a farm, my dad started teaching me how to weld when I was 10!” Sweet Jesus, when I was that age, I am pretty sure I was building walls with Legos. Ken’s pipe dream is to return to Australia and build his own house from scratch, and he has enough mason/plumber/architect friends around to help him out. I asked if we could swap some of my computer programmer friends for his tradesman buddies.

This project, more than anything else, has fully impressed upon me the need for the United States to switch to the metric system.

Soaring Through Centuries: Falcons and Farms in Tuscany

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A falcon catches a lure mid-air.

After a 7 hour battle for seating on a hot, overbooked train, I stepped off the platform in San Miniato and took a good look around. This was Italy’s famed Tuscany, the stuff that Hollywood movies and expat marriage dreams are made of. All was quiet, and I paused uncertainly as I looked at the empty train station waiting room. If I were a WWOOF host, where would I be, I thought to myself. My worries were allayed however, when I spotted a woman waiting around the corner. She approached me with a smile and said, “Hi, are you Crystal? I’m Amy, nice to meet you, I’m glad that you made it!”

Amy quickly introduced herself and told me about the Barbialla Nuova farm, where I am volunteering through WWOOF for the next couple weeks. In no time, we were trading life stories and discussing how the shape of bread across cultures is influenced by the way it is used (flatbreads for curry in India vs round disks used as bowls for stew in England). Amy moved from Australia to Italy with her husband and two young children about 9 months ago, after deciding that they wanted to spend some time living abroad. Ken, her husband, is a very talented bread baker and they both have extensive experience as WWOOFers around the world. After sending out inquiries to the WWOOF network, they stumbled upon Barbialla Nuova and haven’t left since. “It’s really neat to be on the other side now as a host!” commented Amy.

Barbialla Nuova is a 500-hectare farm in central Tuscany, and the project aspires to govern the land as a holistic living organism, with knowledge from the biodynamic, sustainable and Fukuoka schools of natural agriculture. The farm holds a herd of 60+ Chianina cattle, pigs, a lake for fishing, and some of the most valuable natural white truffle beds of the Val d’Elsa. More than half of the property is wooded, and much of the remaining land is set aside for grazing animals. Wild boars, deer, hares and porcupines are some of the animals that are commonly seen on the grounds. At one point, there were about 50 farmhouses on the property, and the 1861 census records state that 382 people lived on the estate at that time, with each family given a house and some land in exchange for half of the profits. Even further back in history, Barbialla was underwater during the Pliocene era, and in some of the layers of rock, you can find marine fossils of gastropods and bivalves.
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WWOOFing with Double Rainbows

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In case you’ve been living inside a subway tunnel, the internet has been abuzz this summer with the Double Rainbow guy, who rose to fame after his YouTube video freak-out at seeing a double rainbow went viral. You can cringe, laugh and cry with him as he goes to crazy town, shouting “OH MY GOD,” “WHOAAAA” and “What does it MEAN?!?” on camera.

In this interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Double Rainbow Dude “Bear” Vasquez claims not to have been on any drugs or other mind altering substances in this video (but not others). As it turns out, he runs a farm in Yosemite, and when Kimmel asks “And how do you get women to come up there?” Vasquez replies, “Um, a lot of them come through WWOOF, that’s Worldwide Organization of Organic Farms…actually today there’s seven European girls that are staying at my house right now.”

All righty then! So, I am headed to WWOOF outside of Florence, where I will hopefully not be meeting people who see double rainbows. At least, not under the influence of mind-altering substances.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhGjBvgw90w&hl=en_US&fs=1]

WWOOF mention is at about 1:30.

WWOOF Italy: Will Work For Food

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Barbialla Nuova farm

Have you ever been curious about what it’d be like to live on a farm? Want to travel to new places? Learn about healthy, sustainable agriculture? Interested in communing with nature and taking a break from the hectic pace of urban life? Does the idea of manual labor in exchange for food and shelter sound appealing? Then you might want to check out the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF).

I first discovered WWOOF a few years ago when a friend was exploring it, and at the time, I brushed it off as the most SWPL thing I’d ever seen. (Hypothetical parental reaction, “Uh, you’re doing what? How many of your ancestors have worked in the fields so you don’t have to?”) I am still well-aware that the phenomenon of well-educated people going back to the farm is quite hipster, but I’ve come to think that this is exactly what we need. There are so many problems with our food system that begin at the farm level; shouldn’t we be encouraging bright graduates to become environmental stewards at the ground level?

Starting next week, we have about six weeks of summer break. I am traveling for some of this but can’t afford to travel for all of it, so I revisited the WWOOF site and decided to register. WWOOF registration for a year costs about 30 euros, and gets you health insurance coverage and access to the official WWOOF farm list for your country of registration, along with access to the WWOOF Independents list. I signed up for WWOOF Italia to minimize travel costs, and also because I hope to improve my Italian by immersing myself with an Italian family.
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