Local food, local people and getting to know a place from the ground up.
by Alexandra Baumhardt
photo taken in Colombia of fellow farmers Alejandro and Maira by Alexandra Baumhardt
There were worse days in Colombia than the one I spent collecting horse manure. I ran around an equestrian military base in the southwest of Colombia, wearing striped pants gifted to me by a clown, with a Chilean guy, an Argentinian guy and some local farmers. We picked up dry, grassy clumps of dung to put into our deliciously rotting compost.
“Alejandra, over here!” Juan, the Argentinian, shouted, “It’s fresh!”
When people talk about how they’d love to do some traveling but it’s financially prohibitive, I think about all of the poo I’ve been willing to collect for the sake of seeing more of the world. When a friend is looking to get out of the grind, have an adventure, or take a real vacation, I can’t help but recommend that they start in the dirt of their dream destination.
Through farming with programs like World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) and Work Away, clever research and just showing up in a new place and asking about farms that take volunteers, you can inexpensively get around just about anywhere. French vineyards, Patagonian sheep ranches, Indian tea estates can all be accessible to you and working at each will be an extraordinary education in foreign policy, economics, nutrition, sustainability and basic survival.
If you’ve never farmed before, you can. If you don’t think you have enough time, you can dabble in volunteer farm work for 10 days to 10 months. Consider that your greatest expenses will be the plane ticket and the opportunity cost of not working a conventional job 40 hours a week. From Alaska to Argentina to the American Midwest, I’ve been able to explore unconventional places and cultures by using farm-to-travel sites and taking a few liberties. Along the way, I discovered an untapped pride in sowing seeds to see the world.
New Zealand
In what was probably disappointing news at the time, I told my parents during my last semester of high school that I was going to put off college to work for free on farms in New Zealand. I was paying for the trip and I was going to be paying for the bulk of my college tuition, so if any of it was a mistake, it was mine to make.
I went online and bought a $20 WWOOF membership for the country of New Zealand, and a paper booklet from the town of Nelson, New Zealand arrived at my house. WWOOF was created in 1971 as a platform for people interested in traveling more sustainably and off the beaten path, who were interested in organic farming, and who would be willing to exchange farm work for food, shelter and cultural immersion. My booklet listed places by region where I could go to chase chickens, sheer sheep, sculpt mud houses and rebuild animal habitats.
You don’t need a work visa to WWOOF anywhere in the world, because you’re not trading labor for money. On a U.S. passport, you can stay in most countries until the tourist time limit is up (usually around three months), but always check before you go. As of 2010, there are 28 European countries, 16 African countries, 23 countries in the Americas, and 20 in the Middle East and Asia Pacific with WWOOF opportunities. Almost every country with a WWOOF program has its own website and social media pages, with most of the posts and information presented in English. It’s especially worth checking the WWOOF Facebook and LinkedIn pages, where today’s tech-savvy farmers beckon volunteers to rainforest communes and mountaintop yurts.
My first gig was at a little vegetarian café and edible garden in New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula. I shared a room, bunk beds and snores with a few other girls from Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and the United States, and we became fast friends. Shortly after my arrival, the café’s eccentric and perhaps overly enthusiastic owner accidentally ordered a double shipment of bananas. He asked us each to eat at least six bananas that afternoon before the new ones came in, so it wouldn’t feel like such a waste. We were eagerly plowing through them when the café’s baker mentioned we could just freeze them and use them in bread, but alas, it was too late: we suffered potassium puke and banana-laden stomach cramps together, and we grew together.
I hitchhiked to other farms during my four months there, and was able to cover the north and south islands of New Zealand for under $1,000 USD. I planted potatoes and cleaned rooms at a skiing and snowboarding lodge in exchange for a snowboarding trip down a volcano next to Mt. Doom from the “Lord Of The Rings” films. This led to a free, weeklong canoe trip down the Wanganui River with three others, including a Frenchman who packed no food other than beer and cookies. I helped with construction of what will one day be New Zealand’s largest driftwood-dinosaur-sculpture park; I WWOOFed on the largest almond farm in the country; I learned how to milk goats, recover from getting kicked in the face by goats, and how to make cheese from the milk that almost made the pain worth it. I lived with a married couple in their 60s, both of whom individually confided their marital troubles to me, and taught me a trick for slurping chocolate cookies out of coffee called the Tim-Tam slam.
Most importantly, I learned how to grow food, without chemicals, and to be way more aware of what I was eating at home. Try to explain Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to anyone outside the U.S. without feeling ashamed.
I had thought initially that the farming would offer, first and foremost, a relief from worrying about basic needs while traveling, like having food and shelter. It quickly became the reason I preferred to be on a farm: to be part of a foreign community, contributing to it and developing new skills that I would be able to use no matter where I went.
Alaska
In 2011, about a year and a half after returning from New Zealand and enrolling in college in Missouri, I headed to Alaska with a couple hundred dollars and three months of summer ahead of me. After some Craigslisted rides and scrappy hitchhiking, I ended up at the Anchorage Public Library where I shamelessly washed my hair and brushed my teeth in a sink. Then, in an even more shameless effort to avoid WWOOF fees, I did a Google Advanced Search using the keywords “WWOOF” and “Alaska” on any website ending in the domains: .wordpress.com or .blogspot.com.
I found a blog post written by a woman from Washington, raving about the weeks she’d spent WWOOFing on an island in Western Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, for a sea-kayaking outfit called A Seaside Adventure. Her blog linked to their site, I called the number on their contact page, and I spent several weeks that summer taking tourists on six-hour kayaking trips through one of the richest ecosystems in the North Pacific. While it wasn’t farming, there was plenty of harvesting. We collected and ate bullwhip kelp each day, which we ate in our soup along with fresh halibut and salmon we had caught. Because we were stationed on an island and couldn’t bring too much weight back from town on the little motorized boat we used, we made our own bread, yogurt and butter. Once a week, we collected barrels of water from a glacial-melt waterfall on another nearby island, and collected mussels from the beach to pair with the homemade bread and butter.
In my sudden role as a tour guide, I had to become a naturalist pretty quickly, by memorizing scientific names for different types of starfish and aquatic plant life. It was sea otter mating season during that summer, and it was, unfortunately, my duty to explain to young children, several times a week, the incredibly violent process of mating that sea otters engage in while the animals writhed about in bloodied water. The tourists would ask if I was studying marine biology or if I was from Alaska, and I’d admit to simply being a journalism student from Minnesota, living in Missouri. The eldest of the tourists would invariably go on a yarn about their own farming and odd work-to-travel stories, describing themselves as simple beings and then trumping one another with tales of precarious situations and wild experiences I could never have dreamed of.
Colombia
In the summer of 2012, I landed in the Colombian capital of Bogotá and almost immediately set to work finding a farm to run off to. I walked around the city, visiting hostels, coffee shops, bakeries and restaurants touting local and organic goods to see if anyone had heard of farms in the country that would take volunteers. I was tipped off to a little farm and foundation called Finca Viracocha, in the southwest of the country, which wasn’t registered with WWOOF because they were weary of people using the program solely for a free place to stay. They were, however, very eager for volunteers interested in learning more about sustainable agriculture, and I hopped on a bus and arrived in the town of San Agustín nine hours later.
Ultimately, it was a fantastic area to work with coffee, presumed a bit dangerous by most who didn’t live there, and no one at the farm would speak English with me, even if they could (one of them could). A few years later, I met the Bureau Chief of the Associated Press in Bogotá, who told me he hadn’t been out to San Agustín since the early 2000s, before the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were thought to be exercising more control over the area.
Between 2012 and today, Finca Viracocha has been my second home three times. It is where I learned to be comfortable speaking Spanish, where I learned some real Colombian history, no-till farming and how to feed hundreds of people with dozens of bean and grain varieties, vegetables, fruits and roots. I farmed with an expert clown who knew how to build fish ponds for irrigation, how to make hungry worms turn richer compost and how to juggle five tomatoes. It’s where I learned that “chicha” is the name of a corn drink and “chucha” is Colombian slang for “body odor,” and if you mix the two up and ask an old woman if she has some and will sell it to you, she’ll come after you with a frying pan.
On this little farm in a subtropical-mountain range, surrounded by a UNESCO World Heritage site, the other volunteers and I lived in a small earthen house and spent the evenings cooking with wood in a mud oven. We read, played music, made jewelry, painted, wrote, contended with harmless bugs bigger than I’d ever seen and watched the stars come out to a symphony of calls and croaks from nocturnal forest animals. We drank beer and talked about our lives like pets, still loved, but attached to some leash that had slackened over the miles. We knew they were still there, somewhere, but they no longer exercised a great pull on us in our remote corner of Colombia. The farming was tough work and sometimes monotonous, and sometimes involved animal poo, but that farm is one of the most important places in the world to me.
Argentina
A few months later, in the late fall of 2012, I was in Argentina and decided to try a “just show up and ask” method of farm travel. I hitchhiked to a town in the Patagonia called El Bolson, having heard there were many farms there, and camped outside of town waiting for the weekend farmers market. On the market day, I showed up and asked each vendor if they needed extra hands on their farm and while a few said they didn’t take volunteers, most of the others said they had too many. Had I been there a month prior there would have been plenty of opportunities.
As I was preparing to hitch to the next town, a carpenter named Pedro, who was building a hostel, flagged me down and offered to trade meals and a bed in the unfinished building in exchange for a few hours of work making and painting furniture every day. I took the offer and include it in this essay because I conflate farm work and unconventional, work-to-travel odd jobs like this. Farming is, more often than not, a series of little tasks that keep the operation running, such as making fencing and small infrastructure like sheds and trellises for vine plants.
Despite some carpentry work on farms in the past, it didn’t take Pedro long to learn I didn’t have quite the carpentry skills I touted, but he taught me what he could and helped me make my own wooden mate gourd to drink Argentina’s ubiquitous grassy tea from. I stayed there for two weeks, helped him build a little flower garden, and in that time met volunteer farmers at nearby strawberry farms, ranches, nature reserves, and more. Some had done what I did, asking around. Others came by way of WWOOFing or the Work Away website, which offers farming gigs as well as work-for-accommodation gigs at hostels, as a nanny, with non-governmental organizations, and other opportunities. I later met the most badass Hawaiian girl named Julia who was WWOOFing in Argentina by herself, and I visited her at a little mountain refuge where she harvested vegetables, collected chicken eggs and made homemade beer and Nutella-like spread. She would go on to hitchhike to Antarctica shortly after, then the length of South America, work on a Colombian coffee farm and hitch a sailboat ride to Panama. I talked with her a few months ago. She’d just returned to the U.S. after hitchhiking from Montana to Mexico.
Minnesota, Missouri and the rest of the U.S.
When I returned to the U.S. from New Zealand and started college in Missouri, a state I’d only visited once, in a town I didn’t yet know well, I saw a flyer for a local urban agriculture coalition and immediately began volunteering with them. This is where I farmed between New Zealand, Alaska and South America. I helped harvest produce, studied their programs for building edible gardens for residents living in low-income housing units and for combating food deserts.
I spent the summer after college writing about organic farmers in Minnesota and Wisconsin for a sustainable agriculture non-profit, using farming as a way of revisiting where I’m from.
I don’t know if there’s been a better time to explore the U.S. by volunteering on organic farms. More and more are cropping up, and the number of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) certified organic farms quadrupled in the U.S. from 1990 to 2008 according to an Organic Production Survey conducted by the department. In 2011 there were 11,600 people with memberships to WWOOF in the United States and 1,300 WWOOF-registered farms covering all 50 states according to the New York Times.
No matter where you decide to farm, you will be full of good food and pride in yourself and what you’re capable of. There is so much power in realizing that you can grow something like a full pumpkin from such tiny seeds. There is so much joy in being able to share something like that with strangers, who you might never have met otherwise, and who become your friends and your family. It’s a universal law that cheese never tastes as good as from an animal you milked. Carrots never crunchier, tomatoes never sweeter and greens never tenderer than the ones you’ve harvested.
Real, experiential travel is invariably beautiful and exhausting. So is farming. In combination, both can take you just about anywhere you’ve booked a flight or a ride, and to endless, unanticipated places and people. All of this is gloriously within reach, even if it means a few goat hooves to the nose, banana bellyaches and reaching for a few clumps of horse manure along the way.
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Alexandra Baumhardt is a freelance journalist, usually roaming about South America. She’s written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, MTV, Latin Correspondent and more.
