FIELD OF DREAMS

I could tell you one story about WWOOFing. That’s the colloquial verb for being a part of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), an organization that connects usually young, usually free-spirited, usually broke people around the world with organic farmers looking for an extra hand, in exchange for food, shelter, and a chance to see the world.

Anyway I could tell you about spending a week at a farm outside of Wellsford, New Zealand. The farm was run by a hippie couple, old to me then but probably middle-aged to me now, with a romantically run-down home. I spent my days picking salad greens and edible flowers and feeding chickens, and slept at night in a yellow room in a bed draped in mosquito netting. The owners were kind and quirky and when I was done with my work, they would take me to the beach to pick green mussels, or to ride horses through the hills, or roll me a joint and let me write in their dedicated writing shed, which was lined with the work of Beat poets.

They also taught me about what “organic” meant, really meant. How to avoid waste and tread lightly on the earth, how to make the best choices you could in an imperfect world. They taught me how to eat an orange like an apple, and just how many flowers really are edible. To date, the eggs from their kitchen were the best I’ve ever eaten. I’d never seen an egg refuse to spread in the pan, taut with protein and power, a yolk like marigold. They told me these eggs couldn’t legally be classified as organic because the chickens were fed with table scraps and worms instead of certified organic feed. It is not about labels, I understood, but the commitment to regeneration and holistic practices.

This is the story I wanted to be able to tell about my time WWOOFing. I went into the program looking to get some hands-on experience in sustainable farming; I wanted to go to a plucky little farm on the other side of the world and have it change my life. Part of it, I admit, was wanting to be seen doing a cool, ethical thing: There’s a photo of me still on Facebook, standing at the farmers market booth under a hand-painted wooden sign, that serves as proof of my do-gooding. But mostly, to be working on this farm was indeed an affirming experience. I was helping, I was learning, and perhaps in some small way I was making the world a better place.

I could tell you another story though. I could tell you about how weird it was that a hostel in Newcastle, Australia made it into the WWOOF directory, and how when I showed up there was no organic garden to tend, only beds to be made and bathrooms to be cleaned. Instead of organic meals I had a meager grocery budget, which I’d spend on beans, toast, and sausage rolls at the gas station, and I slept in a guest bunk. I was the only WWOOF participant there, which was not uncommon on farms, but it felt strange when everyone else was paid hostel staff or guests. I ultimately didn’t mind. I had a free bed and enough time to swim and wander and drink myself into oblivion with the staff. And on some level, I knew this could happen. Even in those early internet days, I had picked up on rumors of “host farms” that fudged the details, looking for free labor.

WWOOF was founded in 1971 by Sue Coppard, a secretary in London who, as she put it in a recent interview, had a “distinct urge to get into the countryside.” Organic farming wasn’t necessarily the impetus. “It was a way for Londoners to get out of the city on the weekend, help out a farmer, and just build a connection with the source of their food and support ecological and organic farming practices,” says Jenna Pollard, the membership program manager at WWOOF-USA. The idea of that cultural exchange — that it’s good for city people to experience country life, and not the other way around — is still a core value of the organization. “Experience rural living while sharing in the everyday life of your host,” the WWOOF website boasts.

Now, WWOOF operates in 130 countries under the Federation of WWOOF Organisations nonprofit, offering portals for each country where farm hosts and participants can sign up and connect with each other — like an Airbnb for volunteering. Giving people the chance to work on an organic farm, it argues, “build(s) a global community conscious of ecological farming and sustainability practices.”

But what does that global community do when their farm stint is up — to say nothing if, like at the hostel, their experience doesn’t line up with their expectations? Because WWOOF is also a tourism project. Most host farms understand that WWOOFers are there not just to learn about organic farming, but to travel: In a way, it’s couch surfing with a holier ethos. Because of that, the farms themselves can become less sites of food production and more scenic backdrops to a backpacking adventure. “Work can thus be perceived as leisure rather than duty,” write Kanokwalee Suteethorn and Judith Bopp in “Tourism Without Governance: WWOOF.”

The problem of how we care for the earth and feed ourselves is in some way the only problem, the problem from which the rest of our joys and sorrows spring. WWOOF tries to offer a path toward solutions by enticing non-farmers to work the land and see firsthand what can happen if we all pitch in to make the food chain a better, more sustainable one. Sometimes it works; I learned new things on the farm that made me more aware of the challenges facing small, sustainable farming operations. But awareness is just the first step. When a farm becomes a vacation spot, how much change is possible?

“What we call organic farming today was developed as a reaction to scientific agriculture” in the 1920s and ’30s, says Anneliese Abbott, an organic farmer and historian. In the 19th century, farmers applied innovations like chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which ultimately had detrimental effects, like leaving fields fallow or stripping produce of nutrients. Disillusioned by the “advances” of the modern age, the originators of the organic movement in Europe looked for ways to approach farming more holistically.

Organics wasn’t just a return to the way things were before. “In fact, the soil scientists who first identified organic agriculture voiced alarm that the traditional agricultural practices then common to Europe and the United States were inherently unsustainable,” write Joseph Heckman and Mark Keating in the article “The History of the ‘New’ Organics,” published in 2019. Modern, British-implemented farming practices had, for instance, worsened the Irish potato famine, writes Charles C. Mann in 1493, as British agriculturalists denounced Irish “lazy beds” for modern “improvements” like fertilizer and tight, level rows — which allowed blight to spread faster. Rather than science, organic farming could actually be the thing to make nature more productive, write Heckman and Keating.

What became known as organics was really “a very holistic system focused on soil health,” Abbott says, which involved “nature and nutrient cycling, making sure to return all organic wastes to the soil.” These early supporters were often looking at Asian and Indigenous American practices for inspiration: Early organic reformers observed that composting methods in China and India were extremely productive, for example, and didn’t result in fallow fields and unusable soil. (Unfortunately, their takeaways often romanticized and stereotyped the people they were drawing inspiration from.)

But commercial agriculture had powerful adherents; after all, chemical fertilizers did produce food. World War II turbocharged things like processed food, crediting science with the bounty in the grocery store. “Science is going to solve all the problems,” says Abbott of the era’s pervasive perspective, “and the state has to have better science than the Soviet Union to stay ahead in the nuclear arms race.” At the onset of the Korean War, American farmers started promoting fertilizer as essential to national security, because they had to feed the soldiers, Abbott says. Supporting the organic movement “was almost considered like — you want us to lose the Cold War? You want the communists to take over?”

The organic movement stayed fringe in the 1950s. But by the time Coppard thought of sending Londoners to the countryside, it had received a boost, thanks to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. More people became aware of the use of synthetic pesticides in food, and the organic movement began building on that concern, positioning itself as an alternative to a world of pollution. The ’60s saw the development of more “food conspiracies,” aka food co-ops, and farmers came together to form organic farming associations. Earth Day was first observed in 1970, the culmination of a building concern for the environment.

WWOOF started “right at that peak of the countercultural interest in natural foods and farming,” Abbott says. There was a whole world ready to upend how things were done, and WWOOF was a potential gateway to that change. You didn’t have to know how to farm, or have money to buy your own land. You just had to show up.

Some volunteers credit WWOOFing with changing the trajectory of their lives. Greg Van Ullen decided to WWOOF after closing a beverage company he ran in Brooklyn in 2016. Facing a free summer and a turning point in his career, he landed on a sheep and berry farm in Vermont run by one man. “There were concrete things I learned, like how to tie up a sheep, or how to cut down a tree with a chainsaw,” he says of his two-week stint. But his host was adamant about maintaining a work-life balance, and he was also able to spend a lot of time hiking and thinking about the future.

That led to Van Ullen and his wife leaving their Brooklyn home and buying a farm in upstate New York, where he now raises chickens and has plans to raise sheep. For him, WWOOFing allowed him to “see a different kind of life and how [he] could have [his] own version of that,” he says. “If I hadn’t gone to more of a solo farm, I don’t know that I would have gotten that.”

Brittney Portes became interested in sustainable agriculture after interning at a permaculture farm. “I ate a carrot from the ground, and it tasted so disgusting to me,” she says. “But then the farmer looked at me like, Brittney — that’s what a carrot is supposed to taste like. And I felt like my whole life was a lie.” That experience led her to intern at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and later, to work as both a WWOOF project coordinator and volunteer on farms through its program.

Portes looked to WWOOF specifically to learn more about food production. She says she learned how to harvest produce and plant cover crops, how to start seeds, the importance of healthy soil, and the full schedule of running a farm. After two years of volunteering, she moved back to New Jersey and began Gardens of Sol, a consulting business helping people learn to grow their own food, even if it’s in their backyard or in a kitchen window. She also regularly posts about WWOOF on TikTok, serene images of herself in overalls in sunlight and greenery, pushing wheelbarrows and picking lettuce.

That romance has been part of it from the beginning. The idea of going “back to the land” (where else do we live?) was centered on self-sufficiency and homesteading, the idea of one person or a couple creating enough for just themselves, and finding fulfillment in the act (according to Abbott, married couples were the most common units engaging in organic farming in the 1970s). Since the advent of image-based social media, sharing that fulfillment became more public, for homesteaders and weekenders alike — TikTok is now awash in dreamy pictures and videos of WWOOFing young people in durable but cute outfits forking hay and feeding baby animals, while also enjoying beautiful meals provided by host families, or taking in enviable countryside views. The storytelling about WWOOFing, both oral and visual, is a key component of its overall mission, enticing those who may not know about the program with images that say this could be you.

As Coppard said, her goal wasn’t to build the organic movement, it was to “get into the countryside.” It’s beautiful out there.

If you want to WWOOF, you first have to decide where you want to go. Because WWOOF is organized as a federation of different countries, each country has its own process by which potential WWOOFers sign up and access the farm directory, and a different process in how the organization vets and onboards the farms themselves. Up through the early 2000s, this meant sending away for a physical directory, with addresses, phone numbers, and sometimes emails of host farms in your desired country. From there it was up to you.

The internet made things a bit more reliable. In the U.S., “a host will sign up through the website, set up a profile, and read the charter to make sure that they’re aware of the organization’s mission and guidelines for participation,” says Pollard. They also have to submit photos of the farm and specifically the sleeping conditions, so potential volunteers can see exactly where they’re going.

WWOOF is aware that many people who sign up aren’t doing it for the pure love of organics. Pollard says of the 14,000 registered WWOOFers looking to work on a host farm, there’s everyone from eager future farmers to “people who are looking to travel and have an adventure, but want to save some money.” The goal, she says, is to ensure that even those who are only looking for a cheap bed are moved in some way, and WWOOF tries to educate participants on the organization’s mission. “You might go to a farm for one reason, but have a totally different transformative experience,” she says.

Not everyone has a good experience. Anya Bernstein says that when she decided to WWOOF on a Hawai‘i cacao farm in 2017, she went in thinking, “it’s going to be very romantic, I’m going to fulfill this part of myself that is, like, a do-gooder,” she says. The farm she connected with, one of the few that would take volunteers under 21 (she was a freshman in college), seemed to be run by a friendly woman who insinuated she was hosting multiple volunteers. But ultimately, “none of those things were met, because the reality was, there was just this woman who had spent all of her money on a dump.”

What was initially presented to her as a working cacao and vegetable farm near Hilo turned out to be a woman who bought cacao in bulk to make chocolate to sell at the farmers market, and who had a small plot of land Bernstein spent clearing of trash. And crucially, it was just her — no other volunteers. “I don’t think I would have chosen the farm if I’d known it wasn’t a working farm,” Bernstein says, and after four days, she left to stay with her grandma, who lived on the other side of the island.

Within the WWOOFing community it is almost expected that one will have had a horror story or two. Many volunteers have written about their dreams of meaningful, fulfilling, and picturesque work, only to be met with inadequate housing and food or hosts that had misrepresented their operations. Some found themselves conscripted into commercial harvests as free labor. Often it’s laughed off or chalked up to what being young and traveling the world is all about, a good story to bring home. Mathilde Montpetit originally heard about WWOOF from her brother, who “ended up getting left on a horse farm by himself over winter with, like, no way to leave,” she says. But her sense of adventure made that sound more fun than terrifying, and she says she had a positive experience during her 2012 experience on an Alaskan farm.

Pollard says the internet has made it much easier to immediately respond to reports of bad hosts — there is a review system in place, and she says she’s constantly following up with WWOOFers and farmers about their experiences.

Sometimes, it doesn’t really matter. I honestly can’t remember feeling all that disappointed when I realized I’d be working as a maid in an Australian hostel. I had just come from weeks of working on various farms in New Zealand, but more importantly, like many WWOOFers, I was not in the program to begin my career in farming. Instead, I was there to experience. And crucially, I already knew what I valued.

To choose to WWOOF over backpacking or couch surfing means something about working on a farm already appeals to you. The former WWOOFers I spoke to all said sustainable farming was something they already had experience with; Bernstein volunteered on farms in high school, Portes interned on a permaculture farm when she was 18, and Montpetit spent summers working at her local farmers market. “It’s at least partially a selection bias,” Montpetit says. “You’re interested in farm work, which implies that you think about farm work already.”

In other words, WWOOFing is a confirmation of a value, not an introduction of one. It’s a lens through which to see the community that already exists, rather than a tool with which to build one from scratch. This is a good thing — it is much easier to engage people who already care. But being aware of what it takes to bring vegetables from the soil to your table with sustainable practices means nothing if farmers can’t actually farm.

American farms are under threat. In a 2024 Modern Farmer piece, Carly Boyer writes that in the U.S., “farmland is being lost to development at a rate of more than 2,000 acres per day.” Among farming’s next generation, 59 percent of respondents to the 2022 National Young Farmer Survey called finding affordable land to buy “very or extremely challenging,” naming land access their primary concern. Over 100,000 farmers quit farming from 2011 to 2018, due to the effects of climate change and the financial challenges of the day-to-day.

WWOOF was not built to solve for that. The fight more likely lies in legislation that protects the Environmental Protection Agency and provides more funding for organic farmers, and punishes companies like Monsanto for intentionally damaging farms. Boyer argues that funding for community-led farming projects should be made permanent through the Increasing Land Access, Security, and Opportunities Act, and others have called for investment in sustainable irrigation systems and ensuring farmers have the right to fix their own equipment.

And yet, the world WWOOF originally wanted to create now exists. More people than ever know and care about organic farming, whether that’s restaurant diners passionate about ingredient sourcing, shoppers able to choose between pasture-raised or cage-free eggs, or the farmers themselves. Eighty-six percent of the 10,000 respondents to the Young Farmer Survey — which defines “young farmer” as anyone under 40 — say their farming practices are regenerative. Drilling down even further into the report, 83 percent of young farmers say they’re “motivated by environmental conservation. For BIPOC young farmers that number is 87 percent, and it is 88 percent for Black young farmers.” WWOOF is looking to harness that interest more concretely: The organization now runs a Future Farmers program, which provides funding and agroecology certification to young people looking to farm.

“We’re seeing a definite increase in the number of WWOOFers who are joining with the goal of gaining those skills,” Pollard says. And the industry needs them. Per the Young Farmers survey, more than three-quarters identified as first-generation farmers — i.e., they didn’t inherit their land or farming knowledge, but instead sought out that path for themselves. They need to start somewhere.

WWOOF will always be a way to travel for cheap, and maybe get stuck making hostel beds or clearing out someone’s backyard. But it is also perhaps the lowest barrier to entry that currently exists for learning how to farm. Because many of us just don’t know. “There is a fairly large group of people who are like, I want to leave the nine-to-five, I want to learn something new, I feel trapped, I want to connect with the land and be close to animals,” says Portes.

WWOOF often encourages the most romantic aspects of that idea: the rustic dreams, the dirt-covered vegetables, the idea that you could spend all day feeding baby pigs with a bottle. Which means that the vast majority of participants are volunteering for a matter of weeks with the express encouragement to explore new surroundings, not to learn to run a business. They’re tourists, and tourism can feel like a crass and dirty word.

But just as you likely won’t go to Italy unless there’s something you’ve heard about Italy that appeals to you, you won’t work on a farm unless you’re already interested in farm work. Tourism is about wanting something new, and we as humans are absolutely capable of being changed by new experiences. I went to New Zealand as a tourist, with no intentions of a career in agriculture, and I returned with stronger opinions about organic regulation. Like any experience, it becomes what you want it to be. Some people start their own farms, others never think about it again. You’re never going to change unless you want to.

Over 50 years after WWOOF was founded, we’re still trying to figure out how to forge solidarity between urban dwellers and farmers. And WWOOF remains an imperfect gateway, the thing that might spark something if the conditions are right, rather than the spark itself. But I still dream of those eggs, and a world in which they are the norm. Maybe in another 50 years we’ll get there.

Beck Deresse is a Black, queer illustrator who loves brussels sprouts.

2024-04-15T13:31:00Z dg43tfdfdgfd