WWOOFing: Volunteers work at 92 organic farms in Oregon, triple the number of six years ago

WWOOFing: Volunteers work at 92 organic farms in Oregon, triple the number of six years ago

www.mailtribune.com

Sam Schlesinger can't tell beet seedlings from spinach. But he knows that after only a week on Rogue River's Runnymede Farm, he may never return to New York City.

"I just got so sick of urban living," says the 21-year-old philosophy student from New York University. "Everybody here seems to need a lot less."

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I am posting this here as a positive counter to the almost continually apocalyptic content of this forum. If the purpose of ATS truly is to, "Deny Ignorance," then I think that needs to include denial of the perception that humanity is inherently evil, worthless, and is inevitably going to become extinct.

WWOOFing is a practice which takes place in many countries, where people who normally live in urban environments, can do volunteer work at organic farms, in exchange for food and accomodation. Many people have had extremely positive and beneficial experiences, as a result of doing this; and it is an important element of the collective human resistance to the New World Order.

www.mailtribune.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by petrus4


That's a good way to introduce people back to being self sustainable and have our gardens, my garden was vandalized by the maintenance lawnmower, and now they are regenerating so I'm going to transplant all my maters and Jalapenos which will produce twice the amount, inside total control and year round savings,

Originally posted by mytheroy
reply to post by petrus4

 

That's a good way to introduce people back to being self sustainable and have our gardens, my garden was vandalized by the maintenance lawnmower, and now they are regenerating so I'm going to transplant all my maters and Jalapenos which will produce twice the amount, inside total control and year round savings,

Great idea!

I believe my sister and her boyfriend did this a while ago as their "holiday".

They loved it and from what I heard I might have to give it a try sometimes!

I hope farmers get a bit more attention from this, they are still the backbone of the country but people seem to forget about them lately

reply to post by petrus4


Yup, and I can take ten mater plants harvest cut them down to about a foot while leaving enough green leaves will promote new growth and grow bigger a bushier and produce more as long as the roots are happy you'll be happy, nothing worse than have a garden of root bound plants that will die if not properly transplanted to a bigger pot, big root system means big pots.

How I got a green thumb I'll never know, in the past I couldn't grow grass, and that's hard to kill lol

reply to post by petrus4

"Everybody here seems to need a lot less."

that philosophy student should stay on the farm - he clearly does not understand the difference between need and want

Hey thanks for posting this article. A former co-worker of mine mentioned WWOOFing to me so I had looked it up but this article really clarifies things.

I did an organic farm internship in 1997 -- for a CSA farm -- and we worked full time doing hard labor -- and I had to fight to get the weekends off. haha. I mean we were supposed to originally but then one of the CSA managers wanted to also sell at the farmers market.

Oh yeah CSA is when people pay beforehand for a season subscription so that the farm has money for seed and supplies and then the farm delivers a box of food every week to the subscription members -- usually in a central pickup location.

O.K. Community Supported Agriculture.

Another exciting project is Ecosan -- which is sanitizing and recyling human waste to use as compost. This is used around the world and is promoted by John Jenkins in his humanure book that is free online. It's a great book that people should really read -- he composts human waste for 2 years before using.

When I went to the most traditional Berber village in Morocco they completely relied on humanure for their fertilizer to feed their village.

So clearly in terms of the apocalyptic times this is in order and is increasingly being implemented -- by alternative engineers, etc.

Also biochar is used to make the compost -- you make charcoal from waste invasive species -- wood -- and then it provides nanopores as home for the friendly bacteria that sanitize the human waste and so biochar then regenerates itself -- called "Terra Prima" in the Amazon -- it was the secret to farming on bad soil.

A lot of this seems radical to Westerners who really don't understand ecology but that is the secret to the future -- that we have to recycle and reuse the past -- in order to have a sustainable present. It's a more cyclical use of time.

So for example in Ladakh they also rely on humanure and compost it for one year -- and then grow their food in the compost from mixing it with straw.

I was watching a doc on an organic farm that had been a traditional farm -- and then the farmer switched to a CSA farm to keep his organic farm in business and then finally the community actually bought ownership of the farm land to expand the farm. The reason they had to expand is because the farmer had depleted all the nutrients in his soil from growing vegetables that require a lot of nutrients.

So of course no mention of humanure compost in that doc so it is the crucial missing ingredient to sustainble farming -- of course along with composting animal manure. You do find humanure composting in old farming books in England -- so it is a traditional practice still used by those in the know.

reply to post by ignorant_ape


He might just have meant what he said. I know for a fact once we started our own garden and used nothing but organics without chemicals, the same filling salads require less volume.

Ignorant Ape: We grow our vegetables and we eat (need) less because they are more nutritious than the field-stripped, mass-produced vegetables. I dont know if it is grammar or language he might need, but his philosophy seems okay.

I have never heard of this! Thank you for posting This is an awesome idea and I really hope it can take off! Let's just cross our fingers and hope Agenda 21 doesn't put a stop to this....

S&F!

Thanks for sharing this, I myself recently became a member of WWOOF Japan and am flying out there in 4 weeks to travel the country and so far have made arrangements with 3 different host families. I really can not wait, I am quitting my soul destroying retail job to go and do this for 3 months, the work will be hard but much more rewarding than stacking shelves all day for a multimillion dollar corporation.
More people should have this kind of experience in their lives in order to learn how to live more self sustainably.

reply to post by petrus4

Wins by sheer radience.
Know Thou Morrtal? To go on unbended knee?
Aye what fools these mortals be.

reply to post by TetsuoIronMan


Wow Wwoofing in Japan looks awesome

Amazing how people are ready to get help -- also looks like they want carpentry skills and even childcare. haha.

Well I guess just doing gardening is obviously not enough on a real farm. I mean when I did the CSA sure you drive a tractor but otherwise it was a lot of weeding, and harvesting mainly like gardening.

Yet, if you are visiting Japan and stay at Japanese families' home, you can't behave as you want or do how you do in your countries. As proverb tells us, when you are in Rome, you must do as Romans do. I see very bad manners out of some non-Japanese wwoofers. This does NOT happen among Japanese wwoofers. To our farm, including WWOOF Japan site, about 350-400 volunteers visit in a year. Out of them, I see 95%-98% Japanese do all well. Yet, some non-Japanese wwoofers cause troubles or frictions in their works, behaviors or manners because of their lack of sense that Japanese should have in common. You should know that you must behave as local Japanese as long as you stay here as wwoofers or volunteers. I hear some complaints out of non-Japanese wwoofers once in a while but I never hear that kind out of Japanese, for example. Once again, you should try to learn Japanese culture, I mean Japanese way of living and behave just like local people while you are staying with them at their home. If you complain any while you are staying at local people's home, that can be very rude in our culture. Imagine, do Japanese demand, talk back or complain any if they go to your countries and stay with local people? You should know that you are NOT ordinary travellers or guests. The following websites might help you to learn how Japanese society is and how Japanese are. blogs.telegraph.co.uk... kristof.blogs.nytimes.com...

Yeah good luck on that.



O.K. cool -- I saw this described in the WOOFjapan page -- sweet.

Have fun in Japan!!!

I am happy for you! That's awesome.

Great post, OP! Look into aquaculture which combines a tank of fish (can be fish to eat or goldfish or koi) and a pump which runs the water up floating rafts which hold the greenery. The veggies reportedly grow much faster and you can also harvest the fish. The dirty water feeds the plants, and you can grow worms and duckweed to feed the fish. The pump can be powered by solar plus battery backup for at night. If everyone had one, even a small unit on a patio, it would go a long ways towards food self sufficiency. There's a guy in Ohio, I believe, who is growing a million pounds of food on three acres; they use the heat from compost to heat the greenhouses during the winter.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Hi - thanks for posting, I am an organic farmer in NZ and have had wwoofers (family with two small children) come stay and help out. It is good for everyone, and teaches me about organisation. In NZ and I think most other countries the organic standards do not allow human waste to be used as compost for the growing of food. Wood tree lots sure but not food, humans are at the end of the food chain which means we collect or the bad stuff (heavy metals) that have entered the chain along the way.
Just so as you know using this s*@# is not a good idea, however much the cycle idea makes sense.

Thats pretty good to hear, I woofed all over the north island in new zealand and it was amazing, shows you a different view on most things in the world.

If I went to the states I'd woof there and I'd reccommend it to anybody who wants to travel on a low budget also.

reply to post by Peter Brake


Peter -- thanks for correcting my post about organic food standards and humanure compost. haha.

I do have to laugh as the sustainable human cultures using farming rely on humanure compost. I saw this first hand. But then they have no tolerance for any Western technology -- for example the government had just put in a gravel road to the Berber village I visited and when a truck drove by all the women in the field working on their crops -- they all raised their fists in the air and yelled at the truck. haha.

So they can use their own human # for compost but a truck driving by is too environmentally unfriendly. Or a plane flying by overhead just brings looks of estrangement -- like wtf? Also the Berbers hang "stink pails" outside their houses to scare off the evil spirits -- so bad smell gets a different take I guess, seeing how it has a secret good purpose. haha.

Consider New Zealand -- I mean seriously anyone who is an organic farmer is a hero in my book.

When invaded by Europeans the Maoris assumed they would become extinct. European rats annihilated the Maori rat, an animal that was a food staple for the natives. The Maori fly might have help ward off the incursion of sheep that quickly destroyed the local flora, but invading European houseflies wiped out the local flies. Clover took over where ferns had been, and the Maori waited for their own extinction. The Maori population hit bottom in 1890 but then began a mysterious recovery and 280,000 people claim to be Maori by 1981 (266-268).

Speaking of book... Ecological Imperialism by Professor Alfred Crosby is a good one

So I mean polar bears and mammals of the oceans are suffering like humans from accumulating the toxic heavy metal and dioxin pollution from industrialization.

Hopefully this will all be a nice transition as oil runs out but unfortunately as the oil corpses are headed for the methane hydrates in the Arctic -- for natural gas extraction in a way that will just accelerate global warming -- I think humans need to redeem their place in their final 2 minutes of the 24 hours of life on planet earth (for the billions of years of life).

Mushrooms, bacteria, algae -- it will all recycle and reuse the toxic metals and radiation and plastic dioxin, etc. that us Western modern humans have contributed to Earth in the last few hundred years.

I think Western farming is really the start of modern global warming -- the ecological imperialism has its roots in the plow and rectilinear farming versus the circular hoe use in matrifocal African cultures -- using humanure for compost.

Still I definitely agree that humanure compost is not for the weak of heart considering there's a good chance for rotavirus, etc. but then you can get that from dairy manure also. haha.

I'm not trying to debate you at all -- again I agree that organic farming should not use humanure if it is going to be certified legally -- but ironic how .. industrial sewage with all the industrial heavy metals is then sold as compost to use on standard farms.

I appreciate that actress Ellen Page from Canada has exposed the lies of this fertilizer from industrial waste being considered a good source for farms -- when actually humanure is better -- she used humanure compost when training on a permaculture farm in Oregon.

So yeah permaculture can use humanure compost and does -- but not organic farming. haha.

I wonder if any WWOOFing farms use humanure compost in Japan as Japan has a long tradition of humanure compost. there's a big fear of humanure compost in the West that John Jenkins calls "fecaphobia."

Farmers of Forty Centuries by F.H. King pdf free book features the humanure compost tradition of Asia....

In fact the reason Rome had to use the irrigration system with the aquaducts is because they dirtied the water supply by dumping their human waste in the river while Japan composted the human waste to use as fertilizer.

Dr. Kawaguchi, of the National Department of Agriculture and Commerce, taking his data from their records, informed us that the human manure saved and applied to the fields of Japan in 1908 amounted to 23,850,295 tons, which is an average of 1.75 tons per acre of their 21,321 square miles of cultivated land in their four main islands. On the basis of the data of Wolff, Kellner and Carpenter, or of Hall, the people of the United States and of Europe are pouring into the sea, lakes or rivers and into the underground waters from 5,794,300 to 12,000,000 pounds of nitrogen; 1,881,900 to 4,151,000 pounds of potassium, and 777,200 to 3,057,600 pounds of phosphorus per million of adult population annually, and this waste we esteem one of the great achievements of our civilization.

Sorry didn't mean to derail the thread -- although since no one else is picking up on the WOOFing just thought I'd pass this along to reply to the comment about heavy metal contamination from humanure compost:

Urine is a high quality fertilizer with low levels of heavy metals. Regarding hormones and pharmaceuticals excreted with urine, the risk of negative effects to plants or human beings is low if urine is spread on agricultural land at levels corresponding to the plants
needs. Figure 2: The annual amount of nutrients in excreta from one family in Niger is equal to nutrients in the two bags of fertilizers. Photo: Linus Dagerskog, CREPA/SEI agricultural land

Human faeces and to a small extent urine contain trace metals. The amounts of harmful heavy metals in urine are miniscule and much lower than wastewater sludge or even farmyard manure (WHO, 2006).

Essentially all the heavy metals in the excreta from a normal population come from the food ingested and a large proportion of these metals will have been removed from the fields with the crop. Thus, it is possible to recycle excreta fertilizers, provided that they have not been polluted when handled, without threatening the sustainability of the agricultural soil (Jönsson et al., 2004).

Prac tical Guidance on the Use of Urine in Crop Production Anna Richert, Robert Gensch, Håkan Jönsson, Thor-Axel Stenström and Linus Dagerskog EcoSanRes Programme Stockholm Environment Institute pdf