City Mouse Goes to the Country

Realistically, the majority of the time at the farm was spent either swimming in the river (at least 3 times per day, often more) and picking piles of green beans from the garden to eat for all meals. However, every now and then, work with the animals would come up and Harry would patiently explain to me, who has never fed a chicken in my life, that you add small rocks to the chicken food to make the egg shells thicker (who knew?). Then I would skip down the hill shaking the plastic bucket of chicken feed and the chickens would run after me in a single-file line until we got to the chicken coop, where I would dump the food in the trough and shut them in for the night. It’s the simple pleasures in life, “they” say, but, really, the hilarious sight of a chicken running (”waddling” is probably a better word) as fast as she can down a hill may very well be enough to keep me on a farm for a very long time.Another notable task was herding a bull from one paddock to another farm across the road. After Jeanette, Anne, and I finally found the bull in the woods, we cornered him against the fence and then chased him down the hill, from one paddock to the next. By “chased”, I really mean that we chased him. In my Old Navy Jeans and Chacos, waving a rod sort of like a ski pole, we ran this giant bull down the hill, onto the road, across a bridge, and then eventually to the other farm…”adrenaline” doesn’t even begin to describe how great it felt.On one of the last days at the farm, when Anne and I were officially in charge because Harry had hurt his leg badly and was in the hospital and Jeanette had political stuff to deal with, Jeanette called us and told us to herd all of the sheep from the top paddock (about 50 sheep) to the “house paddock”. Given the size of the farm and the paddocks, this sounded like an incredible task, but we grabbed our herding rods and hiked up the hill to the paddock. The great thing about sheep, we soon realized, is that they really do run in packs and stay together no matter what, so after Anne had gathered all of the stray sheep out of the gorse patches (very awful, dense spiney plants) and I’d more or less pushed a few very old sheep towards the others, it was just a matter of convincing the sheep that their only option for running away was towards the open paddock gate by, again, running after them and waving our rods threatening.

The tasks that I did on the farm were pretty menial, but nonetheless very exciting for someone who hadn’t actually ever seen a sheep in real life. In addition, as I was running around the countryside chasing farm animals, there was a split second where I thought about the fact that on my trip around the world, on the other side of the world, I was chasing a bull down a hill- who would’ve guessed?

-Luthien

Finding My Dreams in New Zealand

After a two week road trip around the circumference of the South island of New Zealand, we took the ferry to the North Island and drove straight through in four days (stopping in Mordor and Mount Doom in National Park Village, a very small town in the middle of the North island), where Julie dropped Anne and I off at a farm in the Cormandel Peninsula and the drove to Auckland to catch her flight to Cairns, Australia. While Julie scuba-dived in the Great Barrier Reef, Anne and I lived on the farm of Harry and Jeanette, about 7km from the nearest town (Thames) but seemingly hundreds of miles from anything.

Harry and Jeanette quickly made us feel at home. With 30+ WWOOFers staying on their farm every year, plus a multitude of other people living in their house, barn, and sleep-out on any given day, they were accustomed to people inhabiting their space and making them feel like they were not imposing in the least. Harry is a 67-year-old retired sheep sheerer (used to be one of the top sheep sheerers in the region until an accident involving a sheep falling on him ended his professional career) who seemed soft-spoken for most of the day as he gave us instructions for the work day. Yet as we sat around the dinner table at night, conversation always escalated and suddenly we were learning everything there is to know about the New Zealand political system and environmental issues. Realistically, despite his proclaimed profession of farmer, Harry was the man to learn about New Zealand politics from. He is on the committee who interviews, chooses, and ranks Green Party candidates for the national elections that are held about every 3 years, which generally includes 100+ potential candidates that are narrowed down to about 50 candidates for the final ballot. Because NZ assigns Parliament members proportional to the number of votes the party receives, having more candidates on the ballot will increase the number of votes for the party in general, even though only about 6 of the candidates will likely sit in Parliament.

If that wasn’t exciting and educational enough, his wife, Jeanette, was only around for about half of the time that we stayed there because otherwise she was at Parliament, as the co-leader of the New Zealand Green Party (the Green Party requires a female leader and a male leader). Not only was she the first woman in Parliament when she was elected 12 years ago, her position in Parliament marked the first time that the Green Party was represented in the New Zealand Parliament. Today the Green Party holds 5% of the seats in Parliament, but the upcoming election in November is causing some concern, since a party cannot hold seats if it does not receive at least 5% of the vote and the percentage of votes for the Green Party in the last election came dangerously close to missing this mark. In addition to these credentials, Jeanette is cited as THE expert on climate change in New Zealand, so dinners with her also provoked some very interesting discussions.

The most impressive thing about staying on the farm was that Harry and Jeanette, despite her prestigious-ish place in the government, lived as simply as two people could possibly live. By using energy-efficient light bulbs and only using electricity when absolutely necessary, they were able to cut their energy usage to less than 10% of the average house of four. The farm is not registered “organic” because there is one strain of disease that can hit sheep and kill them within 3-4 days that can only be stopped by a chemical. However, while most farmers spray this chemical on all of their sheep every two weeks no matter what, Harry and Jeanette instead do weekly examinations of the sheep and only spray a sheep if it displays symptoms of the disease. At night we would have giant dinners of green beans with garlic and butter, red potatoes with rosemary, lettuce salad with olives, tomatoes, and other vegetables, and delicious fish with lemon…and the only item on the entire table that was not grown on the farm was the fish, which was purchased from a local farmer at the market.

All in all, when it comes to WWOOFing, I can’t imagine a more educational and inspiring set-up than we had in New Zealand.

-Luthien