Experiences about WWOOFING in Portugal and France

"Fancy a WWOOFEN?"

Hanna Grossauer about her work on organic farms

I write "We are WWOOFing in Portugal!" on Kathi's foot. And now I really feel it! We are on the road, we are traveling, discovering, feeling, smelling...

"Last summer I went WWOOFING in Portugal and France, it was so great! A very special experience, you should definitely do that too!" What did you do? WWOOFING? What does that mean? -

The WWOOF organization was founded in England in 1971. Sue Coppard, a London secretary, felt a strong need to be able to get out of the city and breathe in the country air, even if she lived in the city. She assumed that many city dwellers might feel the same way as she did and eventually launched the "Working Weekends On Organic Farms" experiment. People from the city could help out on an organic farm for a weekend in return for accommodation, food and lots of valuable knowledge. The idea was a great success - more and more volunteers became enthusiastic about working on the land, with animals and plants - as a balance to their everyday life in the city and so more and more farms were happy to welcome helping hands.

Today, the abbreviation WWOOF stands for "World Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms" and is now represented in over 100 countries worldwide, including Australia, New Zealand, China, Ghana and Hawaii, with more than 6000 organic farms.

What do WWOOFERs do?

WWOOFing means using your own skills and ideas, acquired knowledge and physical labor to support mainly people from organic farms. "WWOOF is an exchange between - town and country - young and old, - different countries, languages and cultures."[1] It is not necessary to have agricultural or horticultural knowledge, everyone does what they can. Depending on the farm, working hours vary between 4 and 6 hours a day, weekends are usually free and can be used to explore the area. WWOOFers are not paid for their work - at least not with money. Instead, they receive food and a place to sleep, as well as a wealth of knowledge and enrichment.

My friend Kathi and I tried WWOOFING in the early summer of 2009. We wanted to travel around Portugal, Spain and France for three months, but not just from city to city and from one sight to the next. We wanted to really get to know the countries, people and landscapes and stay in one place for longer than just a few days.

We plan to stay at four different farms for about two weeks each and visit a few towns and cities in between. We sign up for an annual membership via the WWOOF Portugal website, which gives us access to descriptions and contact details for all the farms in Portugal. Before we set off, we send e-mails to a few farms that sound interesting and ask whether they could use two WWOOFers over the next two weeks. Our journey starts in Lisbon - we drive further and further inland on winding roads in a rickety bus until we arrive at our first farm in the sleepy little town of Aradas.

In Portugal, there are many so-called "dropouts", people who decide to completely change their lives, quit their jobs, which may have been the main part of their lives before, and move to another country to try something new. Andrea from England and Jeroem from Holland are such dropouts. They have bought a piece of land with an old stone house in the interior of Portugal for themselves and their children Dani and Roan, with the aim of living here as self-sufficient farmers. The house needs to be completely renovated and there are no water or electricity pipes yet. Jeroem is a carpenter and makes all the doors and window frames himself. In the meantime, the family still lives in a rented house in the village, from where we walk along a forest path to the farm every morning.

There is plenty to do here, Jeroem and Andrea are full of ideas and projects, which is why they are happy to take on WWOOFers as support. During our two weeks on the farm, people come and go, at one point we count 12 heads at dinner! A couple from America, two Englishmen, one from Brazil, an Australian woman, the family of four and the two of us. Barbara from Australia is 65 and in Europe for the first time. Her daughter told her about WWOOFing and Barbara is excited to get to know Europe this way. Chris from England has been WWOOFing for several months now, riding his motorcycle from farm to farm. Jeroem has already planted small fruit trees and Andrea has created some vegetable patches that are waiting to be planted. We separate countless tomato, cucumber and lettuce plants that WWOOFers have sown before us and plant them out in the beds. We sow spinach, beet, corn, coriander, pumpkin, nasturtium, rhubarb, leek and fennel. It's not so easy to understand all the English vegetable terms straight away, but when Andrea explains to us what is cooked from the vegetables and what they taste like, we know what will soon sprout from the soil. We water, weed, collect grass and dandelions for the chickens and rabbits or stay indoors when it rains and look after little Roan while Andrea goes shopping in the village.

From the field, which we spend a few days clearing of weeds so that we can plant the lettuce, we can see some rocks in the distance. The landscape with its many hills makes it difficult to estimate distances, but we decide to climb the rocks next weekend. The path leads us along a stream with many small waterfalls, lined with yellow-flowering broom bushes and through the village of Unhais da Velho, where time seems to have stood still. Narrow alleyways, small dilapidated stone houses... apart from a few elderly villagers who meet on the street to chat and observe, the village is very deserted. Then we make our way to the summit, passing an elderly woman who talks to us. Too bad we don't speak Portuguese, we'd love to chat with her!

From the top, we have a great view over the area - the many green hills, wind turbines, forest and small villages in between. A feeling of infinity comes over me, behind all these hills there are still more hills, mountains, rivers, valleys, oceans. It's a pleasant feeling to know that there's always something new beyond the horizon.
On our last evening in Aradas, we cook Kaiserschmarrn for the whole group - we promised to make something typically Austrian.

After two weeks in the rather cool and repeatedly rainy center of Portugal, we are drawn to the sunny south. After a few days WWOOF break in beautiful Porto, we head for the Algarve, in the south of Portugal. Nadine and Calvin, a couple from England, have founded the tipi village "Tipi Algarve" here near Portimão. The tipis and a yurt are rented out to holidaymakers, who can then drive to the beach or explore the area from here. Kathi and I are given our own little cottage as accommodation. In the mornings, we clean the tipis, the camping kitchens and the toilet and shower facilities, paint garden furniture and fish leaves out of the pool. It's not really a farm here, but there is a small vegetable garden. We plant an onion and sweet potato spiral and even learn to drive a tractor to transport fresh soil to the beds, as the ground is very dry and stony. Calvin wants to expand the vegetable garden to stop buying vegetables and perhaps even supply local markets with vegetables. Everything takes time!

We only work here in the morning, around lunchtime and in the afternoon it gets far too hot to do any work outside. Before Calvin came to Portugal, he was a chef in England and he treats us to his delicacies every day at lunchtime: There's home-baked bread, roasted tomatoes with olives and sheep's cheese, fresh salad from the garden,...

Eventually, time comes to an end here too and we drive on to another farm in the Algarve. 68-year-old Jean-Jacques from Belgium has lived in Portugal for 20 years. He has bought a large piece of land near Fuseta and rents out lovingly and lavishly renovated apartments to tourists in the summer. There is also an orange, grapefruit and lemon plantation, with palm trees and a few baobabs and fig trees growing in between. We don't have a lot to do here, but we help where there is work to be done! Trimming rosemary hedges, weeding the palm garden, planting aloe vera next to the pool and pruning the fruit trees.
After a very relaxing two weeks, we want to get back to work and try out WWOOFing in another country. We travel on towards the south of France, to the "Ferme des Courmettes", a goat farm in the mountains at 800m, not far from Nice. Bruno, the shepherd, has lived here for 28 years with his son Valentin and his goats. Another WWOOFer, Mélodie, is here with us and shows us our work. Kathi and I are accommodated here in a container that is set up as a living and sleeping area. Every morning at 8 a.m. we fetch the 80 goats from the pasture, where they spend the night. The shepherd dogs Bulle and Craige help us herd the goats into the barn, then 12 at a time are milked with the milking machines and fed at the same time. The fresh milk is sent directly to the fromagerie, the cheese dairy, where we later process it into cheese.

What we learn here, and above all what we are entrusted with - after a few days, the two of us are alone in the stables, while Bruno delivers the finished cheese to local markets and restaurants.

It feels good to take on responsibility and to realize that you are really needed and can help. There are so many great people in this world with exciting projects and ideas that you can learn a lot from. And they are very happy about people who want to accompany them a little.

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