WWOOF or Willing Workers On Organic Farms (also referred to as World Wide Organization Of Organic Farmers) is a work-trade program on organic farms. Travelers can put in a certain amount of hours of work on a small organic farm in trade for room and board. Each farm is different but it offers a wide variety of opportunities to learn and live from the land.
How Much Does It Cost?
The WWOOF program is extremely cheap given what it has to offer. It also varies depending on the country you are interested in WWOOFing. In the United States a WWOOF membership goes for around $40 for a 1 year membership.
How To Find The Right Farm
Once you are a member of WWOOF then you get access to their network of farms and farm volunteers. You can search and filter through the farms based on many different criteria including: location, amount of volunteer hours needed, type of housing offered, whether or not they are open for the season and many others.
All the Farms and Volunteers can also Rate and Review each other. Once you find a farm matching your criteria the next step is to check those reviews! Some of the reviews can be quite lengthy but it’s really nice to get an in depth look at a new potential home.
Contacting Farms
After you’ve come to a decision on a few farms you are interested in WOOFing at you need to send the Farmer a letter on the WWOOF website (or to their email, if provided and requested). Don’t make a cookie cutter template for an introduction letter. The Host Farmers can tell when someone is sending out the same letter to any farm around just to get the chance to stay anywhere. In fact, many of the farms will attempt to weed out any potential bad seeds by putting somewhere deep in their description something like “Potential Volunteers must put POTATOES in the subject line of their introductory letter.” That way when someone sends them one of those cookie cutter letters they know the volunteer didn’t even read the farm description
All the Farms and Volunteers can also Rate and Review each other. Once you find a farm matching your criteria the next step is to check those reviews! Some of the reviews can be quite lengthy but it’s really nice to get an in depth look at a new potential home.
What To Expect On Your First Farm
Now’s the time you go to your first farm. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve ever been on a farm, exploring the way humans have survived hand in hand with mother nature. Or, maybe you grew up on a farm and are rekindling your childhood memories by getting back to your roots. Whatever your background is it has now led you to this point. You may have all kinds of felling and thoughts racing through your body. – How hard is this work going to be? Are the Farmers going to like me? Is everyone going to get along? Will my dog get along with the farm animals? – This is all normal, you’re about to take an adventure of a lifetime, it’s scary, exciting and all a part of the experience.
