A labour of love

On one hand you have travellers keen to immerse themselves in our Kiwi culture and learn about organics. On the other hand are landowners in need of more hands to manage their properties organically. Anne Hardie finds out about `woofers'.

If it wasn't for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, Karen Matthews would have given up on her country lifestyle a long time ago and headed back to a more manageable section in town.

Instead, she has guests from all over the planet helping to manage her garden and lifestyle block organically in return for a place to stay on their overseas sojourn and meals that are bolstered by vegetables from the organic garden they help manage.

She fell in love with the log cottage in Redwood Valley with its few surrounding paddocks nine years ago when she unexpectedly forded the stream nearby and found herself sitting in the middle of the road gazing through the trees at it. Unexpectedly, because she had intended to reverse away from the ford but her foot had accidentally hit the accelerator and sent the car careering through the stream to the other side.

While fate seemed to have played a part in finding her home, tackling the never-ending upkeep around the property alone while holding a fulltime job became a burden.

"At first it was depressing and was a big weight on my shoulders," she recalls. "I probably would have sold this place by now if it wasn't for the "woofing" scheme. It would have got on top of me."

Back then she was tackling weeds with chemicals to try to keep them at bay; a battle she wasn't winning. Now, the remaining chemicals sit on the shelf and it's a case of many hands making light work of the weed population and tasks.

Travellers from around the globe are now sharing the burden as well as their cultures with her. WWOOF has volunteers from around the globe helping out around homes and farms in exchange for accommodation and meals.

It's an organisation that was created in the United Kingdom in 1971 and New Zealand joined just three years later.

Today, its principal aims remain the same: get people from towns to experience life on a farm, increase knowledge about organic farming and exchange cultures. On top of that, it's a symbiotic relationship where hosts get the help they need and travellers get accommodation and meals.

More than a thousand hosts are spread throughout the country, including about 150 in the Nelson/Golden Bay region, and it's all managed by a couple living in the Aniseed Valley.

Andrew and Jane Strange are the national coordinators of the organisation, signing up new hosts and woofers. It's a fulltime job that evolved from Andrew's own days as a woofer and assistant coordinator and he's seen the organisation grow from about 100 hosts 20 years ago to its present number.

"In 2001 we had a real crisis because we had so many woofers joining and not enough hosts," Andrew says.

Predictably, there have been hosts who abuse the scheme and are simply looking for cheap labour and Andrew says some people in the past have viewed it as a dating system.

Now there's a referee system for hosts to cull out those joining for the wrong reasons and woofers can flick through the organisation's booklet to find properties and hosts that appeal.

Right now, Karen is playing host to Signe Lorentsen and Bo Frosig from Denmark, whose Kiwi experience so far includes a vegetarian community in Whitianga where they picked fruit and a large Hawke's Bay vineyard where they helped around the home and garden.

It's not your usual big OE experience and it's providing much more, they say.

"It's good to get under the skin of New Zealanders," says Signe. "It's really nice to have a place to belong to when you're travelling and meet new people."

Bo adds: "You become part of a family really quick. Every new (host) greets you with open arms at the door."

This is the fourth year Karen has been taking woofers in and in the past year they've become a frequent addition to the household.

"The beauty of it is you can have people in your home as it suits you. I'm getting inquiries every week from woofers during this past year and I've had to turn woofers away whereas four years ago I had to wait for woofers."

Another thing that has changed in those four years is that most woofers now have their own set of wheels, whereas in the past she needed to pick them up and run them places.

"I don't get the hitchhiking stories any more," she laughs.

A sleepout beside the house means woofers have their own private accommodation at Karen's, but she welcomes them to make themselves at home in the house as well and finds it an excellent way of sampling cuisine from other cultures.

"I've had woofers who won't let me cook."

It does mean taking strangers into your home that you've never met before and know zilch about and as Andrew points out, woofers have to have a certain amount of trust also in their hosts.

"The good part about woofing is it takes money out of the equation and so it's just a pure exchange of trust."

Karen continues: "It puts you more on an equal footing. Being in the country and being on my own - you're extending a certain amount of trust that hasn't yet been earned. But I haven't had any bad experiences.

"I think woofing attracts a certain kind of person. They tend to be go-getters and aren't generally lazy types that are going to take people for a ride."

In the past she has placed so much trust in woofers that one Christmas she handed her door keys over to two girls she had never met before and left on holiday herself.

"I had two girls arrive at Christmas time two years ago, desperate for a place to be. They were almost in tears and I was going away. So I said hi, here's the keys, bye.

"They stayed for seven weeks and they've become great friends that I hear from every couple of weeks."

Numerous friendships have blossomed with woofers who have stayed with her and with whom she plans to catch up in their own countries.

Lately, there's been increasing numbers of German and French woofers, heading off on a working holiday to escape the job shortage back in their own countries.

When woofers first arrive, Karen presents them with three pages of "expectations" so there's no confusion about their role. As long as they put in four hours' work a day, they're free to do their own thing for the remainder of the day, knowing they've got a bed and meals at the end of it.

A comment Andrew often hears from woofers is that their work makes them feel they've given something back to the country in which they have travelled.

"Especially if they've planted trees and feel they've put some carbon back into the environment to compensate for what they've used travelling."

- © Fairfax NZ News