Backpackers take on European farms green holidays
July 28th, 2009
Pining for European adventure backpackers have discovered life on the farm, shoveling manure, swine feed and butter as a recession-beating way to indulge their wanderlust.
Your ticket to an earthy flavor of the Old Continent is an innovative website that connects travelers with a network of organic farms stretching from Portugal to Turkey and around the world.
World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an organization founded in United Kingdom, has been around since 1971 but has attracted many more agricultural volunteers in recent years as difficult economic times force people young and not so young to find a cheap way take a European vacation.
This year, 15,700 of them are scattered throughout Europe to get their hands dirty, compared with 6400 in 2004, said WWOOF. The number of hosts is also close to doubling in 2240 to the same period. The organization also offers farm stays in the Americas, Africa, Middle East and Asia-Pacific region.
For a few hours of work per day – other tasks include milking goats, collecting honey and make compost – volunteers get a place to stay, to eat fresh food and a bargain.
"I did not have enough money to stay in any other way," said Alex Mansfield, 21, a guitar-toting philosophy student from Massachusetts who traded life in the city of their study abroad experience in Salamanca, Spain, for a few weeks in an isolated farm. "It is expensive, having to eat and sleep indoors."
Together with three other Americans and one Argentine, Mansfield spent part of this summer in an ever-changing force of volunteers at the Center Ammehula, a ghost town turned into an organic farm, nestled on a steep mountainside in the region of Spain northwestern Galicia.
The setting was scenic, but the accommodation modest number of tents and trailers with metal around a campfire area, all from the same 9 miles from the nearest supermarket. However, the volunteers, the festival in the lettuce and strawberries fresh stain the lips of the farm, do not seem to mind.
"It feels so good to be near the food you’re about to cook," said former New York schoolteacher Talia Kahn-Kravis, 23, as she squirted milk from the udder of a goat in a bucket plastic.
As Kahn-Kravis, supporters of the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy as a reaction against fast food, are praising the return to the farms.
"It’s one way to restore the relationship with food," said Cinzia Scaffidi, director of the Center for the Study of Slow Food in Italy.
Ammehula owner of the center, Verfondern Martin, 51, said WWOOF is not just about fresh produce every time. More importantly, he says, promotes cultural understanding.
"WWOOF is the perfect device to combat discrimination," said the Dutchman born in Germany, who has lived in Spanish for 11 years of exploitation. "We Germans and Israelis have sat at a table together without problems. It is an excellent way to meet more than a country that only nationals of prejudice."
While Spain is seeing an increase of foreigners who wish to take a stab in agriculture is not the only European nation to attract attention.
"It’s a way to spend time in places without spending money," said WWOOF Elliott Smith, 21, who has traveled to Belgium and Italy during a vacation organic vineyard Beaujolais outside Lyon, France. "Everybody wants to travel a little and the big thing is to do it without going completely broke."
Apart from having a base camp for a trip between thin skin culture of the Gamay grape, the language of Texas students said that their "French farmer … tenfold."
Recent graduates and university students as Mansfield and Smith make up a significant part of the WWOOF volunteers, although they come from the peasant life as varied as the tasks they do, says Chemi Peña, a spokesman for WWOOF in Spain.
"The profile of the farms is very diverse," he said.
Julie Bateman, a mother of two sons and slow food advocate, your bags 10 – and 13 years of age, children and left his home in Charleston, SC, a volunteer for the agricultural season in Italy this summer.
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