Naked Children and Tomatoes: WWOOFing in Louisiana

Naked Children and Tomatoes: WWOOFing in Louisiana

D. Spiro: WWOOFing in Louisiana

Not long after I left Oakland Organic Farm I sat down with a pen and notebook intending to write something that would successfully put into words all that I had to say about my WWOOFing experience. With the intent of sharing the document—whatever it would turn out to be—I began it as a letter to the Louisiana couple who own and operate the farm. “Dear Hutch and Prentiss,” I wrote, “I have been trying to articulate to myself for some time the successes of Oakland and the WWOOFer endeavor and I’m not sure where this will get me, but I’m going to give it a go.” I enumerated the many wonderful things I believed they were doing by operating a small organic farm and using WWOOFers as labor. These being: 1. Utilizing organic farming practices (no insecticides, pesticides, or chemicals of any kind); 2.Employing a diverse group of young and energetic volunteers from all over the world; 3. Earnestly investigating ways to make their farm and home more energy efficient and sustainable; and 4. Committing to ethical and smart business practices that viewed consumer health as a bottom line and profit as a secondary consequence of that bottom line, though an extremely important one.

By the end of the list, the romantic part of my imagination (it is admittedly a big part) had grasped tightly onto my writing hand. “You are providing the training ground for the next generation of pioneers in America and the world,” I wrote, “the future of humanity is dependent upon a renewed focus on the small organic farm!” I included a “call-to-rakes” to all the wayward souls, encouraging them to join the ranks of WWOOFerdom and organic farming. I was convinced that this experience, which had stirred in me an ethic of hard work (something very much lost on me during my “formal” education), a mindfulness of other people’s psychologies and cultures, and a humility before nature, was precisely the answer to all the world’s woes. “Not to mention,” I wholeheartedly intoned, “this farm work is fundamentally good. We are helping the earth produce the single most fundamental sustenance to human beings’ survival—healthy food!” “What better method is there,” I asked, “for cultivating our individual humanity than to reconnect with our species’ agrarian heritage?” It went on and on. Eventually I grew tired and had to stop writing, leaving the impassioned credo unfinished and largely incoherent, though I believe parts would make Shelley proud (“we and the vegetables are together the progeny of the earth!”). It is now a year later, and upon reflection I am more aware of the real world complexities challenging my idealistic vision. While my passion for the food movement and the future of small organic farms has not waned, I believe I have come to a better understanding of the roles WWOOFers can and should play in that future.

DEPENDING UPON whom you ask WWOOF either stands for “Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms” or “Willing Workers on Organic Farms.” The latter was more familiar to WWOOFers of the 1970s in England, where the term first came in to use. Then, it was used to describe English city dwellers looking to take inexpensive vacations in the countryside. “Worldwide Opportunities” became the new moniker in the next decade, as “Willing Workers” rang just a bit too Marxist for Thatcher’s Britain. By now the term has become something of a colloquialism for the practice of exchanging farm labor for room and board.

The fundamental premise of WWOOFing is a simple exchange. The farmer provides room and board and the WWOOFer provides labor. The specifics of this exchange—what kind of room is provided, how many meals a day will there be, whether the WWOOFer will have access to a kitchen and a stipend or be invited to meals prepared by the farm family, how many hours a day the WWOOFer will be expected to work, whether there are days off—are left to the individual WWOOFer to work out with the farm. The various WWOOFing organizations that have popped up across the globe are essentially networking platforms that put potential WWOOFers in touch with farms. Websites like WWOOFUSA.org provide a database of organic farms in the United States that are looking for volunteer workers. For those without internet access, they also publish a booklet listing the locations of and contact information for participating farms. There is no program to sign up for and no application process to go through to become a WWOOFer in the United States. There is only a small fee to gain access to the website, where one can make a small profile and browse through the farm database. Similar organizations exist all over the world, from New Zealand to Italy to Turkey, and there are also many farms that bypass these “official” organizations and advertise for WWOOFers on their own websites.

My WWOOFing experience began in early September 2010, the fall after I graduated from college. At the time I was generally listless, unsure of my future, and lacking in most basic skills. I decided to WWOOF after having the vague idea that physical labor would do my body and soul some good after twenty years of learning to sit still at a desk. After contacting farms in Hawaii, New Mexico, and Louisiana, I got in touch with a small farm in the East Feliciana Parish of central Louisiana. The Feliciana Parishes are located in the heart of the former Republic of West Florida, an independent country for seventy-eight days in 1810. The lone star flag of the Republic—later used by Texas—still flies high at Oakland.

Six days after having my wisdom teeth removed, I set out driving to the single-road “town” of Gurley, Louisiana. Part of a string of country towns established to mark train depots and named after one of the largest landowners in the area, Gurley is buttressed by Wilson, Ethel, and Slaughter. (Among the descendants of the Slaughter family is Hutch, one of my hosts on the farm. Hutch’s grandfather Dr. Slaughter once worked as the physician on call for a local prison.) As the story goes, John Gaynor actually owned more land than Gurley at the time of the town’s establishment, but as there was already a town in Mississippi named Gaynor and Mr. Gaynor did not want the post office to become confused, he requested that the town be named for his friend John Gurley, who once beat him in a game of cards.

I arrived at Oakland Organic on the Tuesday evening after Labor Day and was immediately taken by how well the property lives up to its name. Large and imposing oak trees with thick twisting limbs pepper the sixty-eight acres of property surrounding the home that sits in its center. Amid the oaks are scores of pecan trees with garlic growing around their roots; local residents stop by to collect the dropped nuts in the fall to sell at the local markets. When I arrived, a fellow WWOOFer named Kimberly told me about the “resurrection ferns” that coil around the trees trunks. Vines that appear brown and dead most of the time but turn a lush verdant green after a rain, they would prove to be an apt metaphor for the story of the farm’s origin.

Oakland Organic is home to the McClendon family, and in the fall of 2010 it was just a year-and-a-half old. Hutch McClendon is an entrepreneur who comes from a long line of Louisiana families (see Dr. Slaughter) and an avid hunter whose trophies from Africa decorate the home’s interior. He grew up at Oakland, a former plantation home built in 1827 by Judge Thomas Scott, whose portrait still hangs in the living room. After marrying Prentiss Theus, a free-spirited photographer who liked to tell me that she didn’t believe in calendars, the two purchased the house and property from Hutch’s parents and moved their family to the country. In late 2009 Prentiss underwent treatment for an aggressive form of inflammatory breast cancer at MD Anderson in Houston (she is now, happily, cancer free) and Hutch, having gone through his own cancer scare a few years earlier, became determined to use his land, skills, and resources to grow food free of chemicals in land that he would keep healthy and productive. The farm was a resurrection project, both in terms of Oakland’s historical roots and Prentiss’s ill health. From my very first day we WWOOFers were regularly reminded of two things: that our mission was to “make people healthier one meal at a time” and that our jobs were not to be vegetable farmers but dirt farmers, caring for and managing the earth of Oakland, our living factory.

For the most part, we WWOOFers lived in tents in the woods across the street from the house. There was also a small bunkhouse in the converted attic of an eighteenth-century kitchen building located next to the house. Many of the shorter-term WWOOFers stayed there, as did the long-term WWOOFers when the weather became too cold or too hot. (My first task on the farm was to lay the subflooring and flooring for the bunkhouse. Before then I think the last thing I had built was a Lego spaceship. I’d rather not say when.) Being something of a privacy monger, I took my tent deep into the woods, setting it up in a grove of invasive privet trees alongside a small fishing pond. I spent my nights—after the campfire and beers with the other WWOOFers—reading and writing by flashlight in my tiny home. While I make no claims to any Thoreauvian insights, I did find that living in nature and undergoing the physical rigor of farm work gave my nights the peace and quiet I needed in order to gain a certain measure of self-awareness, which helped me begin to build a set of internal principles to live by. WWOOFing provided me the opportunity to exhale and think with a clear mind.

When it came to board, we ate exceptionally well. Everyday we had fresh vegetables, often picked minutes before they were eaten or cooked—Cherokee purple tomatoes, with their ugly deformed shapes, were perhaps the most delicious—and had access to a freezer full of healthy and lean meat that Hutch had hunted and that some of us helped dress (clean, skin, and gut). Fresh bread was baked daily and, while we had chickens, there was a plethora of fresh eggs with thick deep yellow yolks. We all took turns preparing meals for the group, in either the main house kitchen or an outdoor “WWOOFer kitchen.” Often there were a few WWOOFers who’d chosen farm life in order to cultivate their cooking skills, so there were always experts to salvage a certain WWOOFer’s (I invoke here my Fifth Amendment rights) paltry, though spirited, attempts at dishes like pasta carbonara, chicken chili, and homemade pizza.

At any given time during the five months that I lived on the farm there were between three and fourteen WWOOFers. Together with one paid farmhand, we comprised the farm’s entire labor force. One of the greatest successes of WWOOFing is its diversity in terms of the ages, countries and cultures of origin, and life situations of the volunteers, though not in terms of race (WWOOFers are overwhelmingly white). WWOOFers I met hailed from France, England, New Zealand, Peru, and all across the United States, from Alabama to Washington, D.C. to Oregon. We ranged in age from seventeen to forty-two and comprised an eclectic mix of characters. We had divorcees looking to experiment with cooking, high-school graduates taking gap years, art students dissatisfied with college, school teachers, couples with plans to buy land and start their own farms, a young contractor traversing the states and offering her building expertise as a contribution to the farms where she stayed (she led the project to convert the attic into a bunkhouse), and Sebastian—a four-hundred-year-old former salt miner from upstate New York who told me on his first night that in a past life he’d been a tree.

We spent our days hipping rows, planting vegetables, feeding the chickens, collecting eggs, weeding, harvesting, and selling our veggies at local farmers markets and to local restaurants. The work was physically taxing, sometimes monotonous, and wholly dependent upon nature’s whims (“It doesn’t take a whole lot to become real humble about nature,” Hutch once told me), but the farm grew—from two acres under cultivation to five by the time I left—and we found respite and spiritual goodness in the farm’s successes and in our connections with each other. During the first three months of my stay, we expanded from the nearby St. Francisville market to the bigger Baton Rouge and New Orleans farmers markets, and we began a successful CSA (community-supported agriculture) program wherein patrons purchase a share of the farm’s yield at the beginning of the season and are given a selection of that yield once a week. We experimented with various growing arrangements, different methods of pest and weed control, and became more efficient at harvesting. The WWOOFers had come with a wide range of experiences and, especially during the fall season of 2010, the farm benefited from the specialized wisdom of individual WWOOFers. In addition to the bunkhouse, we built a chicken coop and acquired forty tragically fated chickens. A neighbor’s dog killed eighteen of them and coyotes slowly picked off the rest. It was sad but those chickens did not go to waste. They were delicious.

Nights, we ate dinner with the McClendon family—Hutch, Prentiss, and their four small children under the age of nine who were always naked or costumed—and then sat around a campfire discussing the world’s problems and solving them, every last one. I recall a few particularly memorable conversations we had by the silhouette of a big oak in the woods about the future of education and the meaning of love. (In October of last year, while participating in the New Orleans version of Occupy Wall Street, I was struck by how many people, especially in the beginning, talked about how happy they were to simply have a space to discuss things with a group of open-minded people.) There is no freer and safer place to discuss something as personal and important as what you think the meaning of “love” is than sitting around a campfire over a few beers in the woods of central Louisiana. One of the great triumphs of WWOOFing is its potential to bring very different people with very different life experiences together to think and converse.

There is a caveat to the above description: the good times of WWOOFer success at Oakland Organic lasted only the first three months that I lived there. That is not to say that the farm fell apart after that, only that after the successes of the previous three months we were hit with a veritable gut punch in late December. I’ve come to believe that there are two relatively simple reasons for this. First, from September to November of that year, there were no fewer than eight WWOOFers who remained on the farm, and we coalesced into a functional and happy group with a good working rhythm for the entirety of the season. With little turnover, there was also little time wasted training new WWOOFers. Second, that season happened to be fall, which in Louisiana is the most comfortable and temperate time of year in which to grow vegetables.

By the beginning of 2011, most of the WWOOFers who had been there that fall had moved on to their next adventures (I left for about two weeks to see friends and family in New York) and the weather had turned cold and rainy. The winter became a lesson in the challenges wrought by a transient, self-selecting, volunteer workforce. During that time the number of WWOOFers was in constant flux, making it difficult to strike upon the rhythm we’d had in the fall. Also, WWOOFers arrived who were less than good fits for the farm’s style. (Sometime after I left I heard from Hutch about a couple that’d come with the intention of staying for a long time. After no more than a few days they informed Hutch—who, between his business life and the farm, tends to work ten to twelve hours a day—that he wasn’t “hippie enough” for them and that they hadn’t intending on having so many harvesting and planting deadlines, which are absolutely necessary for growing in season and getting to farmers markets.) Nature took its tithe as well. The wet winter weather made for a rash of diseases and pests that spread among the crops, forcing us to perpetually dig drainage ditches so that our rows wouldn’t flood. While our CSA stayed afloat, we were forced to cut back on the New Orleans market. Work had simply become slower and more difficult, and morale was low. With nothing binding them, WWOOFers left. I ended up leaving at the end of February. In the year since then Hutch and Prentiss have cut back on WWOOFers, preferring instead to pay local residents and agriculture students from LSU as farm hands.

I CAN think of almost no better personal educational experience for me than my time WWOOFing. However, the events of the winter of 2011 and my discussions with Hutch and Prentiss since that time compel me to believe that WWOOFing is not a sustainable farm-labor solution. Perhaps it was never meant to be, though there remain a good number of farms in this country trying to make WWOOFing just that, mostly for lack of a better option. I fear that many of these farms will find themselves running out of money and will all too soon. I must also report that not all WWOOFing experiences are as fortuitous as mine was. I have heard many a horror story of people left to flounder on farms where they were given little direction or support, and in some instance, were not given their earned accommodations of room and board. Conversely, I have a friend who joined a group of energetic and eager WWOOFers on a farm only to find that the farmer was not prepared for their energy and ethic and quickly grew frustrated with their constant requests for work. They were eventually kicked off.

Let me propose that this entire struggle is ultimately for the best. The food movement is young and growing pains are to be expected, even relished, as opportunities for tinkering with the experiment. WWOOFing is simply one of the experiment’s ingredients. What if WWOOFing transitioned to become part of the formal American education experience? Every high-school student could take six months to a year to work on a small organic farm near his or her hometown. Already elementary schools are cultivating their own organic gardens; why not continue the trend in secondary and higher education? What if a program structured like Teach for America existed for small farms, where young people are trained as apprentices in the basics of farming for a specific location and then, if they choose to do so, are set upon a path to manage a farm and eventually purchase land on which to build their own small organic farm? What if all those idealistic people coming out of high school and college eagerly looking for places to experiment with solar power and hydropower and soybean power had small farms to house and support them? I imagine many people will believe I am overly optimistic to think that these things are actually doable. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think we can get them done. After all, we may actually be the pioneers of a glorious future.

Daniel Spiro works at Beckham’s Bookshop, a second-hand bookstore in New Orleans.

Photo: Farm in Jefferson, Louisiana, 2008, by the Kozy Shack via Flickr creative commons