Wednesday, April 22, 2009

wwoorking on the farm

From new zealand shevanegans

kim and yu did some wwoofing (willing workers on organic farms) in australia and convinced us of its merits enough to give it a go in new zealand. we got hooked up with a great couple in the dunedin area and after a few days of work we can now say that we have:
-collected fields full of cow shit by shovel and pitchfork
-harvested potatoes
-weeded at an old folks home
-built a car-sized compost pile
-moved a 1 ton playpen
-converted biomass into charcoal, on purpose

here are the migrant workers
From new zealand shevanegans


the farm itself sits near the coast... here's the view from the frontyard.
From new zealand shevanegans

annie, our host, raises beef cattle, amongst other things, so we ate 2 meals a day of steak. also had fresh milk, just hours after it had been squeezed from a dairy cow.
From new zealand shevanegans

annie's partner dennis also has a farm. we helped out on his farm for a while and got involved in his new venture: turning wood chips into "biochar"...
the idea is to lock carbon away in the form of chips for fertilizer, thus reducing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere when organic matter decomposes. its not a bad idea, but hard to put into practice. dennis is interested in selling carbon credits for his work... something i'm not altogether a fan of. regardless of the environmental benefit, it was fun burning shit.

we were on this farm a few weeks ago now... haven't been getting much internet time lately, so there's a delay in posts. there are some new pics up on picasa though... like this beaut:

1 comment:

Daniel said...

That moustache is like putting camouflage on a tree.