is WWOOF worth doing
>>2820024It's dyingSince COVID, WWOOF USA has lost over 50% of its hosts. The remaining hosts can be very cagey about who they let onto their property. It's common for them not to approve your stay unless they are positive that you will be leaving a good review of the farm. This way, bad reviews are suppressed. The original premise of WWOOF was a volunteer work exchange which will help you learn about farming and alternative ways of life, but in reality, WWOOFers are primarily used for laborious grunt work that the hosts are unwilling to do themselves. Digging holes/trenches and clearing weeds/brush were the two tasks that I always got assigned as a WWOOFer. Showing up without a car leaves you completely at the mercy of your host, who may be very distrustful of volunteers due to past bad experiences. The most common scam on the part of the (homeless) volunteer involves getting a piece of mail with their name on it sent to their host's address. Then they legally change their address and become a tenant, whereupon they quit working, refuse to pay rent, and wait for the eviction process to run its course. Hosts often value their volunteer's labor at the minimum wage, i.e. $7.25 per hour in the USA. By contrast, the food and lodging they provide is valued at prevailing market levels. A private room, well, that's worth $50 per night. $10 per day for food, and voila, a fair exchange in the host's view is 57 hours of work per week in exchange for room and board. Slave-driving hosts are very common.
Should you try it? Yes, unless you're an autistic and unlikeable person. I recommend picking a host who has a very large number of past WWOOF stays. This way, you'll hopefully get to work and socialize with fellow volunteers, which makes the experience a lot more fun than slaving away alone for a demanding, distrustful host. Be fine with primitive sleeping conditions. You have more freedom that way, and chances are the workload will be much lighter than with the hosts who offer a private bedroom in the house. One of the most common pressure tactics is for the host to begin a project himself or herself shortly before your workday is supposed to wrap up. This pressures you to continue helping out in order to not seem like a lazy volunteer. If you insist on wrapping up the day at six hours of labor per your agreement, the host will say "it's okay, I understand, enjoy yourself" with a disappointed look, then make a scene of working extra hard while you are relaxing around the property.
This was one of the more primitive workstays I did, in San Diego county. The property had a waterfall and a hiking trail. It was 420 friendly and offered some old campers and a tent to sleep in. Only 20 hours of work per week expected. Meals were cooked on a wood fire; laundry was washed in a metal bucket.
This four-person art commune in the California desert had a lot of messed up creative energy. I did not get along with any of the people, and after I made some criticism to another person which got back to them, they banned me from the house and said it would be better if I headed out. My primary task was digging a foot deep ditch through hard caliche with a broken pickax.
>>2820040thank you for the replies, this was so insightful. ive already wwoofed before and it was cut short but I want to do it again.
This vineyard workstay in Southeast Arizona was one of the best WWOOF stays I had. I was tasked with weedeating the grass around the grapevines. Unfortunately, I nicked a few of the vines in the process. The guy was French, very friendly and cultured. He served wine, European food and erudite conversation with every meal. His wife was brain-damaged from a stroke and was very averse to my presence, almost hostile. They trusted me enough to leave me with the keys to their home when they went away for the weekend. I did eat more pine nuts than I should've, but otherwise I was a responsible housesitter. BTW if you have a trustworthy personality, housesitting is a way to live in rich people's homes and care for their pet dog or cat while they are away at their other home. I know a Canadian lady who got PAID to live in a billionaire's home on the French Riviera for months. She got gigs like that all over the world...Australia, Mexico, Philippines, etc.
They had a beautiful wooden cabin complete with utilities for WWOOFers on the property. I went above and beyond for them, but unfortunately my stay was cut short as a female WWOOFer was scheduled to move in a week after I arrived, and sharing the cabin was not an option.
I also volunteered for a time at a Twelve Tribes commune (across the street from the primitive homestead in >>2820043). They had a huge yurt for commune males, where I was given a bunk. My quality of work and level of intellectual engagement with their belief system made them really eager for me to stay on for the long-term. But for whatever reason, I started feeling like I was being used as a workhorse, and longed to be free and at leisure again. They took that as a betrayal and a waste of all their emotional investment (i.e. lovebombing).
My last WWOOF stay was at an off-grid homestead / cannabis farm in the California Sierra, run by a Chad with a giant lifted F-350 truck. First day of work was brush clearing in sunny 70 F weather, which unbeknownst to me involved a shit ton of poison oak. Then a snowstorm descended, the road out got blocked by a mudslide, and the radio waves were filled with news of COVID panic. My arms became one giant blister. Some chick came up from the Bay Area to get away from the hysteria. She was convinced it was the start of some Handmaid's Tale dystopian dictatorship. Of course, she fucked Chad for a place to stay, and flirted once with me as well. Sitting right up against me on the couch, looking at photos on my phone and cooing over them while touching my hands and brushing my arms. She was doing it just to spite the Chad, because they had had an argument earlier. She gave me her number, texted me once, then disappeared from my life.It was fun taking a hot shower outdoors in 33 F snowy weather. The water had two settings - freezing cold and scalding hot. The entire property was powered by a generator which was left running 24/7. My cabin had a wood stove, but it was very cheap, rusted out and full of holes. I didn't want to be breathing fumes, so I chose to sleep in the cold instead, bundled up in my jackets in a sleeping bag. My host provided margarine, mac & cheese, granola bars, and other assorted goyslop to subsist on. Foolishly, I had brought very little food in my truck, and word of empty grocery shelves made me feel very anxious for the future. Eventually the state came around and cleared the mudslide. I made it across the Sierra to Carson City, bought whatever remained on the Walmart shelves, then returned to my current job in Colorado on March 31, 2020 and turned my back on the whole workstay business (and on the whole matter of living with people in general).
One workstay in far-out western Arizona I spent long days with my host sledgehammering a six-foot iron stake into the ground, then wrenching it out and inserting a cottonwood or willow shoot. We had hundreds and hundreds of shoots to plant. I grew to hate the backbreaking labor under the winter sun, though I persisted at it for the two weeks I had agreed on. Later on my host told me that he had been given a $20,000 grant from the USDA to study reforestation of a desert riparian landscape. He tried to bait me with all kinds of perks if I continued working: a trip to a Vegas strip club, an AR-15, any food I wanted to eat, all the beer I wanted to drink, etc. But I told him my favorite part of his property was the driveway, because eventually it would allow me to leave. That was a mean thing to say. Coolest part of the stay was climbing the Nipple Mountain and firing my shotgun into the air at the top to signal my host to take a picture. He never sent it to me, however.
The hill beyond his valley property. I was also tasked with shooting cattle with birdshot when they trespassed on the property to graze on the newly planted shoots. The cow that got hit let loose a huge splatter of shit and ran off, never to return. I also shot and cooked up a jackrabbit. This host was the most bro-tier of all my hosts by a long shot, but he definitely should've invited another volunteer. Being the only volunteer kinda sucks, unless you really get along well with your host. He also left me the keys to his house and went away for the weekend shortly after I arrived. People have always trusted me more than they liked me, and I'm fine with that.
Staying with a rabidly Zionist and anti-abortion 60 year old white woman on her estate in the scenic Big Bend country was interesting. I signed on with this one in order to have a chance to lose my virginity with a former coworker in the national park two hours south who had been v-chatting and flirting with me all summer long. Mission succeeded, but I found her company to be completely uninteresting. The girlfriend, that is. I had big political arguments with this host, and at one point she even wondered aloud what was stopping me from grabbing her .38 from its hiding place, shooting her dead and stealing everything she owned. I told her that I had been robbed before and understood her worries. Her parents next door were very friendly and let me swim in their enormous heated swimming pool. She tutored kids for a living, but some people at a school spread nasty rumors about my host being mentally ill, so she took her kitchen knife and cut a heart-shaped hole in every prickly pear pad along the road to the school. When a car would come by, she hurried into my passenger's seat to duck down low and hide her face. One time we were watching a movie together and she put her legs up on an ottoman and let them spread open, with her dress carelessly falling back and showing her bloomers. I think she did it deliberately to see if I was a normal heterosexual man and not some faggot pedo pervert, kek. What can I say? The reaction in my pants was that of a normal heterosexual man, even if the age gap was greater than my age. She then pulled her dress down and said that she was forever in love with her dead Jewish husband, and no man could replace him.All kinds of interesting characters in this American land...
>>2820060>WWOOF>WTFWow this sounds crazy I am 47 so now I am too old maybe to do stuff like this but this job would apparently make an amazing book.It sounds like a total horny woman festival too. Are you hot anon?
She also left on a weekend trip and handed me the keys to her house. I asked her to take the .38 with her, and she did. In her yard was a very strange hill she called Monkey Bread Mountain, full of honeycombed holes. She invited me to climb it with her, and to my shock she began clambering up the nearly vertical surface as if it were a staircase. I asked "but what if you slip?" She said "I've never slipped". Sure enough, the rock was extraordinarily rough and grippy. I left my car behind at her house (after losing my virginity) and rode along with her to Ojinaga, Mexico, where I boarded a bus for Chihuahua, Durango and Mazatlan. There I got violently sick from sipping on Mexican tap water and languished in misery for two weeks at an ultra-cheap hotel near a cruddy beachfront. That October of 2018, the Slumbo character was born.
>>2820061A whole different side of America opens up to you when you seek out the oddities rather than the typicalities. At that age you might struggle with the primitiveness and unconventionality of the workstay lifestyle - or you might make connections which will open doors for you that you could never foresee opening. People you meet and stay in touch with have a way of reappearing in your life at opportune moments, or introducing you to their own social network.This workstay in southeast Arizona was fraught with difficulties from the get-go. A young couple bought this huge compound in the high desert with dreams to convert it into a commune, but the mortgage payments and a lack of suitable visionary volunteers doomed the project to stagnation, internal conflict, and eventual catastrophic dissolution. It was sad to see things deteriorate over the years, and all the hard work we put into the property come to naught.
I had a hard time finding anywhere that would take me. Finally this farm in central California coast nestled in a mountain valley, really beautiful. They didn't have anything to do. I was ready to work but there was none to be done. They let me sleep inside the main house. There were a couple older guy workers and a younger guy. The younger guy kept getting in blow up fights with the guy who ran it, who was a real piece of work. I left when he left since I didn't have a car.It was weird shit and made me lose interest.
>>2820072Getting sick off Mexican tap water is what convinced you to spend your time getting your pecker played with in SEA?
Anyone here worked the sugar beet harvest in North Dakota? I'm thinking of applying for this season
>>2820061>It sounds like a total horny woman festival too. Are you hot anon?it sounds like dirty hippy 6's and milfs at best, you don't need to be hot to pull those
>>2820308Do you have an RV? They much prefer to hire people with RVs, but if you don't have electric, water and sewer hookups, they'll put you up in a motel room for $150/week or so. Rooms are limited, so the earlier you get hired, the more likely your chances of getting a room. A car is a requirement.Shifts are 12 hours long. Of course, everyone wants the day shift, so new hires are likely to get the 12 hour overnight shift. That's what they gave me when they hired me. I decided that waking up at 5 AM for an eight-hour shift on a golf course was better than 7 PM to 7 AM in some muddy field. However, the beet job would've stacked the cash faster due to the 44 hours a week of overtime accrued.>>2820143What time of year was this? In winter it can be very difficult to find a farm that is in need of volunteers. There is a filter you can use on WWOOF-USA to find farms which have immediate openings. I've seen a few listings which specifically took in people who were down on their luck. Kind of like a working charity. Most people are very skittish about hosting brokefags, cannabis smokers, and anyone without a car who is not a foreigner.>>2820170As a straight man, I couldn't care less about pecker play. It's time you stopped assuming everyone else was as much of a degenerate faggot as you are.
