organic this is!!

So, you were all really waiting for my story from my second WWOOFing experience with impatience, as I announced it to be online soon?! I hope so, because there is some interesting stuff to come up now!

I spent only one week on the Redtail Ridge farm: an organic farm with cattle and an olive grove. My experience on this farm was completely different to the one on the River Flats Estate. I loved both sojourns but for completely different reasons. I will mainly remember the first farm because of the overload of delicious food and the great wines I had the pleasure to drink. The second farm however I will definitely remember because of what I learned about organic farming. And I really learned a lot!

Peter and Robyn are typical organic farmers – or at least now I will always think of them when talking about organic farming: On their estate they are growing, beside 2000 olive trees, many other things: they have one line of wine: 64 vines (mainly Shiraz, a bit of Cabernet Sauvignon), only for themselves. They get out around 300 bottles of delicious sulfite-free wine per year! We used to drink one bottle of it each night for dinner.

They do produce really delicious organic raw honey. Furthermore they have many different veggies in the garden, mainly for their own use. And they have ten chickens which lay around seven eggs per day (I asked my parents how many chickens my grandmother had on average and how many eggs they lay every day - one chicken lays around two eggs in three days… Yes, for those who don’t know it: I grew up with chicken on our property and was used to fresh eggs from happy chicken).

But of course their main source of income is the beef. The cows were taken care of in a completely different way to what I am used to in the village I grew up. Where I grew up the farmers all had dairy cows which stayed in the stalls all winter and in autumn/spring nights. The farm-work in summer was all about getting enough hay for the winter. Guash, the hours I have spent helping out on my oncles or my best friends farm when the various fields had to be mowed. But on this farm in Australia it was completely different – of course first of all because of the weather and secondly because their cows are for meat production. Weather: they don’t even have a stall. Meat production: the milk is only for the calves.

They have a few bulls and some mother-cows, which get pregnant once per year (9 months pregnancy like humans). The rest of the many cattle around the farm are rather young (and won’t get too old). The bulls are always among the cows and can choose the cows by themselves when they are in heat. And the cows foal their calves all by themselves too, the vet is only coming when there are some complications. Every morning when we went to feed the cattle we would have a look if there was maybe a new calve. All nature, hum?! And yes, the meat was DELICIOUS!!

Both – Pete and Robyn – are organic farmers with all their heart. Check out their 10 reasons for organic farming. They really stand behind their believe that this way of farming, letting the nature do it’s job by itself and not use herbicides, pesticides or GMs, is the right way, best way and more sustainable way of farming. I really loved Peter’s attitude towards his land and his farm. I talked a lot with him, was really interested in what he was doing and he was really willing to tell and to teach me a lot. So I ended up learning sooo much in just one week:

I drove their tractor distributing huge hay-balls for the cows, tried to drive their quad-bike backwards with a trailer (I wrote “tried” not “learned” because I didn’t manage…). I learned how to correctly prune an olive tree (Pete’s answer to how many branches should be taken out of the tree at the final pruning after the harvest is “Imagine that there is a naked girl staying on the other side of the tree – you should see her tits.”)

And I was explained how red-wine is made. I loved what Pete said: “Wine makers tend to behave as if they were one step below God. But making wine is really easy in fact.” 
So one day, when I have my own garden I will make my own wine too!

I learned that honey can only be called organic if within the bee’s flying distance around the hives are only organic farms or woods or any other kind of unused land. And they fly up to 8km if they need to!

The reason why I learned so much more than on the first farm, which was also an organic farm, is that not only was I doing much more work connected to farming but also that when doing this work Peter was always with us doing the same work. On the other farm I had been picking olives only with the other WWOOFers, who of course could not teach me anything about organic farming. Oh yes, on this farm as well, there were two other WWOOFers beside me: Tom from Wales and Aisha from Italy. Pete would always explain us why we are doing what we are doing, and how we should do it best, and so on.

He talked a lot about politics concerning farming as well. For example how the subsidies on farmers in Europe influence farmers in Australia. Well, surprise surprise: the subsidised olive growers in Italy swamp the Australian market with cheap olive oil and the Australian olive growers can’t compete with them. (The photo shows the neighbor farm: they have 84.000 olive trees!!!!)

What was really scary was what he told us about the international corporation Monsanto . I knew this company already through the film “Food Inc.” which I had seen a while ago. It is the worlds biggest producer of GM seeds. Even though there is still not enough knowledge about the effects of GM on our organism and on nature, Monsanto manages with various methods to force farmers  into using and whole countries into legalising their GM crops. The big problem with these crops is though that cross-contamination is not stoppable: as soon as one farmer uses these crops the neighbour farm is affected as well because the seeds fly with the wind… Or just imagine: a truck with the seeds loaded driving past fields – and all the fields will be affected because of the seeds flying around. And that’s how the company ends up suing all the farmers in the US whose fields are affected with this cross-contamination: they check the fruit on non-GM farms and if they find their GM crops among them, they sue these farmers for violation of intellectual property. But many other methods of Monsanto are listed in this really interesting executive summary.

Many of the negative effects of globalisation I had already heard about I now saw on the farm and learned about it from somebody who is really affected by it. Scary...

One can see here in Australia, like it is the case in Europe as well (Bio), that more and more people are willing to pay more for locally grown fresh organic food. There are more and more farmers markets in each town. So Pete and Robyn are really busy during the weekends, as they are selling their products on three different markets each week: Peter is on the Manning market (where me and Trish visited him) and Robyn on the Subiaco market on Saturdays. And on Sundays Robyn is on the Growers Green market in South Fremantle too. And as if they didn’t have enough to do, they are delivering food-orders for free to the doorstep on Fridays. So the last day - Friday -I went back to Perth and spent hours with them at the butcher where they were preparing everything for the deliveries and for the three different markets of the weekend.

Yes, a farmer never rests. There is always something to do! Whereas I had written recently that it was nice to work on a farm for two weeks but I couldn’t imagine working like this for a living, I now – after this experience – really want to have not a farm, but my own little garden with various veggies, maybe vines and a few chicken. Thank you for this great experience!