Tag Archives: farming

WWOOF Italy: Will Work For Food

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Barbialla Nuova farm

Have you ever been curious about what it’d be like to live on a farm? Want to travel to new places? Learn about healthy, sustainable agriculture? Interested in communing with nature and taking a break from the hectic pace of urban life? Does the idea of manual labor in exchange for food and shelter sound appealing? Then you might want to check out the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF).

I first discovered WWOOF a few years ago when a friend was exploring it, and at the time, I brushed it off as the most SWPL thing I’d ever seen. (Hypothetical parental reaction, “Uh, you’re doing what? How many of your ancestors have worked in the fields so you don’t have to?”) I am still well-aware that the phenomenon of well-educated people going back to the farm is quite hipster, but I’ve come to think that this is exactly what we need. There are so many problems with our food system that begin at the farm level; shouldn’t we be encouraging bright graduates to become environmental stewards at the ground level?

Starting next week, we have about six weeks of summer break. I am traveling for some of this but can’t afford to travel for all of it, so I revisited the WWOOF site and decided to register. WWOOF registration for a year costs about 30 euros, and gets you health insurance coverage and access to the official WWOOF farm list for your country of registration, along with access to the WWOOF Independents list. I signed up for WWOOF Italia to minimize travel costs, and also because I hope to improve my Italian by immersing myself with an Italian family.
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Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute

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Note: This post is mostly geared towards UNISG students, so it will be fairly useless to you unless you need to get from Bra to Pollenzo.

Living in Italy, you start to realize that there are always two ways of doing everything, the official system and the back door in-the-know route. Take the process of acquiring a permesso di soggiorno residency permit, required for all non-EU citizens staying in Italy for over 90 days. In Bra, you can either go to the Post Office, pick up an application kit and struggle to figure out what to put down so as to not have your application rejected, or you can go to the Al Elka-L’incontro center for foreign citizens, which provides consulting services and staff who fill out the application for you. Granted, the center is only open for 7 hours a week, on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, but that is different gripe. Ah, Europe.

Similarly, there are many ways to get from my apartment in Bra to UNISG campus in Pollenzo. There is a bus available and one of my flatmates has a car, but I have opted to make use of my bicycle and bike to class daily. This has led to some scary, ahem, entertaining rides to class, since intercity Italian roads strongly favor wide trucks and no shoulders. And so, I set out to find an alternate route to school besides the one suggested by Google Maps, and began exploring the back roads between Bra and Pollenzo. After a week of exploration, I had discovered a number of small dirt-lined roads, some of which were unpaved and lined with gravel (e.g. a bike flat waiting to happen), others which were just as crowded with traffic as my original route. Then Laura, one of my classmates, told me that she had learned the perfect route to get to campus from an undergrad student. Free of traffic and thoroughly paved? I jumped to follow her.
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