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Allison Weston

Academic Year: 2010-2011

It’s More Than Just Planting Seeds, Picking Beans, and Pulling Weeds

Area of Concentration

  • Environment

Key Terms:

World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms(WWOOF), Small-Scale Organic Farms, Sustainable Agriculture, Food Systems, Food Justice

Significance/Broader Impact:

Since returning to San Diego after spending the summer WWOOFing on the Devoy’s Organic Farm in Rosscarbery, Ireland, I have become increasingly aware how disconnected our agricultural practices are from the land.  Although this experience was separate from my educational experience at UCSD, I still learned an incredible amount from working on an organic farm and living so close to the earth.  If my personal perspective on food systems can be changed through WWOOFing, WWOOF can also work to change our national food system if the host farms were better understood. 

In order to begin to understand WWOOF’s effort to cultivate holistic agricultural change and its potential to guide national progress towards a more sustainable food system, it is necessary to start by examining a part of the whole WWOOF network.  Using semi-structured ethnographic interviews with farmers and participant observation working on farms, this study creates a descriptive case study exploring the motivating forces behind participation in WWOOF for five different farmers in San Diego County.  Using the component parts of holistic agricultural change as an a priori guide, interview responses were coded inductively according to a desire harness the environmental, economic, and community power of WWOOF.  This results of this coding process revealed that the most significant motivating force for farmers’ participation in WWOOF is the desire to harness the sense of community that WWOOF provides.  Using a food justice framework, this small-scale finding is able to guide the national journey towards a more sustainable food system.

References

Berry, Wendell. “People, Land, and Community.” 1983. In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, by Wendell Berry, 2002. 182-194. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

Berry, Wendell. “The Whole Horse.” 2002. In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, by Wendell Berry, 2002. 236-248. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

Gottlieb, Robert., and Anupama Joshi. 2010. Food Justice. Cambridge, Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press. 

Jarosz, Lucy. 2000. “Understanding Agri-Food Networks as Social Relations.” Agriculture and Human Values 17: 279-283.

Kimbrell, Andrew. “Corporate Lies: Busting the Myths of Industrial Agriculture.” 2002. In The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, by Andrew Kimbrell, 2002. 3-36.  Sausalito, C.A.: Foundation for Deep Ecology and Island Press. 

Links:

WWOOF USA: http://www.wwoofusa.org/

Fall SRP Proposal Abstract

While there is an abundance of research detailing innovative cases of sustainable agriculture, research often presents economic, technical, and ethical innovations as separate processes.  This study will examine four World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) host farms in San Diego County as case studies of holistic sustainable agriculture. WWOOF is an organization that connects organic farms and volunteers.  In exchange for farm work, WWOOF host farms provide volunteers with food, housing, and the chance to learn about organic farming.  Using ethnographic interviews and participant observation, this study will create an exploratory case study revealing why WWOOF host farms in San Diego County choose to participate in WWOOF, with a particular emphasis on their motivations and lessons learned.  This study will contribute to the literature on sustainable agriculture, food systems, and rural and hinterland development.  The results will be shared with the WWOOF community and universities in hopes that findings will facilitate a connection between WWOOF and higher education that will help to foster national holistic sustainable agriculture.

Winter Senior Research Project (SRP) Abstract

Unless radical changes are made to the way the national food system interacts with the land, American agriculture will soon face a serious prospect of decline.  While there is an abundance of research detailing innovative strategies working to make the national food system more sustainable, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) is notably absent from this discourse.  WWOOF is an organization that connects organic farms and volunteers.  In exchange for farm work, WWOOF host farms provide volunteers with food, housing, and the chance to learn about organic farming.  In order to fully understand WWOOF’s transformative power, this study explores why host farmers are motivated to participate in WWOOF using semi-structured ethnographic interviews with farmers and participant observation working on farms.  This study found that the most significant motivating force for all five WWOOF host farmers is the desire to harness the sense of community that WWOOF provides.  This suggests that Americans not only need to change the way their national food system interacts with the land, but Americans also need to change the way that they relate to each other within the national food system.

Study's Major Findings and Contributions

While all San Diego County WWOOF host farmers are creating holistic sustainable agricultural change, applying small-scale lessons learned on WWOOF host farms to the national food system cannot happen all at once.  Because the American food system has become so completely dependent on unsustainable practices, lessons learned from local sustainable holistic agricultural change must be applied gradually.  Because the desire to harness the community power of WWOOF was the most significant motivating force for all WWOOF host farmers, this desire to cultivate community holds the most potential to guide national progress towards a more sustainable food system because of its status as the most significant motivating force for all WWOOF host farmers.  Thus, the agrarian community values that are represented in WWOOF host farmers’ desire to harness the community power of WWOOF hold the most immediate transformative power for the national food system.  On WWOOF host farms, this growing sense of agrarianism transforms the way that humans relate to the land and the way humans relate to each other.  By decreasing the distance between the land and humans, the environmental problems of extractive and exploitative agricultural practices, the capitalist logic of productivism, and the loss of social embeddedness of food production are eradicated on WWOOF host farms.  Further, by increasing the strength of bond between humans, individuals are more likely to sustain the effort to eradicate the problems of agriculture because of a feeling of solidarity and connection with others working towards the same agricultural goals on WWOOF host farms. 

Evidence

The qualitative cultural data presented in this descriptive case study was collected through semi-structured ethnographic interviews with WWOOF host farmers in San Diego County and validated through participant observation working on one WWOOF host farm.  For the purpose of this study, individual host farmers rather than host farms were selected as the unit of analysis.  This study includes interview data from five different host farmers from four host farms because one interview was conducted with two host farmers that ran one host farm.  With the exception of one WWOOF host farm in San Diego County, this study includes interview data from at least one host farmer from each San Diego County host farm listed in the WWOOF USA Farm Directory.  Because the central focus of this study is locally exploring motivating forces of San Diego County WWOOF host farmers, semi-structured ethnographic interviews is the best research method because it provides a way to access the internal cultural phenomenon of motivating forces of WWOOF host farmers that is currently absent from existing scholarly literature.  Because this a study of why WWOOF host farmers are motivated to create holistic agricultural change through participation in WWOOF, it was necessary to spend significant time conversing with each farmer.  The interviews were intentionally kept conversational to allow each farmer to explain their own unique motivations without leading their thought-process in any one direction.  Because this research method was designed to provide access into internal and amorphous motivating forces, it was also necessary to validate this information using participant observation working on a WWOOF host farm.  Working on the farm provided a first-hand view of motivations in action.  By working as a part-time WWOOFer to gain participant observation data, it was confirmed that host farmers’ motivations are in fact motivating action on their farms. 

Spatial Dimension

The semi-structured ethnographic interviews were conducted on site at the WWOOF host farms.  The five San Diego County host farmers featured in this case study are: Peter Stone and Lily Schwartz from Farm One, Helen Carter from Farm Two, Mandy Johnson from Farm Three, and Judith Allen from Farm Four.  In light of the recent legal issues with farm apprenticeships and the Fair Labor Standards Act, the names of the farmers and the farms involved in this study have been changed and exact locations omitted to protect the identity of the farmers.

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