Organic farming is going about its business with a will and a WWOOF

Press, 24 September 1983, Page 17

Organic farming is going about its business with a will and a WWOOF

By

KEN COATES

More WWOOFERS, a new species of international traveller, are turning up in New Zealand.

They are probably young and thoughtful, and the reason they come to this country lies in the soil, for WWOOF stands for “Working Week-ends on Organic Farms.”

Alongside the growth of worldwide concern about pollution has come growing interest in organic farming, which does not rely on artificial fertilisers or poisonous insecticides.

WWOOF has grown from working week-ends to an international movement of people gaining experience and exchanging ideas.

A member of WWOOF in Canterbury is Bob Crowder, originally from Devizes in Wiltshire, who has been for 16 years a lecuturer in horticulture at Lincoln College. Although surrounded by institutional orthodoxy, he founded a course in biological husbandry at the college in response to intense interest by students in organic farming and its claims. “There has been a rising tide of awareness among young people in the environment and exploitation of natural resources,” he says.

This includes a demand for information about organic methods and how they compare with a conventional horticulture heavy on the use of chemical fertilisers and sprays.

Bob Crowder has been granted a small area of five hectares at Lincoln which he uses for research and experimental work, “with very little support from the college which has contributed only $l3OO over seven years.”

Technicians have come in the form of young people temporarily sent to the project under Labour Department schemes for the jobless. This has had obvious drawbacks in maintaining continuity of trained staff.

Bob’s career has hardly been advanced by the way in which he

expounds the organic philosophy, but he says there is no alternative. He believes firmly in the need to study alternative methods of using the soil without upsetting ecological balance. As one of 53 property owners, from Keri Keri to Dunedin, who have agreed to take part in the WWOOF scheme, Bob Crowder himself uses organic methods and is willing to host a visitor who is prepared to work on his half-acre property at Ashgrove Terrace. He is selective when it comes to accepting a visitor. “The scheme is not an opportunity for a cheap holiday. The people who apply must have a good idea of what organic farming is all about—and be prepared to make a worthwhile contribution.” Co-ordinator of WWOOF nationally is Tony West, formerly in the Air Force at Wigram and in England, and now owner of a 105-year-old herb garden »n Collingwood Street, Nelson. He says that WWOOF grew out of the back-to-the-land movement in England. Many people scraped and saved for the money to achieve their dream of a small piece of land in the country. Then they often found it was unsuitable, or they lacked the necessary knowledge to use it. These sold up, disappointed and critical of organic farming. Farmers and growers experienced in the organic methods resolved to offer opportunities to newcomers to gain first-hand experience by living on farms for periods and working. In this way, people from cities setting out on their own at least gained some prior experience. In the early 19705, three leading British WWOOFERS visited New Zealand and the idea was introduced to university students in Canterbury and Wellington. They

ran the organisation but with indifferent success.

Eventually, Tony West took over as co-ordinator. He says that most WWOOFERS are now overseas visitors. In the last two years, they have come from North America, Australia, Britian, West Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and France, with the odd traveller from Spain, the Netherlands, Iceland, Japan, and Korea.

WWOOF is seen as an exchange scheme—in return for work on organic farms, gardens, and smallholdings. Work is full-time and quite hard as it is labour intensive. In return, WWOOFERS receive meals, a place to sleep and, if necessary, transport to and from airport or station. The WWOOF network includes the United States where there are variations on the name. In California is MIAOW (Make It An Organic Week-end). The organisation is well established in Australia, France, and Spain, and is soon to be set up in West Germany.

Tony West says that most of the 250 WWOOFers who visited New Zealand last year, heard about the scheme through leaflets he sends youth hostel groups, and from talking to people who have been to New Zealand.

As costs of sprays and fertilisers rise, more and more people are becoming interested in organic farming, he says. Properties in New Zealand offering places to visitors range in size from a quarter-acre to 1200 acres. He estimates there are more than 100 organic farms and gardens throughout the country. Bob Crowder is also widely known in Canterbury as the man who introduced morris dancing to a city describing itself as the most English in New Zealand, yet which previously boasted only Irish and Highland dancing until a few years ago.

He spreads the gospel of the benefits of organics with the same determination with which he learned morris dancing while in England on sabbatical leave at Bath.

(For the record, he now leads a group at Lincoln called The Tussock Jumpers; morris dancers, that is. Soon they will be exhibiting in Cathedral Square a series of fertility dances for spring. “My research is in biological husbandry, which is rather more than organic farming in that it explores an alternative system of living,” he says. Bob Crowder talks of allelopathy, the scientific definition of companion planting, and says it is well established scientifically that plants have chemical messages for other plants. He is in a measure scientifically examining ancient practices and methods handed down through centuries of folklore. Much of the folklore of gardening, previously dismissed as old men’s tales akin to superstition, was based on keen observation. For example, garlic was planted next to roses simply to repel aphids. In the rush to replace folklore, technology is being constantly introduced, often without sufficient regard for its widespread effects.

Chemicals are found to be insidious in their effects. Even minute quantities of dioxin, for example, are now being found seriously to affect the environment.

More people around the world realise that use of chemical fertilisers, poisonous weed killers, and insecticides can pollute water supplies and the soil, and sometimes

tragically harm humans and animals.

Even so, in this country, which relies heavily on exports from the land, there are still few centres for study and research into alternative systems of crop-raising. Although biological husbandry is offered at Lincoln College, and Bob Crowder says he brings into the course as much of his philosophy on alternative horticulture systems as possible, it is very much an adjunct to mainstream orthodoxy. He says there is destructive criticism of any approach implying an alternative system to that being used in horticulture. Not all students are allowed to take his final paper, and those who wish to study the topic are required to show good cause to the college authorities. Bob Crowder makes it clear he is far from condemning all New Zealand farm practices. Many Canterbury farms are managed well, with good rotation and superb fertility. Clovers play an important part in a balanced pastoral economy.

One reason why he finds himself out on a limb at Lincoln is that his speciality, horticulture, is much more reliant on the use of chemical fertilisers and sprays than pastoral farming. Overseas, there is a keen awareness of the need to investigate different systems, he explains. At his own expense he visited Kasse University in West Germany in 1981 where he met a professor of alternative agriculture, Hardy Vogtmann. At Rodale, Pennsylvannia, where there is a centre for organic farming studies, he visited a research station headed by Dr Richard Harwood, a reputable scientist with an internalional reputation. Organic farming has been practised for many years in England, and Bob Crowder visited the old Haughley experimental farm in Suffolk, set up in the 19305, and Elm Farm, in Berkshire. He also visited another centre at Oberwil, near Basle, in Switzerland. He says that in centres abroad, the emphasis is on examining advanced methods of farming and trying to find out what might happen throughout the eco-sys-tem—the total chain of events.

“We are not against technical advances, but let us first determine where they will lead in the long term,” he warns.

WWOOFING is very much a way of spreading the gospel for Bob Crowder, but before hosting a WWOOFER he makes sure the visitor is genuinely knowledgeable about organic farming and is prepared to work and exchange knowlege. In the past year he hosted two visitors, one from the United States and the other from England. As he says, it is a useful way of getting to know people, of visiting other countries, and gaining new knowledge if those in the scheme have something to contribute. These days, they usually have.