Ohana of ‘woofers’ finds cheap way to travel

At Honest Greens Farm in the hills of Waimanalo, a sunny concrete lanai held tanks of young tilapia, pots with herbs and tomatoes, and a table with flats of seedlings. “That’s where we start our baby plants,” said Ian Alexander, 24, the farm manager. Alexander is a tall, pale, green-haired California transplant with leg tattoos of butterflies and a beetle. He had farmed on Maui before moving to Oahu three months earlier.

It was 11 a.m. on a muggy Tuesday, and Alexander and three other farmworkers had just finished their morning shifts. In shorts and clean shirts, they gathered on sky-blue benches around a long wooden table in a shady kitchen opening onto the lanai.

Joe Benjamin, 25, walked past with a tray of seeds; a long-sleeve hoodie covered his face to his nose. “Mosquitoes,” the Florida native said, unzipping the hood with a friendly smile.

Alexander, Benjamin and their colleagues are “woofers,” which is the nickname for the 80,000 volunteer farm laborers who have participated in World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an international nonprofit group operating in 60 countries. They pay $30 a year for the opportunity to work without pay in exchange for a hands-on education in organic farming as well as room and board. The organization’s website says the individuals are responsible for their own health insurance.

For many, “woofing” offers a cheap way to experience different places and cultures. Hawaii ranks as one of the top 25 destinations for woofers, but outside organic farming circles, the practice doesn’t enjoy much name recognition, not even among folks who shop at farmers markets.

“It’s a great way to travel because you can live for months in a place like Hawaii, which wouldn’t otherwise be affordable unless you’re wealthy,” said Patrick Rowland, 31, who hails from Arizona. Well-tanned, he had been at Honest Green Farms, his first woofing experience, for four and a half months and wants to try Europe next.

“Being part of food production is something I want to do,” Rowland added.

WWOOF Hawaii, founded in 1995, maintains a state directory of more than 200 participating farms that range in size from backyard gardens to 20-acre operations, said administrator Jonathan Ziegler, 36, who lives on Kauai. Noting that “some farms haven’t updated their profile in a few years,” he estimated that about 20 to 26 farms may be currently using woofers on Oahu, 23 on Kauai, “a little more than 50” on Maui and between 160 and 170 on the Big Island.

In the last five years, Ziegler said, the number of woofers registered in Hawaii has grown from 1,800 to nearly 2,500. They typically work 10 to 35 hours a week and live in tents, cabins or in a room in a house, he said.

Woofers tend to be footloose: He hadn’t heard of many who’d stayed here longer than a year.

Volunteers with a commitment to learning and farms with a commitment to teaching make for a win-win situation, said Elko Evans, owner of Honest Greens Farm, which has hosted more than 300 woofers in four years. They usually stay for a few months and then go back to school, find a permanent job or travel on, he said.

Asked whether they’d met many local people, the longer-tenured woofers of Honest Greens looked a touch wistful as they replied that their social interactions were mostly with their neighbors, Green Rose Farm, Waimanalo Health Center and Waimanalo Feed &Seed.

“Every year Elko (the owner) has a fish fry and invites the whole community,” Alexander said, adding that he was looking forward to participating for the first time.

IN LATE summer, several Oahu farms on the WWOOF Hawaii website posted openings for work and living accommodations, but when the Star-Advertiser called some of them, six out of nine declined to talk, canceled a visit or said no woofers were being used. Most seemed publicity-shy.

Hawaii Kai farmer Edwin Otsuji said woofers had not proved to be a good fit. “Our pace is faster and my workers have regular hours,” he said. Another host said she grew butterflies, not food; one farmer had gone out of business and left the state.

Bill Kunstman, a spokesperson at the Hawaii Department of Labor &Industrial Relations, said he was aware of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms and similar organizations. Woofers are not subject to minimum wage and overtime provisions in state labor laws if the farms they work on have 20 or fewer employees, he explained.

Most participating Hawaii farms have 10 or fewer woofers at any given time, Ziegler said, although he doesn’t follow up to learn which members ever work at a farm. Individuals and farmers get in touch directly at wwoofhawaii.org and “pretty much do all the arrangements together,” he said.

However, he is there to help if woofers contact him, Ziegler said.

There is also an infrequently used forum on the website, wwoofhawaii.org, in which farm hosts and woofers can rate one another. “Not a vacation,” one woofer commented about a farm.

Some do expect a more laid-back atmosphere, envisioning a bed-and-breakfast scenario with light chores arranged around their surf- and-sightseeing priorities, Ziegler said.

“We call them the ‘vacation woofer,’” quipped Christian Zuckerman, co-manager at Kahumana Organic Farm and Cafe in Waianae, which requires a two-month minimum stay and a 35-hour work week in exchange for room, training and board. “We’ve also had lifetime woofers who are amazing, who have woofed around the world for seven years,” he said.

On the other hand, some woofers have expressed frustration that farmers weren’t teaching them anything, just running a bed-and- breakfast, while others have complained they weren’t being fed, Ziegler said.

That wouldn’t include Kahumana’s woofers, who eat all their meals at the farm’s cafe, which gets glowing reviews from food critics. “We’ve been called the Ritz-Carlton of woofing,” Zuckerman said.

The farmers say they’re giving more than they’re getting back, but it’s very fulfilling, said Ziegler, who added: “They know the program is about educating, not just getting free labor.”

To judge from the clean, productive condition of Kahumana and Honest Greens farms, their woofers and staff are committed to the organization’s mission of propagating sustainable farming and living as well as crops.

At Honest Greens, watered by drip irrigation, lettuce and other greens, along with beets, radishes, eggplant and okra, grow in impressively neat rows in the ground on the hilly 5-acre farm. “We do a lot of weeding,” Alexander said.

A panicked bleating coming from a jungle of tall cane grass made him smile. “That’s Martha the goat, tangled up as usual,” he said, going over to rescue the demure white-and-black ungulate. “She and Gilbert are our lawnmowers. They eat weeds — haole koa is their favorite, and they’ll take down all this cane grass.”

On a nearby slope, lush kalo loi are flooded weekly from a rainwater catchment tank. Watercress, ong choy and more lettuce thrive in raised metal beds, irrigated by nutrient-rich water from tilapia and catfish tanks in aquaponics systems. Netting covered recently planted lettuce seedlings to protect them from rapacious birds.

The chicken coops and rabbit pens were also clean. One hundred chickens lay 60 eggs a day, some consumed by the farmers but most are sold, along with vegetables, at the Ward Warehouse farmers market on Saturdays. The rabbits are eaten on the farm.

The Honest Greens woofers work from 7 to 11 a.m., five days a week, then are free until evening, when they return to do one more hour of chores and dine together at the kitchen table.

“Every night we come here to this table. This is what makes us a farmily,” said Robert Burns, 58, a Hawaii resident who said he is legally blind and disabled, but teaches aquaponics around the world when he is not woofing at Honest Greens.

One person makes dinner for the group every night. “I love it,” said Arianna Smith, 18, who was taking a gap year before college after graduating from high school in Pennsylvania. She had just made her first salad dressing, with mangoes from the farm’s tree. “I’m becoming my own person,” she said.

The woofers have Wi-Fi in their hangout space, a loft above the kitchen, and sleep in tents, with the exception of Alexander, who has a tiny house, “my hale,” he said with pride.

On weekends they enjoy exploring Oahu as a group. “Every full moon, we go to see the moonrise at Pele’s Chair or Alan Davis beach,” Alexander said. “We try to camp on the west side at least once a month.”

ON FARMS such as Honest Greens and Kahumana, woofing shows potential to open up more opportunities for learning on the job.

“When I started, four years ago, we had all woofers on the farm, but that’s really hard because of their transient nature,” said Zuckerman, 27, who grew up in Waianae and moved back after college at the University of Puget Sound to help his father, Robert Zuckerman, with the nonprofit farm.

“Right now, we’re transitioning to more long-term, paid apprenticeships lasting at least a year, and some of our woofers became our first apprentices,” he added, noting that the 14-acre farm, too, is growing, having just acquired 16 more acres.

After mastering such skills such as operating farm machinery, packaging and marketing, apprentices help train the woofers.

“I was looking for a place where I wouldn’t just be another labor hand and I would be valued,” said Kahumana apprentice Olivia Watkins, 22, a New York City native and Barnard College grad, breakfasting in the Kahumana cafe with coworkers after harvesting salad greens in the fields. She had found that place here, she said.

Echoing Watkins’ sentiment, Rustin Fuss, 34, a Colorado native on his sixth tour as a woofer, said of Kahumana, “As soon as I arrived, I felt it was special. I was instantly thinking, why did I not find this place before?”

After breakfast, volunteers and staff, some from Waianae and Ewa Beach and others from Michigan and Georgia, rinsed the morning’s harvest at sinks in a washing pavilion. “It’s a lifestyle we do,” said apprentice Chanel Kaleikini, 21, from Waianae. “It’s not a job.”

Woofing, Zuckerman and Evans said, is one tool that can help cash-poor small farmers survive while benefiting the local economy and food security in the islands, where every bit of an acre in production counts.