Life on the Farm

So I guess I'm a farmhand now.

I know I've got a track record for being a bit of a smartass at times, and you're probably wondering what kind of stupid joke this is leading into. It's not, I assure you – I'm pretty much a farmhand now.

My new WWOOFing locale is on a petting farm/cottage accommodations/llama tracking business on the Kaikoura Flats: the Kaikoura Farm Park. It's been owned by an English couple for the last 5 years – a struggling business, but for the traveller whose aim is to poke his nose into as many unique nooks of New Zealand as he can, it has the exact romanticized, magnetic pull I've been seeking. It would need to though, given what happens here in the course of a day.

At any given time, there are six people working on the farm: Kevin and Lynn, the husband and wife owners, and four WWOOFers. Right now, that's me, an English guy and gal, and a girl from Germany. 

We've got a little living building away from the main house: a common lounge with some books and a TV, and two bedrooms on either end. Welcome to life in rural New Zealand – the wardrobes are stocked with ragged shorts, shirts, and socks for mucking around in the fields, the showers are short to save hot water, anything that can get recycled does (Kaikoura is actually pretty well-known for its zero waste initiatives), and the kitchen and bathroom are in the house, so if you have to get up in the middle of the night, it's the outhouse for you.

The day starts at 7:30 – breakfast time for the WWOOFers, some tea, toast, and cereal. We're cleared out of the house by 8:00, and ready to go by 8:15 to feed the animals. Picture this: half a dozen main fields, and within those a bunch of clusters of smaller pens, essentially enveloping the living area. Spread out across those fields are the animals, some 160 of them: birds of every kind, rabbits, guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, pigs (I'm not sure about one of them though – it might be an Orc from Mordor), a tame deer named Bambi, donkeys, ponies, and some goats. 

The animal park isn't a zoo: people come in to look at the animals and feed them (although I said this is a struggling business, so there aren't quite as many crowds as Disneyland), but it's not through a glass or even a cage. Instead, there's an open, traditional concept to the farm, so that all the critters have free range for the most part. When we go out in the morning, it's feeding time.

And the animals sure know it. They're waiting by the gate, and flock to you like dudes playing "Wagon Wheel" to Open Mic Night. Meanwhile, they make an awful, cacophonous din, just like . . . well, dudes playing "Wagon Wheel" at Open Mic Night. 

First off is the pigs because, by virtue of being pigs, they'll eat the other animals' feed if they're not looked after right away. You wouldn't be able to do this job with much of a hangover, and not only because of the early mornings – the pigs' food needs to be scooped from garbage containers full of leftover everything, collected from town: a smorgasbord of rotting vegetables, fish heads, and any other scraps that happen to get tossed in there. We've got a few saucepans to put a pile into a feeding pail and chuck it amongst the squealing pigs – the morning is just getting started, and you already need to shrug your shoulders, dig your hands in, and accept that you're going to get a bit dirty on a farm.

From there, the other animals need to be fed – a lot of crumbled bread and greens, and then water buckets all across the farm need to be topped up. The morning routine takes about an hour, which brings you to the main part of the morning.

So, there are 160 animals. And each of those 160 animals needs to poop. That's the only way to put it, no prettying up that I can do. We've got some scrapers and bags, and you take a field like you would if you were mowing the lawn: you walk up and down in strips, bending everywhere you see a pile and flicking some turds in your bag. And it's not like there are 160 neat little piles – animals aren't exactly particular, and won't even stop their wandering to lighten their load a bit. So, it's everywhere.

I can't say it's the most unglamourous job in the world – that's hyperbole, and I've got no time for doing that on this blog.

"Uh?"

But the most unglamourous job I've ever had? Ok, that comes closer to hitting the mark. And you know what? I love it – I'm not going to drop everything and be a farmer, so this two week stint is the closest I will ever get to gaining that perspective, to seeing what self-sufficiency is and how getting the bacon and chicken to your plate requires immersing yourself in a complete lifestyle, not just working 9-5 and forgetting about it. It takes two hours, sometimes more, to clear the poop, and I like that I get the chance to spend my mornings that way. That was part of the reason for running away in the first place, to do something that I would never have another opportunity to do and to soak it all in like a sponge. So far so good, even if that soaking can be a bit messy at times.

After the fields are relatively clean (you're not going to get it all, and even if you could, the animals don't waste much time filling in the gaps you nearly broke your back to create), it's back to the feeding room, to crumble bread, chop fruit, and generally sort out the feed for that afternoon and tomorrow morning. Only after the animals are taken care of is it lunchtime for people, and the end of the day for half of us. The two that are left stay in their farm clothes for project time – digging holes, painting, just anything that happens to need doing. This afternoon, it was slaughtering two chickens.

Wait, what?

So, you tie a string around the unfortunate sucker's head, so that his last moments are at least kind of comfortable. The other chicken is taken to another part of the field – the last thing I'd want to do before getting my head lopped off is to watch the same thing happen to my buddy. Even for chickens, ignorance is bliss. You pull that string taut with your foot, lay him down on the chopping block, have one person hold the body, and with one swoop of the ax . . .

That's when thing get real. You've heard of a chicken with his head cut off? It's a real thing – all the nerves in the body shoot to life when you make that severing blow, the wings fluttering and quivering with feathers flying everywhere. You need a tight grip, just to keep it in one place. After both chicken have paid a visit to the guillotine (their feet need to get hacked as well), the bodies are soaked in boiling water, so that the pores on the skin open up and the feathers are easier to pluck. After the skinning, it's the gutting, and then we're at the same place as when you go to Sobeys. Except, funnily enough, Kevin says the chicken in the supermarkets are generally better than this – the birds you buy have been born (and killed) to end up on your plate, and don't end up developing all the tough muscles that the birds on the farm do. Still, it's supper tonight, so I'll be the judge of that a little later on.

Things finish up around 4:00, after the afternoon feeding. We take our showers before the evening meal, to get as much of the farm gunk off as possible. I haven't felt fully clean in a few days, but I haven't felt uncomfortable in this setting, either. After supper, the evenings are ours, usually back to the WWOOFer cabin to play ukuleles and watch movies.

For two weeks of my life, I'm more than ok, getting this glimpse into down and dirty rural living. The company is good, the food from the fields is tasty, and after a hard day of honest work, you sleep well.

Saturday fell a bit out of routine, because it was the annual Kaikoura A&P Community Show (that's Agricultural and Pastoral, and it's essentially a big country fair), and the Farm Park had a tent along the race track outside of town. So, it was an early, 6:00 morning – after the feeding, it was time to herd some llamas, an alpaca, sheep, ponies, and go chasing after a pig that sounded like it was being slaughtered. Once they were on leads or in crates, they were lugged to a horse trailer, and taken down to the grounds. Over the next few hours, I watched a Grand Parade featuring tractors, saw a wood-chopping contest where a guy cut pieces into an upright log and used the cuts to wedge a board that he then used as a standing platform to cut another piece in the log, sold animal feed to children, and judged a kids' sheep contest. If I'd ended up having a square dance with a country belle, it wouldn't have surprised me that much.

After we'd unpacked the animals from the show, Kevin and Lynn took us to the Adelphi in Kaikoura, for some pizza (chicken with drizzles of aioli – mmmm) and pints as a thank-you. Seems a bit unnecessary – I'm pretty thankful for getting to spend my days in this little microcosm, not only physically separated from the rest of the world but also seeming to belong to its own little time, years behind the rushing pace of 2013 society.

But that's how it goes – we farmhands just take it as it comes.

Cheers,

rb