WOOFing in Nirvana farm

Nirvana Farm located at Te Pohue, New Zealand.
Photo credit to John Lau

What is WOOFing?

WOOFing. No. This isn't a typo. It's stand for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Fram. The concept of WOOFING is to work in exchange of food and accommodation. We tried our luck in applying WOOFing in Nirvana Farm. Once we got his approval, we drove to Te Pohue all the way from Te Puke to start our farm life.

What I do in the farm?

It's sound nice to own a farm. Nirvana farm is a 700 acres farm encompassing of mountains, rivers, streams and wild life. When talk about farm life, it conjures up those romantic moment of rolling hills and vast, open spaces, cute farm animals and an abundance of vegetables all glimmering in fairy dust and rainbows. I'm wrong. If it's one thing that I've learned in this WOOFing, it's this: Farming is a tough job. 

Feeding and shifting the cows.

Feeding dairy cows and cattle. 

The farm is divided into parts and it is still under construction. The 3 main parts are where cattle, dairy cows and bull were being keep. They live separately. Basically, me and my travel mates will feed the cattle by shifting them to the part of dairy cows(cattle and dairy cows live separately so dairy cows able to rest and reproduce milk for cattle)  were staying for milk feeding twice a day, 7am and 5pm. After cattle feeding, we will then separate them and move dairy cows to a new part of field for grass feeding. The process took around 2 hours because the farm is really big. I smell like a bull poop almost all day because of this routine. I can't really justify it's the smell of the cows or from my boots. Haha!

Collecting woods and Craig ( The owner of the farm) show us the way of building up fences from A to Z.

Building up fences.

I didn't expect this is part of farming. Not only are concerned on growing your crop and feeding your dairy cows, it's all about running a business. So there's accounting and expanding your farm in order to make more money to keep the farm business running. We will head to the top of the mountain right after our breakfast by Craig's telescopic wheel loader and ATV.

Try to zoom into the picture on the left, look at the pole on top of the hill. There was where we build the first pole. After that, each of us will be carrying a set of tools (hammer, wire cutter, shovel, tamping tool, etc) with a 2m long wood along with us  to the next check points. We were first marked 12 checkpoints where we are going to build up a pole before starting the job. Where I was standing to capture this picture is only about 1/3 of the way to our last checkpoints.

Not to mention about setting up the poles. Firstly, you need to dig a vertical and square hole as deep as my height blablabla...........(Dare not to write in detail, if not I might have to name this blog post to 'how to build fences')

My favorite activity of the day - Feeding the pig (-(o o)-)

Household Feeding
What I miss most about Nirvana Farm is the nine little piggies. Those piggies are always run freely around the farm. There is no specific cage or parts for them, they go wherever they want to. However, they will show up around chicken coop every evening right after I gathered some food scraps for them. Pig feeding was the peaceful moment while I was staying at the farm. I always stayed a little longer to play around with them. 

Life lesson I've learned from this WOOFing experience in a farm.
Don't be afraid to get dirty and great things take time. It teaches me to be patience. Patience to accept what was, what is and what will be. Even if I fail, I can start all over again.