Winter is coming

At first, it was dramatic to change seasons so suddenly but I’ve started to get used to it. Other times in my life when I’ve done this it’s been to somewhere like Africa where it’s not so much of a change of season but more just temperature and quantities of rain changes. Here it’s really like I woke up in December when yesterday was July. The skies are gray, the grass is brown and faded, and a lot of color seems faded. The sun goes down before 5:30 and isn’t up until 9. The cold night reveals an impressively clear starlit sky and dramatic moons.

In total, I spent a week at the Chapman’s farm on the Otego peninsula. It was an isolated, beautiful, and different type of experience from any other travel experience before. Since my last entry, as far as work goes, I helped with pregnancy scanning of the sheep. As with shearing, I didn’t actually do the thing itself and I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising. What do I know about sheep? It doesn’t really make sense for a farmer to train a volunteer on such a short-term basis on something more technical or in the case of scanning I can’t run machinery which I don’t own. The actual process was surprisingly similar to an ultrasound so the trick is really just isolating one sheep to go through the machine and that’s where I came in, helping control the flow of the 2000 sheep through this machine. I think this is a true WWOOFer job. Most of us don’t really have much experience and really offer very little in the way of actual skills for what people here need. I think a lot of people end up in peoples’ gardens weeding for a week but some WWOOF hosts do seem to be truly interested in teaching WWOOFers something new and it can be a mix of interesting work too. Or at other times it can just be interesting to experience something different, like when I chased horses away from some cattle we were trying to separate because an adjoining neighbor’s cattle had accidentally joined the Chapman’s.

Working on the farm gave me a lot of opportunity to also ask questions and understand the business side of it better which I really enjoyed. I didn’t even know for instance that dairy sheep were different than others and it wasn’t so simple as to just milking the sheep if John wanted to start a new revenue channel like this. Similarly, his cows were not dairy cows and even the behavior of the cows was different than what I remembered from farm field trips growing up in Vermont. These cows ran away from you when you got near and were not very cooperative. These are just a few examples of my observations but overall this experience really made me think differently about Vermont and the lives of serious farmers there (as opposed to “life style farmers” who have another more-or-less full time job and dream about being farmers).

The cool thing about WWOOFing is living in someone else’s house and understanding their world in a much deeper way than you would ever get from something like Air BnB. We are all creatures of habit and especially when you visit another country and observe someone in such a different job function than what peoples’ daily routines are can be insightful. John does not get up at 6 AM like you would think farmers do although it is winter here. Unless there’s a specific reason, most mornings John gets up around 8 and lets three of his four sheep dog out; these are distinct from the pet house dog Wally as they sleep outside in cage houses. Those dogs were still super sweet and great at chasing sheep. He doesn’t let a rotating fourth one out because he feels like it’s more than he needs and it’s easier to control the dogs this way. He feeds the chickens and grabs their eggs, throws out the compost, and goes off to do some work. He returns at around 10-11 for a mid-morning coffee break (always start the early morning with tea not coffee) with his wife, and then goes back to work until lunch. They often eat their eggs but save the surplus for sale locally. Every day they record the 6PM news and watch it over dinner whenever it’s served. Zooming out further they have their weekly routines as well. For instance, Saturday is the day they walk to get the paper and let old Wally out for a longer walk to the end of the driveway and Wednesday is Shona’s yoga day in town.  

Lastly, I was impressed with John’s patience and it was very interesting to see the relationship with his son Robert. Robert dropped a bale of hay off the back of his truck at one point and John wasn’t upset. I broke the wool presser at one point when I didn’t remember the order of operations correctly for forming the bale. Robert was patient with me. John (may have) forgotten to turn on the electric fence before running off on a vacation and Robert wasn’t too upset. I guess you have to not get too mad at each other for mistakes as a certain amount of time is probably calculated in the back of a farmers’ head for dealing with this. Right as I was leaving we found a new type of invasive weed on the land. Always something more to deal with on the farm.

Dunedin Train Station, an impressive local piece of architecture

Wondering around Dunedin in my free time, growing a beard. Dunedin was originally a Scottish town and the first city of New Zealand after the 1860's gold rush.

The view from the dining room of the house. Very impressive gardens and landscaping there

The Land and Sheep

Long Beach nearby has amazing rock climbing. Damn it, need to prepare for this next time 

Hippie crowd from Wanaka visits our nearby beach

The caves at Long Beach are pretty sweet for exploring

Early morning rise for pregnancy testing (see box at the end)

One of the sheep dogs hard at work sniffing butts

"No U.S. Customs Agent sir, no. I have not been in contact with any livestock during my trip to New Zealand"

Dinner time and the evening news with old Wally struggling to sit normally. 

"Wally, get off the garden. We're planting." - He's estimated to be 20! 

Landscaping in the back yard, working to level it out. I need to be doing this in my home.

Helping the neighbor get their cattle back from the group after they jumped a fence and joined ours. Quite an experience and fun to ride the "bike" (4 trek)! Goodbye Dunedin!