Not quite organic

When Brian and Kristin and I told Fiona that we were interested in farming, she thought we meant cattle. (The correct term over here for what I am interested in is evidently “market gardening.”) So after I had called every wwoofing farm in the south island who could host three people and heard, “No, sorry, we don’t have any work now” or “It’s the school holidays - we’ll be gone” or “We already have two wwoofers here and I’m not sure when they will be leaving” or “Call back closer to the time and maybe you can come” one too many times, Fiona offered to ring her mum, Jenny, who had a lifestyle block with her husband, Alastair, with deer, cattle, sheep, and a small vegetable garden just outside Christchurch. It wasn’t exactly organic, but the folks at Wilderland (who pretty much invented organic farming in New Zealand) had used Round-Up on kaikuya weeds, so we decided “organic” is all relative. Jenny had never taken wwoofers before but had been considering it, so Fiona thought that the three of us would be the perfect trial run.

When I called Jenny to let her know what time we would be arriving, Alastair answered the phone. I told him we’d be getting in around 4:00, and he said, “Good - then I won’t be home.” I laughed and said, “Well we’re certainly looking forward to meeting you - we think Fiona is just great.” “Oh,” Alastair replied, “she’s not really like us.” What Alastair was referring to was his daughter’s recent wayward movement into making a living as an artist as opposed to remaining solidly within the realm of reason in her job as an environmental scientist; however, Fiona inherited all of her parents’ warmth, hospitality, and the twinkle in her father’s eye. Jenny (a bonafide Kiwi) used to be a nurse among other things, and now is the president of Riding for the Disabled (riding horses that is) in Christchurch. Alastair, born and raised in Scotland and now a professor of animal science at nearby Lincoln University, was actually glad to meet us as well. He is a true professor - from his white hair and glasses and button-down-under-polo-v-neck-sweater down to his brown loafers and knowledge of minerals in the soil, and we soon had him telling us a short history of nearly everything: Why do we feed cows grain? We Americans grew too much grain in the Midwest and didn’t know what to do with it, so why not feed it to the cows? Voila - immediate dependence of the grain industry on the beef industry and vice versa. This marriage has even convinced the Japanese that grain-fed beef is tastier and more natural than grass-fed beef, so New Zealand beef farmers who feed their cows what they were made to eat can’t get a market in Japan for their meat. Why are there deer farms in New Zealand but not the States? Because of the hunting lobby of course. The NRA has not yet exerted its influence in New Zealand. And why are the beautiful green hills we see everywhere terraced? Brian, Kristin and I were all wrong on this one - the terracing is neither natural or left from early Maori travels; the sheep do it as they graze.

Jenny hesitantly put us to work (she was clearly not in the habit of asking her guests to perform manual labor) pruning, weeding, and raking, and even let us come along when she mustered the deer into another paddock one morning. We stayed in the ute (short for “utility vehicle”, i.e. “pick-up truck”) and tried not to look like wolves while Jenny and Buffy the wonder-dog managed to get all the deer through a tiny little gate into the next paddock where they had plenty of fresh grass. For a girl from Wisconsin where deer run wild through the backyard and scamper away at the slightest movement from the window, this feat seemed pretty tricky. And I’m sure it was, but Jenny made it seem like there was nothing to it: aside from a wee hand movement here and there and a few calls to Buffy the wonder-dog, she didn’t do anything at all.

Our crowning achievement of the week, however, was constructing a compost heap. We gathered some dried sheep poo from under the shearing shed, and Brian kept insisting that we really needed to get some fresh horse poo (and he was right), but as none of us were willing to do this, we stuck with the dried sheep dung and poured on buckets and buckets of water for good measure, and miraculously it heated up anyway. (Fiona gave us a full report when we met her for coffee 10 days later - Jenny had evidently never had such a great compost heap.) Aren’t micro-organisms amazing?