Sheep, of course

Three farms produce all of the organic carrots for the supermarkets in New Zealand, each harvesting carrots for about four months of the year. One of these three farms, Willowmere, a 110 hectare farm in Hororata (about two hours west of Christchurch), harvests carrots from about April - July. Katharina and I came there in late July, in time for the final harvest.

"Digging carrots" is what Kelvin had said on the phone. To me that meant a pitchfork and a pony (5/8 bushel basket for all you non-farmers), but when you produce enough carrots for a country the size of California, there is no time for pitchforks. A potato-digger is what we used - a huge red machine, pulled behind a tractor that dug the carrots out and spit them up onto a conveyor belt for us to sort. There were four of us: Marilyn and Kath, two local women who worked regularly for Kelvin, Katharina, and me. Our job was to stand up top on either side of the conveyor belt, taking out all the rotting carrots and removing as much dirt from the carrots as possible. It took awhile to get used to all the movement on top of movement, but after a bit I got the hang of it. Each row took about 15 minutes and yielded about 1250 kilos of carrots, which were then dumped into huge wooden crates, 500 kilos each. After two days on the potato digger, bracing the cold Nor'wester, we had 65 crates of carrots.

The steps involved from harvest to supermarket went something like this: Wednesday and Thursday, harvest 32,500 kilos of carrots. The following Monday transport 65 crates of carrots in three truckloads via freight company to the nearest washing and packing factory (an hour away). Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the factory workers wash and pack all beautiful carrots into one kilo bags for the supermarket and send the rest to Wattie's Food Co. to become prepackaged carrot soup.

Willowmere, run by Kelvin and his parents (who were off in Canada on holiday in July), has been organic since 1992, and their success is a feather in the cap for organic New Zealand - neighboring conventional farmers raised many an eyebrow and waited for the impending failure of Willowmere, but after 13 years they are still flourishing without pesticides, artificial fertilizers, or antibiotics.

Antibiotics for the sheep and the cows, that is. Every day we got up to feed them, hopping on the trailor at 7:30am, riding up to the cow paddocks just in time to see a bit of pink sunrise on the tip of Mt. Hutt and watch the morning mist disappear over the grass. Kelvin had 50 cows and 610 sheep; feeding them was pretty much the same as feeding out at Waihi Bush: move the fence eight paces and give them some feed. What a lovely, sweet, fermented smell alfalfa has.

Katharina and I had hoped that we would get to help with the sheep shearing, scheduled to take place the week we were there. But it rained all week instead, making the sheep too slippery to handle. (This not only makes it more difficult for the shearers to pick up and hold the sheep in place, it also makes for slippery, less-controllable hands which mean more cuts into the sheep's skin.) Kelvin generously gave us a taste of what shearing was like and dagged a few lambs the day before we left. "Dagging" is shearing only the backside of a sheep, to get off all the matted poo and keep flies to a minimum. Katharina and I made ourselves marginally useful by sweeping up the dags and sorting out the bits of clean wool, which Kelvin said would get sold to be used for things like mattress stuffing.

Wwoofing at Willowmere was a bit like sharing a flat with two mates. Kelvin opened his home completely to us. We peppered him with questions about carrots, sheep, and replenishing minerals in the soil without artificial fertilizers; we made carrot juice, carrot soup, carrot biscuits (cookies, actually), and carrot-potato curry; we took a picnic lunch to the Rakaia Gorge; we played cards before and after dinner, and hung our laundry to dry above the wood stove. Can't say it ain't been a little slice of heaven.