I’m green to wwoofing, and have a few concerns–any help would be awesome! Here’s the situation:

My brother and I are planning an open-ended ‘walkabout.’ We’re keen to visit the likes of France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, UK, Ireland, Croatia, and, as money is a concern, we’d like to use wwoof as much as possible.

My primary concern is about the visa. I believe that it’s required to wwoof in most countries, but as we’d like to visit multiple places, I’m wondering what our best course of action would be. We are US citizens, for whom I believe countries like France offer short-term 90 day work visas. Would it be possible, for instance, to work in France of 90 days, then work in Spain for 90 days, then Italy, and then back to France (i.e. would the France visa reset itself if we left for awhile then came back?) ? Would I have to get separate Visas for each country, or can they carry over somehow via the EU fraternity? Lastly, and perhaps stupidest-ly, how strict is this visa thing? Would it be at all possible to wwoof ‘under the radar’ of the visa requirement?

My second concern is that we are looking at beginning the trip in January–which, I realize, is not the best month for farming. Any advice about winter-wwoofing would be a great help!

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Best,

Conor

The living situation varies a lot depending on the place. I’ve had my own room, a couch in the basement(they’d meant to give me a hammock in another building but hadn’t got it set up), a room in a kinda half a douplex that they kept for woofers.
I’ve totally seen places that take people and dogs! Most don’t have dogs of their own, and people can even woof as a family(mostly people with their own toddlers or what have you). Lots of people do roadtrips with their dogs using woof.

I\’ve woofed for 3 years and had 2 places like that who expected 8 or 10 hour days. If you stayed it wouldn\’t have gotten better, I spent a month in Vermont working that hard because there were some really cool things to learn there. But after a month of no breaks other than laziness and losing 10 lbs I\’d break out crying at random. I had a simillar experience only last a week in Vermont doing maple syruping (and absolutely nothing else, you know how heavy that much wood and sap is?).

They advertise as learning but I\’ve only found one place in 6 that really seemed to care much about teaching people farming.

In the US there are plenty of places that will accept seniors. There are plenty of hosts that age for a start! But really, especially in looking into intentional communities or religious based things. It might even be safer than woofing as a 20something because no one will take you on just to do hard labor.
I met a woman while woofing in Vermont who retired and sold her house to go woofing to learn about construction and build her own place.

Thank you~

Lisa, where were you wwoofing exactly? I’ve just begun my planning for wwoofing in Ireland this fall. I read someone else’s post on reddit that he was able to get another wwoof position when something similar happened to him in Canada. Hope things work out for you!

What I surely have to learn is packing light. I will arrive with a 75L backpack, a small daypack and a big travel bag for just two weeks.
Not really minimalistic, but I hope I will learn from it…