Arriving at the Farm

So! Day one! All and all it was pretty leisurely. I hit the road a little bit after noon and got here around 2.45, but only after my GPS took me on the most inefficient route imaginable, through back roads (I may or may not have also gotten lost as well), so I suspect it would take less than two and a half hours to get here from Dover.

To sum up for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: I’m wwoofing at a raw milk dairy farm in western Massachusetts. WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms and basically you pay a fee ($30) to have access to the farm listings and contact information from all over the country (each country that participates in WWOOF has their own website and thus own fee.) From there, you just sort it out with the individual farms when you want to work and for how long, and then you work for room and board for the agreed-upon time. Simple! This is my first time wwoofing though I’ve known about it for years.

Sadly there will be no pictures from today because I didn’t take any, and even if I had I forgot to bring the cable that connects my camera to my computer, but tomorrow I think Sally (the farmer) said she has one I can use. Anyway, for now, use your imagination.

At the farm there are three cows (one Jersey and two Brown Swiss), plus a cute little Jersey calf that was born two days ago. It’s sweet and soft and tried to suck Sally’s knees. There are also chickens that wander around, ducks that are currently confined to a pen, three cats and one dog. Also a big vegetable patch that they mainly grow for food (not to sell.) I have my own room in their beautiful old farmhouse which is quite nice, despite the fact that I’ve already seen three spiders (I’m a recovering arachnophobe.) Tomorrow another wwoofer arrives!

This afternoon Sally let me watch her do the afternoon milking which was really interesting, but I’ll describe it later because I don’t want to frighten off my audience with a long post and no pictures. A few things about the cows though: they are huge! The Brown Swiss are much bigger than the Jersey cow, and one of the Brown Swiss is really massive—her hips are probably as tall as me (5’5”). I asked Sally how much she weighed and she said 1,300 to 1,400 pounds (!) at which point the cow lifted up her tail and shit all over the place (it splashed onto us a bit as well.) What’s the moral of the story here? Never tell a lady’s weight without her permission.

That’s all for tonight. Tomorrow is a day off here and I’ll try to figure out how to make the blog look better and contain pictures. If you’ve made it all the way down here, thanks for reading!