Tell me about your experiences hosting with WWOOF

Good day-

I began hosting WWOOFers on our vegetable farm in around 2012.  The first few years were great.  Met some great people and even got a few chores done.  I'm not sure what happened, but in around 2017 our typical guest began to change.  They were no longer folks looking for an experience or for a mutually beneficial relationship and instead it became people who were looking for a free place to sleep as they traveled.  Some refused to even attempt to help in the gardens or help making dinner.  Several drug issues.  A couple of folks that we were outright scared of.  So we stopped hosting, and here we are several years later thinking back on the good guests we had (mostly international), we're considering hosting again.  How are guests these days? Has WWOOF done anything to weed out the folks who aren't WWOOFing for the right reasons?

We hosted a few over the last several years and found that, despite having some lovely guests and (mostly) positive interactions, it's not a good fit for us. Broken tools were the biggest dealbreaker, which went along with the need to be completely hands-on in supervision of inexperienced but gung-ho workers. Our working style is very independent, introverted, and self-directed, but the standard profile of a WWOOFer in this country is a 20-something tourist from Europe who grew up in the city and has no idea that a garden spade is not the same thing as a crowbar but wants to knock out four hours of labour and get out to the trailhead before lunch.

We will probably ease back into it, sporadically, when we have separate accommodation built and more of an intentional community set up on our land. At one point there were a few permaculture instructors here who looked into setting up a more education-focused network where people would do an orientation (possibly even a PDC) and then tour a series of homesteads for hands-on learning. We never took it beyond the brainstorming stage but it would be fairly easy to implement as long as you had some vetting and scheduling systems in place.

We have been woof hosts for I think 7 or 8 years. You are right the quality of all woofers is not reflected by only a few. Woof doesn't weed out but we do. We require interviews, Photo ID and references. We look hard before we invite. Most have been good. Jules