The farm we worked at is called BIO Uruguay (www.biouruguay.org Batovi Instituto Organica Uruguay). It is funded by grants from the United Nations, as well as the proceeds from the farm´s produce. The mission (in our words, but if you read spanish you can find their words on their website) of the organization is to educate local farmers on sustainable organic methods which are economically viable. Thus, the offer classes, seed banks, a laboratory, library, and demonstrations of farming techniques on the Abambae Farm which supports the school. There are a series of Faros (translates roughly to light house) which are supposed to bring the ideas taught at the school to areas even more remote across the country. It was founded by a group of people, most notably Doctor Alda Rodriguez (Agro-Engineer from Tacuarembo but educated in Montevideo, Havana, and Coroico, Bolivia), for whom we worked.
Our chores began at 8 a.m. when we fed the chickens, bunny, and pigs and watered the plants, sheep, horses, and cows. After this, we were assigned a task that changed daily. The variation was crucial: any task is miserable with repetition. Somedays were worse than others: hauling liculo (a fermented pig waste liquid fertilizer) and removing thorn bushes were considerably less fun than herding cows to be bred, capturing loose chickens, or cutting corn with a machete. We learned to make our own bread, which became a frequent and necessary activity. Given the relatively narrow range of ingredients, we had to get a little creative to avoid boredom in our daily meals. Onion and garlic bread, eggs every way you can imagine. caramelized onion and garlic spread, hot sauce without anything that was actually spicy, honey and flax seed bread, peanut sauce on noodles, flan, rice pudding, and spicy macaronic and cheese were big succeses, though the grilled cheese sandwiches using only farm raised ingredients were pretty good, too. On special days, we got to eat with Alda and her family, which meant we ate things like: sheep from the farm, ravioli, apples in various desserty forms from the neighbors farm, spanish tortillas, and delicious crepes with ricotta and ciboulette. We worked till noon, had a two hour lunch/nap break, and then worked for four more hours. Then we made dinner, washed clothes, made bread, played cards, and fell asleep as early as possible.
We lived in an ecologically friendly house, which means the construction was spotty at times. Our straw roof was fine most of the time, but during the intense thunderstorm on the last day, we found out that it was not entirely waterproof. The semi-permeable walls (probably unintentional) let in lots of critters from outside. There were probably 10 species of tree frogs which came into our house as very welcome guests and ate all of the bugs. This was especially nice because the ants around the farm, while small, left these giant zit-like welts which hurt for days.
The bathrooms at the farm were much nicer than the last farm. Rather than just a wooden box over a hole in an open field (to be fair, it was the nicest bathroom view in the world), we had four stalls with complete walls, doors, and toilet seats to choose from. It was a composting toilet, which is good for the environment but we were glad that the job of cleaning it was a once a year thing...and this wasn´t the time of the year. The showers could be heated, if one made a fire. We did this twice and realized the fire did very little to heat the water and that it was better to just take a cold shower. Thus cold showers are doubly good for the environment because one does not waste fuel heating the water and, moreover, it is impossible to take a long cold shower. Realistically, though, we just didn´t take that many showers. Perhaps the best thing about the showers were the colonies of frogs that lived in them. At first, we didn´t realize they were there, but when the water hit them in their hiding spots, they would jump across the shower or over the walls into the adjacent stalls. Pretty hilarious to have a frog land on your head in the middle of a shower.
One of our favorite parts of the farm were the beautiful dogs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://www.gopetsamerica.com/
They are called Uruguayan Cimarrons and are generally used as hunting dogs, but Alda´s partner whose name is (phonetically) As-Drib-Bull had trained them to round up chickens and hold them (albeit aggressively) so they wouldn´t run off into the fields. We learned how to round up chickens with and without the aid of the gorgeous dogs (named Cimarron and Francesca. Cimarron, whose name is the height of boring, we decided to call Big Macho instead because he weighed 100 pounds and was very very macho). The two campesino ladies the worked on the farm taught us to chase the chickens with brooms back into the cage, but if there is just one chicken, you can corner it and grab it. In general, chasing is easier than catching but there is so much reward in catching a chicken. For the few that escaped our brooms, the dogs rounded them up and held them on the ground while we ran frantically to make sure that they didn´t kill the chickens. Afterwords, we were told that the dogs wouldn´t hurt them, but we didn´t know that at the time.
This led to the most exciting part of our stay on the farm. Everyone had left and it was just the two of us working in the field. We had come in to do our evening chores (the same as morning with the addition of collecting eggs and protecting the eggs from the thieving dogs) when we realized the latch on the chicken coop had broken and all of the chickens had escaped. Using the techniques taught us, we managed to round up the majority of the chickens. Stew chased them with a bamboo stick while Tori stood by the gate and opened it to let them in when they came near. One escaped and the two free range babies were outside. The dogs, having forgotten that these two babies are always outside, started bringing them down so we could put them back in their cage (where they did not belong). Stew, seeing the two dogs pinning the baby, tackled Big Macho and pried the dog´s mouth open so that Tori could grab the baby and throw it over the fence into the coop, where it would at least be protected. We then chased the other baby at the same time as the dogs, but we got it first and protected it from the dogs.
However, the fence was not designed for chicks, and they escaped under the wire netting from the coop. We realized this while we were eating dinner and heard a horrible squawking. Apparently the excitment led to the dogs to forget their training and they managed to kill one of the babies. The other was still alive, but in the mouth of Francesca. For the second time that day, Stew had to reach in a hunting dog´s mouth to stop it from eating the baby. Tori fended off the dogs with angry yells of ¨Stop¨and ¨Go away!¨ while Stew ran to put the baby back in a more secure cage. We didn´t think it would live through the night because one wing was torn off from the back, but five days later when we left, it had mostly recuperated (though it will never fly). The lesson here being that even though dogs are useful for bringing home stray chickens (the one that ran off to the field was recovered by the dogs safely, along with several others we didn´t even realize had escaped), a hunting dog still has hunting dog instincts and, unless extremely well trained, will probably want to eat some baby chickens every once in a while. They did not, fortunately, make any aggressive moves toward either of us and only wanted their delicious chicken meat. Fairly reasonable demand, actually, but not permitted on our farm.
Now we´re in Montevideo where we intend to do errands (new bathing suit and boots for Stew, VISA´s for both of us, internet, eat some American food, etc), visit some sites (Artigas´s ashes, first World Cup Stadium, beaches) before we head up to Punta Del Diablo which is a tiny beach town of 700 people and hopefully deserted at this point. Though you should probably also realize that whenever we announce our plans on the blog, they do not show up in the next entry. We have a history of changing our plans.
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