Tyler Kern

Category: WWOOF

  • Wandering in Place

    Wandering in Place

    For most of the last decade, I assumed the direction of my life had a natural progression. I am a farmer, and although the details were sometimes hazy, having my own farm one day seemed like the ideal destination. I spent years building the skills I thought I would need: vegetable production, irrigation, hoophouses, equipment, crop planning, organic certification, recordkeeping, marketing, grants, and all the less glamorous systems that keep a small farm functioning.

    There is a line from Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America that has stuck with me for years:

    “No farther. This is the place.”

    I’ve always found that idea deeply appealing: to stop looking perpetually over the horizon, choose a place, learn it deeply, take responsibility for it, and build a life there.

    And right now I’m doing almost exactly the opposite.

    After spending months moving between farms in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, I’m less certain than I’ve ever been that owning one farm is what I actually want. That creates some conflict for me, because I haven’t fallen out of love with farming. I haven’t even stopped farming. If anything, I’m more certain that agriculture needs to remain a major part of my life. I’m just becoming less certain that owning one farm is the only way to build a life around it.

    The Appeal of “This Is the Place”

    For most of the last decade, I assumed the direction of my life had a natural progression. I am a farmer, and although the details were sometimes hazy, having my own farm one day seemed like the ideal destination. I spent years building the skills I thought I would need: vegetable production, irrigation, hoophouses, equipment, crop planning, organic certification, recordkeeping, marketing, grants, and all the less glamorous systems that keep a small farm functioning.

    There is a line from Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America that has stuck with me for years:

    “No farther. This is the place.”

    I’ve always found that idea deeply appealing: to stop looking perpetually over the horizon, choose a place, learn it deeply, take responsibility for it, and build a life there.

    And right now I’m doing almost exactly the opposite.

    After spending months moving between farms in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, I’m less certain than I’ve ever been that owning one farm is what I actually want. That creates some conflict for me, because I haven’t fallen out of love with farming. I haven’t even stopped farming. If anything, I’m more certain that agriculture needs to remain a major part of my life. I’m just becoming less certain that owning one farm is the only way to build a life around it.

    WWOOFing Has Shown Me Another Version of Agricultural Life

    One of the unexpected pleasures of WWOOFing has been entering a farm, becoming useful relatively quickly, learning how the operation works, contributing something, and eventually moving on. That is obviously very different from building a relationship with one piece of land over twenty years, but it has its own appeal.

    Over the last several months I’ve been able to:

    • Work with different crops
    • See different tools and production systems
    • Live with farm families
    • Compare how similar problems are solved in different countries
    • Teach techniques I already know
    • Learn practices I had never encountered
    • Work within different climates and landscapes
    • Move between agriculture, cultural exchange, language study, and travel

    I like being experienced enough to contribute while still being new enough to pay attention. There is something energizing about walking onto a new farm and figuring out how it works: Where does the water come from? What is the limiting factor? What breaks repeatedly? Which jobs consume too much labor? What does this farmer care about? What are they unusually good at?

    I find myself constantly asking what I can learn and where I can help. That curiosity may be telling me something about the kind of agricultural life that suits me.

    I Like Being Useful More Than I Like Being in Charge

    I’ve always valued autonomy, and part of wanting my own farm was wanting control over my work. I still want that, but I’m realizing that autonomy doesn’t necessarily require controlling an entire operation. What I seem to enjoy most is having enough independence and experience to solve meaningful problems.

    Sometimes that means:

    • Improving a workflow
    • Helping design irrigation
    • Building a hoophouse
    • Troubleshooting equipment
    • Helping a beginning farmer think through a production problem
    • Writing a grant that makes an infrastructure project possible
    • Building a spreadsheet or website that saves somebody time
    • Showing someone a tool or technique that changes the labor equation

    Those can be relatively small interventions, but they can have a large effect. I can also do them without carrying every responsibility that comes with owning the farm myself.

    Maybe Consulting Isn’t Separate From Farming

    For a while, I thought of consulting and technical work as things I might do to support farming financially. I’m beginning to think that may be backwards. Perhaps consulting can itself be one of the ways I participate in agriculture.

    I have an unusual combination of experience:

    • More than a decade of farming
    • A background in software development
    • Hands-on infrastructure experience
    • Organic certification experience
    • Grant writing and research
    • Websites and digital systems
    • Beginning-farmer mentoring
    • International farm experience

    None of those things individually defines what I want to do. Together, though, they suggest a role I find increasingly interesting: the person farmers call when there is a messy problem that doesn’t fit neatly into one category.

    That still feels like agricultural work to me. Maybe even more so than spending every winter trying to sell next year’s CSA shares.

    The Part Berry Makes Difficult

    This is where I can’t completely dismiss that line: “No farther. This is the place.” There are things movement simply cannot give me.

    I can arrive at a farm and understand a lot fairly quickly, but I don’t know that place the way somebody knows it after twenty seasons. I didn’t build the soil. I don’t remember when that tree was planted or what happened in that field ten years ago. I won’t necessarily be there to find out whether a decision that looks good today still looks good five years from now.

    There is a depth of knowledge—and responsibility—that only comes from staying. That matters to me.

    I also don’t want to turn mobility into another version of constantly believing that whatever is over the next hill must be better. There will always be another country, another farm, another language, another interesting person, and another possibility. At some point, choosing one thing means giving up the others.

    That is the part of Berry’s argument that still bothers me in a productive way.


    But I’m Not Ready to Stop Moving Yet

    At the same time, I like what movement is giving me right now. More specifically, I like living temporarily in rural places.

    I like:

    • Staying long enough to develop routines
    • Working with people instead of only visiting them
    • Learning languages
    • Eating with families
    • Hearing people’s stories
    • Seeing how agriculture changes with climate and cuisine
    • Comparing tools and production systems
    • Being pointed toward places tourists rarely visit
    • Becoming useful somewhere unfamiliar

    Importantly, I’m not sacrificing farming to do those things. The farming is what makes much of it possible.

    A farm of my own would give me roots. This life gives me something else: the ability to keep farming while moving between places, people, cultures, and agricultural systems. Right now, I’m not sure I’m ready to trade that for permanence.

    There may also be a version of my life that doesn’t require permanently choosing between rootedness and movement. Maybe it looks something like:

    • A season working intensively on a farm
    • A period of consulting
    • Time abroad
    • Writing
    • Technical projects
    • Another growing season somewhere else

    That would have sounded unfocused to me a few years ago. Now it sounds increasingly coherent.


    There Are Things This Life Cannot Give Me

    I don’t want to romanticize the alternative either. Moving between farms has obvious limitations. I don’t get the same long-term feedback, see soil improve over ten years because of my management, plant an orchard and watch it mature, or build the same depth of knowledge about one piece of land. I also don’t experience the satisfaction of creating an operation whose culture and systems are truly my own.

    Ultimately, there is a difference between advising someone and being the person who has to live with the outcome. That responsibility has value, and there may still come a point when I want it. I’m just less interested in forcing myself toward ownership because it seems like the proper conclusion to a farming career.

    I Haven’t Given Up on the Farm

    This isn’t an announcement that I will never own land. I still imagine it sometimes: a small place with good soil, enough infrastructure to work efficiently, a greenhouse, a workshop, and maybe an acre or two of serious production.

    But the image has become less rigid. I no longer need that farm to prove that I became a “real” farmer. I already am one. If my future involves helping ten farms instead of owning one, I’m starting to think that could be just as legitimate—and maybe more interesting, at least for me.

    The Dream Changed Shape

    For a while, I thought owning a farm was the destination. Now I’m starting to think farming may be the constant while the form around it changes.

    I want agriculture and rural communities in my life. I want physical work and problems worth solving. I want enough independence to choose work I believe matters, and I want to keep learning from people who farm differently than I do. At least for now, I also want enough freedom to keep moving.

    Maybe those things eventually lead me back to a farm of my own. Maybe someday I reach a place and know: No farther. This is the place.

    Or maybe they lead to a life that moves between farms, countries, seasons, consulting projects, and writing.

    I don’t know yet. A few years ago, that uncertainty would have bothered me.

    Now I think it might be the interesting part.

  • Why I WWOOF as a Farmer

    Why I WWOOF as a Farmer

    I have spent more than a decade farming, so when I tell people that I’m traveling through Asia by volunteering on farms, there is an obvious question: Why?

    I’m not WWOOFing because I need someone to teach me how to weed a row, transplant seedlings, run irrigation, harvest vegetables, or survive a long day outside. I already know how to farm. That turns out not to be the point.

    What keeps me WWOOFing is that farming gives me access to something I care about even more than agricultural technique: rural life.

    I’d Rather Live Somewhere Than Visit It

    Despite my Las Vegas urban roots, I prefer the country. Cities can be interesting, but when I travel I don’t really want to spend months moving from landmark to landmark, eating in restaurants, sleeping in hotels, and observing a place from the outside. I want to know what ordinary life feels like.

    WWOOFing gives me a way into that. I get to:

    • Live where my hosts live
    • Eat what they eat
    • Work beside them
    • Hear how they actually speak
    • Meet their families, friends, neighbors, and other workers
    • Ask locals where I should go instead of relying entirely on travel guides
    • Spend enough time somewhere to develop routines instead of constantly moving on

    That has taken me to temples, mountains, streams, markets, festivals, neighborhood restaurants, small towns, and other places I probably never would have found following a normal tourist itinerary. Some of my favorite experiences have started with someone simply saying, “You should go here.”

    Agriculture Is Close to the Root

    Part of my attraction to rural life is that agriculture sits very close to the root of most settled societies. Human culture obviously existed long before agriculture, but large, specialized societies depend on someone producing enough food that everyone else doesn’t have to spend all of their time producing it.

    Agricultural surplus makes possible things like:

    • Specialized trades
    • Cities
    • Large religious and political institutions
    • Scholarship
    • Art and craftsmanship
    • Large-scale commerce
    • Eventually, all the modern industries that seem very far removed from a farm

    So when I’m trying to understand a place, I’m naturally interested in the people producing its food. A farm tells you a surprising amount about the culture around it:

    • The crops tell you what people eat.
    • The food tells you something about climate, preservation, history, and taste.
    • The machinery tells you something about labor.
    • The size of farms tells you something about land.
    • The age of the farmers tells you something about demographics.
    • The meals tell you what people have valued enough to keep making generation after generation.

    Agriculture isn’t the whole culture, but it’s a solid doorway into it.

    Being Useful Changes the Relationship

    There is a big difference between visiting someone and working beside them. As a tourist, I’m mostly a customer. As a WWOOFer, I have a role. It may be temporary, and I’m still a guest, but I can contribute.

    Depending on the farm, that might mean:

    • Harvesting peppers or corn
    • Weeding
    • Seeding trays
    • Packing produce
    • Fixing something
    • Washing vegetables
    • Moving materials
    • Cleaning up after a job

    Because I already have a lot of farming experience, I can usually become useful pretty quickly. That changes the relationship.

    Conversations happen naturally while working. People explain why they do things a certain way. They complain about things that aren’t working. They joke, give advice, and tell stories that probably never would have come up during a formal farm visit. After enough days of working and eating together, you stop feeling quite so much like an outsider.

    I Get to Experience the Place, Not Just See It

    Language has been another big part of the experience. When you stay with people, you hear the same words and expressions over and over—not just formal language, but instructions, jokes, complaints, filler words, family conversations, local pronunciation, and all the little expressions that rarely make it into textbooks.

    In Japan, this was especially valuable because I had already spent a lot of time studying Japanese. Farm work gave the language context. Words stopped being vocabulary cards and became attached to tools, vegetables, meals, weather, mistakes, and people.

    Even in places where I know far less of the language, living around ordinary conversation changes my sense of how it actually sounds and how people use it. A good host also becomes an informal cultural guide. I can ask:

    • What should I eat here?
    • Where should I go on my day off?
    • Is this place actually worth visiting?
    • What does that expression mean?
    • Is this normal here?
    • What’s the best local restaurant?
    • Why do people do things this way?

    Google Maps has never told me, “My childhood friends are going to the stream this weekend. Come with us.”

    The Best Places Usually Aren’t on a Top Ten List

    One thing I don’t love about conventional travel is how easily everyone gets funneled toward the same places. Search for what to do somewhere and you often get the same temples, viewpoints, restaurants, shopping streets, and photo spots repeated across hundreds of websites.

    There’s nothing wrong with famous places. They’re often famous for a reason. But some of my favorite experiences abroad have been much smaller:

    • A meal someone wanted me to try
    • A local hike
    • A tiny temple
    • A neighborhood market
    • A place to swim
    • A festival
    • A restaurant with no reason to appear in an English-language guide
    • A friend of a host inviting me along somewhere

    Those experiences feel less like consuming a destination and more like temporarily participating in it. That’s much closer to what I want from travel.

    It Makes Long-Term Travel Affordable

    There is also a much less philosophical reason I keep WWOOFing: it’s cheap.

    Long-term travel gets expensive quickly if every night requires paid accommodation and every meal comes from a restaurant. WWOOFing changes the economics. In exchange for work, I typically receive:

    • A place to sleep
    • Meals
    • Access to a kitchen and ordinary household life
    • Local knowledge
    • A built-in social connection
    • Something productive to do

    That makes it possible for me to spend months in a country instead of rushing through it in a couple of weeks, and I think that extra time matters. A place looks different after a month than it does after three days.

    Eventually you have bad weather and boring days. You develop routines, find the grocery store, learn the transportation system, get sick of one food and obsessed with another, and stop trying to maximize every day. You begin recognizing people, and sometimes they begin recognizing you. At some point, the place starts feeling less like a destination and a little more like a temporary home.

    Cheap Does Not Mean Predictable

    WWOOFing also keeps travel adventurous because you never quite know what you’re walking into.

    Sometimes:

    • The room is nicer than expected.
    • There barely is a room.
    • The work is fascinating.
    • The work is incredibly repetitive.
    • You immediately connect with your host.
    • Communication is difficult.
    • You end up on the side of a road with no fuel during a typhoon.
    • You end up at a commercial farm.
    • You end up at a homestead.
    • You end up living at a Buddhist temple.

    The days can also go in directions I never would have planned. I’ve gone from farm work to karate, streams, racetracks, mountain hikes, traditional markets, temples, and even ended up naked in a hot spring with people I had only just met.

    That uncertainty is part of why I like it. I don’t want every part of travel optimized in advance. A little friction creates stories.

    I Still Learn About Farming

    None of this means the farming itself is irrelevant. I’m still paying attention, and because I already have years of experience, I have a lot to compare against.

    I notice:

    • Tools
    • Crop choices
    • Field layouts
    • Labor
    • Irrigation
    • Greenhouses
    • Weed management
    • Harvest practices
    • Marketing
    • Recordkeeping
    • How farms solve recurring problems

    I compare those systems with what I know from the United States and what I’ve now seen in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Sometimes I see something I would copy immediately; sometimes I see something I would never do. Sometimes a practice seems strange until I understand the conditions around it, and occasionally I can contribute something useful from my own experience in return.

    That exchange is more interesting to me than simply collecting techniques. I’m not looking for a secret Asian method of farming that will solve every problem back home. I’m building a larger set of examples of how farmers solve similar problems under very different conditions.

    So Why Keep Doing It?

    WWOOFing lets me travel in a way that matches what I already care about. I like rural places, farm work, eating with people, being useful, hearing how people actually speak, and seeing how ordinary households live. I like getting local recommendations instead of following tourist itineraries. I like traveling slowly, keeping costs low, and not knowing exactly what next week will look like.

    I also like that agriculture gives me a common language even when the spoken language is difficult. I may not know how to say very much, but I understand what it means when rain is coming and something needs to get harvested.

    I already know how to farm, and that may actually be part of why WWOOFing works so well for me. I don’t need every host to teach me the basics. Farming gives me something useful to contribute and a reason to become part of daily life for a little while.

    The farm is the doorway. What I’m really there to learn is the place.