I wwoofed outside of the country, not in the USA, BUT: from my experience, and from talking to others who did it (both internationally and in the US), a couple things I wish I'd known were:
1. If you can, talk to someone else who's actually worked at the farm you're interested! The damn blurbs and summaries about the places that you can read appear to be pretty much always wrong (boy i have a story about a "soap-making farm" in spain .. ). Also, I did have one friend who found out upon arriving that the farm was a crazy hippie cult.
2. Setup terms of work/days off in advance. Don't just show up without a game plan: some places will feed you all your meals, some places won't, some places want 10 hours of work a day, some places want 4. also, you can try to get a straighter scoop on what they're doing this time of year, farming/otherwise.
Negotiate a minimum time to be there: in case things just don't work out, most places still want at least a couple weeks out of you. And just for yourself, be a good boyscout: make sure you have a viable escape plan; knew one girl who wound up at a farm WAY the buttfuck out in the middle of nowhere, when it turned out that owner was a drunk-driving drug-addicted nutjob (wait, doesn't that describe half the people here?).
3. have construction skills. as far as i can tell, every wwoof farm is basically a front for some kind of construction project that you will spend your entire time working on. Or, better yet, tell them that you don't know a damn thing about construction ..
4. spend more than a couple weeks or a month, if you can. Anything less than a couple weeks minimum, you'll probably be doing very menial, repetitive tasks, same kind of stuff (digging, mucking, mixing concrete, etc). More than a couple weeks/month, you'll actually start getting integrated into the structure of it -- however, some places don't like to have anyone stay very long, so keep that in mind.
that's all just off the top of my head. the WWOOF organization says that all farms have to be able to provide blankets/shelter/etc for the workers, but take that with a serious grain of salt. bring gear, just in case.
1. If you can, talk to someone else who's actually worked at the farm you're interested! The damn blurbs and summaries about the places that you can read appear to be pretty much always wrong (boy i have a story about a "soap-making farm" in spain .. ). Also, I did have one friend who found out upon arriving that the farm was a crazy hippie cult.
2. Setup terms of work/days off in advance. Don't just show up without a game plan: some places will feed you all your meals, some places won't, some places want 10 hours of work a day, some places want 4. also, you can try to get a straighter scoop on what they're doing this time of year, farming/otherwise.
Negotiate a minimum time to be there: in case things just don't work out, most places still want at least a couple weeks out of you. And just for yourself, be a good boyscout: make sure you have a viable escape plan; knew one girl who wound up at a farm WAY the buttfuck out in the middle of nowhere, when it turned out that owner was a drunk-driving drug-addicted nutjob (wait, doesn't that describe half the people here?).
3. have construction skills. as far as i can tell, every wwoof farm is basically a front for some kind of construction project that you will spend your entire time working on. Or, better yet, tell them that you don't know a damn thing about construction ..
4. spend more than a couple weeks or a month, if you can. Anything less than a couple weeks minimum, you'll probably be doing very menial, repetitive tasks, same kind of stuff (digging, mucking, mixing concrete, etc). More than a couple weeks/month, you'll actually start getting integrated into the structure of it -- however, some places don't like to have anyone stay very long, so keep that in mind.
that's all just off the top of my head. the WWOOF organization says that all farms have to be able to provide blankets/shelter/etc for the workers, but take that with a serious grain of salt. bring gear, just in case.
