Farm-Volunteer Workdays

[thedawid.livejournal.com]

Join theMOVE on 2 exciting trips coming up!  Get more info and get signed up at www.getoutma.org/volunteer. Fee waivers available if needed.

(1) FAMILY Farm Workday at Gaining Ground Farm (Concord).  Sat 8/20 @ 10a-1:30p.  Come join us as we help out the farm for the morning.  $8 for adults, $5 for youth (must be 8 years or older), includes delicious Chipotle lunch, snacks, and van transportation from Ruggles or Porter (at 9a).

(2) Chicken Processing Workday at Pete + Jen's Backyard Birds (Concord).  Sat 8/27 @ 7a-1:30p.  Help us process (slaughter) naturally-raised chickens to get them ready for sale.  $12 trip fee ($8 for members) includes lunch, and carpooled ride.  Volunteers may also stay till 6p to finish up the work, but not required.

Hope you'll join us!

Dave Madan
Founder + Executive Director, theMOVE

Comments

[thespian.livejournal.com]

I am very confused. You want people to come and volunteer for you by doing strenuous labour on the weekend and paying to get to do so? Serious question; I was wondering if I was reading that correctly.

[bombardiette.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I was seriously wondering the same thing. Paying to volunteer to do hard labor??

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Well, if you know where I could go to kill chickens for free, I'd like to hear it.

[bombardiette.livejournal.com]

I hear that occasionally, these people called farmers who own these things call farms actually hire people and pay them to do things like kill chickens. So you could probably take out an ad on CL or something saying, "Will choke your chicken free of charge"? Or...oh. Wait. Maybe not.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

It's actually not too uncommon to pay for the opportunity to volunteer, especially in cases where the work is viewed as fun and/or rewarding for its own sake. Also, volunteers workers are generally much less efficient than paid workers. (And I suspect the 8 year olds at this event will be more likely to impede than facilitate.)

[kelkyag]

$8 probably covers lunch and the ride, and 3.5 hours on a farm is barely enough time to look around and have the basics of how things work and what tasks need to be done explained to novice city slickers. That's more of a field trip than a work day.

The chicken processing trip might be long enough to be a little more like a work day, but as surrealestate said, it's probably going to be wicked inefficient to have a bunch of novices "helping", and I suspect at least a few of them will discover it is Not For Them.

[gingicat]

Does one get to bring a bag of produce or a chicken home?

[nurrynur.livejournal.com]

I find it hilarious that this is tagged local food yet you are feeding your "volunteers" fake mexican food from a national chain that probably ships their ingredients all over the place. Why not feed them food from the farm they're volunteering at?

[orangejuice1120.livejournal.com]

Although I totally agree with you that it would be much cooler to serve food from the farm itself, I have to step in and defend Chipotle. I would be willing to bet that Chipotle uses more locally grown ingredients than, say, Anna's Taqueria considering that they recently announced that they were doubling their use of locally grown produce (granted their definition of local is within 350 miles) Chipotle also uses free range chicken, organic veggies and beef sans hormones. Considering how much business Chipotle actually does, I bet that they provide a considerable amount of business to local farming across the country. Just sayin'.

[ron_newman]

For what it's worth, the OP didn't add the tags, I did.