As happy as a piglet in merde de cochon

IT’S DINNER time at the pig farm in the Pyrénées. And after weeks of scorching south of France sunshine, the heavens have opened and turned the pig pens into mud baths.

Which is lots of fun for the black Gascon pigs who are squelching about in their element, and not so much fun for moi — their waitress for the evening.

No, I’m not having much fun at all and I couldn’t be any further from my element. I’m straddling a slippery mountain bank just above the pigs’ mud-caked snouts, trying my level best to hold onto my balance, two full-to-overflowing buckets of pig-feed, and a fast-disappearing sense of oneness with nature. It’s July 2011, I’m four days deep into my French farming adventure, and for about the fifth time that hour wondering how on earth I was going to get myself on the next flight out of there.

I’m not a natural-born pig farmer; the goats on the hillside could have told you that. So what exactly was a 24-year-old Irish woman with a glittering (OK, ‘steady’) career in advertising doing doling out pig-feed in the middle of the mountains in France? A very good question, and not too far from the sort my parents had taken to leaving on my answering machine for a few days now.

My parents’ concern, although unwanted, was not entirely unwarranted. You see, having shown absolutely zero interest in agriculture for the best part of 24 years, I’d all of a sudden decided to fly to France to try my hand at organic farming.

My sudden departure into agriculture wasn’t motivated by a sudden interest in agriculture or anything logical like that. God forbid. No, instead it came from me wanting to spend a few months in France without having to spend very much money. I’d just returned home from a year in Canada, and had a few months to fill before my next visa would come through.

I typed something like “fun in France for no money” into my laptop’s search-bar and after a very interesting and educational 10 minutes filtering out some of the more risqué results, I stumbled upon an intriguing website called HelpX.

HelpX, or Help Exchange to give it its full and proper title, was founded in 2001 by an Englishman named Rob Prince. The premise is very simple — Help Exchange is a work-exchange website where cash-strapped travellers can connect with hosts around the world and arrange to work for them for a few hours a day in exchange for room and board.

HelpX is not a million miles away from WWOOF — the organic farming association founded in the 1970s by Sue Coppard. Coppard, a secretary in London, founded WWOOF as a way for young people in the cities to visit and volunteer on organic farms at the weekends and learn more about the organic farm movement.

Originally the WWOOF acronym stood for ‘Working Weekends On Organic Farms’. In the intervening years, the WWOOF movement has expanded into almost one hundred countries and its acronym has since evolved into ‘World Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms’.

As a Help Exchange or WWOOF volunteer you receive room and board in exchange for hours worked. The main difference between Help Exchange and WWOOF is that to be a WWOOF host, your farm or home must be run on organic principles. Help Exchange makes no such demands of its hosts, so the types of organisations listed are much broader. With HelpX you could find yourself volunteering in a hostel in Helsinki, a circus in Bulgaria or an eco-farm in Ecuador.

It’s a very economical, not to mention interesting, way to travel and it’s a great way to pick up new skills — both language and agricultural. For me, what started out as a whim has somehow turned into a way of life. After a baptism of fire at the pig farm in the Pyrénées I ended up volunteering in France for 10 months between 2011 and 2012, and this year, I’ve spent four months in Spain so far.

My placements have been so varied that they’d make a guidance counsellor blush. I’ve babysat camels and exotic cats, bottle-fed kid goats and lambs, and, for a particularly memorable afternoon, was a birthing partner for a lovely first-time-mother sow called Courage. I’ve made hay and brought it home in several different countries. I’ve taught drawing, painting and piano-playing. I’ve been stung and bitten in just about every place imaginable. My French is très bien, and my Spanish is... not as awful as it used to be. I also have a permanent farmers’ tan.

But back to those first few days as a volunteer on the pig-farm. I marked my second day as a rookie farm-hand helping to castrate a bunch of less-than-impressed piglets. My third day saw the local mountain goat gang take against me, as I tried to run them out of the vegetable garden.

So there I was on day four, soaked to the skin and feeling more than slightly frazzled. The posse of pigs gaze up at me from the pen below, snorting hungrily, their mud-caked snouts raised in readiness for the shower of grain that should rain down on them any second now, once this new helper got her act together. That’s when my so called foot-hold gives up the ghost completely and I start to slide helplessly down the bank towards the muddy depths of the pig pen below.

In a last-ditch desperate attempt to save myself, I fling the buckets of feed up into the air (to the delight of the watching goats) and, flailing wildly, somehow manage to grab onto the fence with one outstretched hand.

Unfortunately for me, the fence is electrified and since electrified fences are not really known for their steadying properties in France, or in Ireland for that matter, I go vaulting head-first up and over the fence, becoming airborne for one long second before landing mouth open, face-down in organic, locally sourced (traceable to about two feet away), freshly produced merde de cochon.

Délicieux, it was not.