Get Your Hands Dirty

rumbum.com | May 21, 2010

As reported by Tara Dodrill, on rumbum.com  May 21, 2010:

” A distant cousin to ecotourism, Agrotourism offers you the chance to spend a weekend, week or a month in a new habitat, learning while doing. We recently profiled some great “agro light” vacation spots, but if your idea of agrotourism involves getting seriously down and dirty then these spots will be more your thing.

Ready to get up at dawn on a ranch and “muck” stalls before heading out on the trail to wrangle cattle? No? How about learning how to handle an alpaca and weaving the soft textured wool into a new scarf. These spots will get your hands dirty and your soul …

Want Some Milk? Get it Yourself at Weatherbury Farms

Cross-generational activities and chores foster a true teamwork environment and the satisfaction of a job well done at Weatherbury Farms, a Pennsylvania dairy farm.

The only concrete you’ll encounter at Weatherbury is around the swimming pool, which washes the salty sweat away after a day spent hoeing, tossing hay and sheering sheep. Your kids will love getting to bottle feed baby animals, and play around in the garden. But be warned: you want to eat breakfast, you’ll have to go to the chicken coop and collect some eggs before pulling up chair.

Even better, you’ll get to learn how to determine if a goat is a male or female, which is an important skill when you are sent to the pen to do a little milking. Once the milk is collected, guests can learn how to make cheese and butter. Once the all-natural version tickles your taste buds, the plastic wrapped variety full of preservatives will no longer suffice.

Rest assured, this dairy farm adventure isn’t all work an no play. Guests at Weatherbury Farms get to sit around a cozy campfire at night, or relax in the twilight playing checkers and drinking lemonade on the porch of the guest house.”

editor’s note:  It’s always nice to get mentioned on the web.  However, please note that Weatherbury Farm is a beef farm not a dairy farm.  We don’t have milking goats either.  We are beginners in the making of cheese and butter, having made some for ourselves.  Perhaps one day we will be accomplished enough to share those skills with our guests.  And chores occur after breakfast — collecting eggs for the next day’s breakfast is, however, one of our guests’ most popular activities during chores.