Volunteer in Finca Luna

We offer a 9 months volunteer programme for young people (from 18 to 30 years old) who would like to learn or develop their skills in permaculture design, regenerative farming and sutainable living.

The volunteer program offers permaculture education, practical ecological farm work, multicultural volunteer community experience, all with a focus on learning by doing. The program is organized in cycles of 9 months with a group of 5/6 volunteers. It is perfect for a solid introduction to the principles permaculture design, the practice of regenerative agriculture and the work and life in an ecological farm. We also deepen into leadership building, capacity building and life design projects. We work 7 hours daily ranging from routine farm work (garden, forest, animals, infrastructure maintenance), individual and group project development, workshops, and community work in other farms.

We ask all participants to collaborate on cleaning, cooking and farm maintenance tasks.

Activities in the farm

Typically we organize the week around the following activities:

Farm maintenance and farm projects. Gardening, animal care, infrastructure repair, seedlings, land restoration, etc.;
Individual and group projects, where we apply permaculture design methodology;
Permaculture design and skills development workshops, also time to study deeper on your own;
Cleaning and organizing indoor and outdoor spaces;
Planning and evaluating work, participating in community meetings;
Documenting work and learning process;
Community work in the neighborhood and with local non-profit partner projects.

Example of projects

Veggies and trees Nursery (ongoing)
Gardening, vegetable production (ongoing)
Edible forest (ongoing)
Fruit harvest and transformation (ongoing)
Solar dehydrator project
Water mgmt infrastructure project (designed)
Energy production project
Soil building project (ongoing)
Forest planting project
Eco-construction projects (ongoing)
Beekeeping (ongoing)
Sheep raising (ongoing)
Infrastructure repair and maintenance (carpentry, masonry, painting, stone walls, water tanks, etc.) (ongoing)

Volunteer profile

Requirements are:

To be passionate about the environment, farming, and permaculture;
To be willing to learn rural and manual skills and to enjoy doing physical work;
To be ready to spend 9 months living and working on a farm with basic comfort;
To be deeply interested in permaculture design theory;
To have an open-minded attitude and predisposition to learning;
To be ready to participate in maintenance activities such as cooking and cleaning;
To be willing to learn spanish. Basic spanish preferred.
Preference will be given to candidates with fewer opportunities (facing cultural, economic or social marginalization).

Framework of the programme and costs

Finca Luna belongs to the Association Gaia Tasiri, a non-profit organisation registered in Spain. The program is fully funded by the EU and we give priority to people with fewer opportunities (people at risk of social, cultural or economic exclusion). If you are between 18 and 30 years old, there are bursaries available if you qualify under the European Solidarity Corps (ESC) requirements. ESC scolarships cover your costs of travelling, food, accomodation and pocket money. We currently receive groups of 5 to 6 volunteers and we have open scholarships for nationals or residents from Spain, Morocco, Armenia, Palestine, Georgia, Syria, Poland, Czech Republic, and Greece. To apply, please fill out this application form.

Apply for volunteering

Accommodation

Volunteers are hosted in our volunteer house inside the farm, in shared bedrooms. Most of the year, external facilities are used (solar shower, compost toilet). Internet connection is available around the library/common space.

In winter, we frequently work under the rain and temperature can go down to 3 degrees Celsius by night (it can be cold inside too). In summer, we normally work with 32C degrees and it can go up to 40 degrees.

Food

At Finca Luna we are still far from being food self-sufficient. With your help we’ll try to remedy that. Food is covered partially by our farm produces, but you would need to complement your diet by shopping in the nearby town and farmers’ market. ESC volunteers get money allocation for this. Food is prepared and shared among the group of volunteers.

Please note we are not a vegetarian / vegan project, but we welcome people following all kinds of diet. We believe there is no ethical, ecological or biological right and wrong answers regarding diets. What is important is mutual respect and openness to hear each other.

Permaculture training

At the moment, there is no onsite Permaculture Design Certificate course planned. But we constantly give permaculture workshop in order to work according to the permaculture concepts and methodology. The aim of our project is to train you so that you can become a social and environmental changemaker, improve your awareness of the natural environment, become proactive actor of your personal and professional life, and to become leader in your community. We focus on learning by doing, where mistakes are part of the process. Our goal is you enhance confidence and autonomy in conducting ecological farm tasks. Volunteers are trained through workshops (permaculture, composting, eco-construction, etc.) and the development of individual projects.

To apply for volunteering, please fill out this application form.

Apply for volunteering

Examples of Design Projects

Below are some examples of the kind of design work we’re doing on site. These are just some, there are many others.

Gardens

We have a big nursery and several gardens and there’s space for many more including a large chicken-tractor garden still under construction (for future large production: at the moment we don’t need so much).

So we have plenty of space & scope for some more intensive growing, which is ideal for someone who wants to design a whole garden from scratch, plant, maintain & harvest it (if you wish) or simply improving and maintaining the current ones.

Because with the online-learning & design time, we can do interesting team-work things like get the nursery plants before you arrive, so you have however many plants & varieties you decide waiting for you, as you will have worked out the preparation & growing times together with us & be well on the way to becoming an expert garden manager by the time you’ve completed your project.

Or you can simply help in the day to day maintenance of the existing gardens, nursery work and / or building of the larger infrastructure work, which is ongoing.

Forest Gardening

We have 8 embryonic forest-gardens on site, and if you wish to focus on trees, soil conditioning, making & improving swales, paths, hedges, & in general learning how to be a food-forest designer, there is plenty still to design & plant in each of these sites.

Our vision is that each of these small forest gardens will eventually join up into a big edible forest, which will be the whole site, but this takes quite a few years to all grow, so building soil & planting more & more varieties is still a priority.

The idea is that each part will have it’s own character, own peculiar art, cosy sitting-places, wide variety of food growing with least effort. All are future foraging-space for our chickens & other animals.

Hobbit Domes

One of the more adventurous (& controversial) projects that we started on site is an experiment in making small “hobbit-domes” with 90% waste materials.

This means finding creative ways of working with things like:

– plastic bales instead of straw-bales (in order to find good uses for the huge quantities of plastics which are currently causing havoc in landfills & the oceans)

– using cardboard as a building material (quite challenging also, but has great structural qualities, as well as being plentiful waste material from the banana industry here) – old car tyres, metal fencing, palets … whatever is normally pollution & can become a valuable resource, with some imagination & skill.

Eventually the vision for the domes is that they be covered with a thin fire-proof, water-proof ferro-cement shell that will in turn be a support-structure for climbing plants – so the buildings can disappear totally in the landscape.

At the moment we have a 2 early prototypes at various stages of building, which you can help with or take on as your individual project, as you prefer.

Here is a short video we made in spanish about this (it’s called Transforming Rubbish into Dreams & is presented as a crowd-funding project – which you are very welcome to use if you wish to fund your stay in a very original way)

Plant nursery

We currently have 3 plant nurseries: one for trees, one for seedlings and one for cuttings / bigger plants. Interns interested in this work usually take responsibility for one of them in turn, also contributing to design ideas for improving them if they wish.

As we love nurseries (most of our production is gifted to neighbours and friends at present, and we have exchanged all sorts of stuff for plants in the past) we’re always open to making new or improved ones, like this rather ‘wild design’ one of our students came up with :

The old trial greenhouse and the guinea-pig multifunctional greenhouse design we made for a future larger greenhouse.

The idea is that the guinea-pigs live inside the greenhouse, providing plants with Co2, compost & heat, in exchange for being in a nice warm sheltered place, where we can see them every time we pass through the greenhouse on the way to the camping site or the house, as the new structure will act also as a corridor in a well-transited place.

Chicken house

A large-scale chicken-tractor project, that will eventually join up the 6 big half-moon terraces & gardens is still being designed.

It aims to provide enough chicken meat & eggs for a small community – & of course also all the great de-bugging & fertilizing services that these wonderful creatures offer.

The chicken house is part of a big chicken & pig tractor project which is slowly being completed. This is a great design for someone ambitious who wants to contribute to a major structure of the whole.

Chickens in one of the tractor system gardens.

Solar Showers

The solar shower started as basic bottles + black pipes structure (in the picture) that we built in our first months here, & it worked fine most of the time, but was a little cold in winter.

It was re-designed in february 2015 & has been through several re-designs already.

We could do with more showers, so there’s scope for much creativity as there are lots of ways they can be designed, … eg. as an integral part of a wood-heated sauna-spar complex that we are fantasizing about from time … 🙂

Just this simple shower can be improved by building a compost-heated winter version & by adding a storage tank for hot water.

Compost Toilets

Again, we started with the very basic sawdust bucket-system which we still use in parts of the growing project as they work very well, but in 2015 a friend also built us a larger twin chamber composting toilet.

There’s still lots of scope for improving the existing structures and for experimenting & building various toilets of different types here, if anyone has the enthusiasm to organize it.

Apply for volunteering