2025 Slack Farms Interns

This year marks Woodlawn’s eleventh year hosting farm skills workshops. Beginning in 2015 with three interns who were eager for a WOOFER (World Organization of Organic Farmers) experience, Woodlawn began an experiment that turned into a program and a passion.

This year seven interns join us from HBLA Elmberg College in Linz, Austria. This remarkable school offers instruction in Agriculture and Economics and has a requirement for three separate internships as part of the curriculum. Ours is often the third internship for students, who have been to other farms before ours, in Finland, Sweden, Ireland and other parts of Europe and the Britain. We are particularly fortunate to have such seasoned interns from whom we often learn as much about farms as we teach.

This year we’ll be posting special projects which we’re linking to our new Substack, Slack Farms: The Garden Projects. Some of these are simple efforts which take a few hours and a heap of elbow grease, and some are projects that engage multiple days work by our erstwhile team, and a fair amount of thinking, trial and error and design contemplation. We’ve created a chronology of the four week internship which we hope you will enjoy, written by the interns themselves.

— Maggie O’Brien July 10, 2025

Thursday night through customs and baggage at Dulles Airport, en route almost 24 hours and still smiling. This photo was taken just after 10 pm, and we were all up and working the next morning — a great antidote to jet lag.