WWOOF Italy: Agricultural Wisdom

23 April 2011

Agriculture is probably the most difficult profession that exists. Aside from the obvious physical work and the perhaps less obvious vulnerability of a farmer's livelihood, it requires incredible mental labor, as well.

Physical Labor: When speaking of serious, “respectable” farming,* farming is grueling work. Machines can make most of this farming nice and easy, but only few machines can be defended as part of respectable farming. I spent over an hour cutting salad greens in Giancarlo's greenhouse and then washed, dried and packed them. This all for about the equivalent of about four bags of store bought salad mix. How could it have taken so long only to do the very last step on the production chain? While before I complained about a costly $4 salad bag, $4 certainly could not cover the costs of the labor to make this salad. Those salad mixes come from farms where the ground is leveled to such a perfection that a machine can cut all of the greens at their roots in one easy sweep. Because they use a machine that does not differentiate between plants, they must use chemical pesticides to keep all non-wanted plants, or weeds, away, lest they make their way into the salad mix. Then, the greens are put through a giant machine that cleans and dries them; after they are bagged (by machine) with gases that make them keep fresher and longer so they can be shipped wide and far. For such expensive systems to be used, this must be a very large-scale system to make it efficient. Hundreds or thousands of acres thus need to be planted to make up the costs of these specialized pieces of equipment. With specialized equipment, they cannot rotate crops year to year as is healthy for the soil, so surely more chemicals are needed to make the same greens grow yearly on such over-exploited land. With a system this large and the consumer so far, the health and the safety is barely questioned, encouraging companies to skimp on both in order to raise profit margins (for example, using poorly paid labor). While this is incredibly financially efficient, it is hardly serious, “respectable” agriculture. This is “muscle flexing, conquer nature” agriculture. The amount of petroleum used for the machines is hundreds of times more than that used when doing it by hand. The earth that is leveled flat looses its much needed air pockets, and the pesticides ruin the natural soil humus and ruin water supplies in their chemical runoff. While on a large-scale it is certainly more economical than my cutting greens with scissors by hand, those bags of salad come at the expense of many, while my bags of salad come at the expense of few. I used water to water them from our manmade lake on our property, I fertilized them with last year's compost, I hand-picked out the weeds myself, and instead of blasting them clean with water, I hand rinsed them in a plugged sink. Nevertheless, my bag of greens would NEVER cost as little as the other bag of greens, not even when I, the unpaid WWOOFer, is the one who picked them. So imagine when it is a worker demanding a respectable wage!

This is where we need to come to terms with our food reality. We are what we eat. However, this seems little believed; rather we tend to all think that we are what we wear or we are what we own. We are willing to spend money on a better shirt or a better television set, but we try to pay the least possible for food.

No security: (As said by Giancarlo) A farmer takes his money and instead of putting it in an actual bank, he trades it for seeds. Then he buries the seeds in the ground, hoping that they will bear fruits that he can sell for more money. However, if the ground freezes too soon, if there is too little rain, if any number of factors present themselves slightly out of the ordinary, a farmer risks loosing all of that money he put into his underground bank.

Mental Labor: Andrea, a fellow WWOOFer who worked for years as a financial advisor, began WWOOFing, and now has quit his job to reawaken his grandfather's old farmland, said, “A farmer's analytical work is world's more complex than that of someone working in an office. An office worker analyzes fragments of information. A farmer, on the other hand, never makes a decision without considering a world of other factors. If he must choose where to plant a tree, he is not just thinking of the tree but how it will affect the life and structures around it, how it will be affected by the life and the structures around it and what it will be doing five, ten and twenty years in the future. He can never look at a fragmented picture: all factors must be considered.

Giancarlo had a friend, much like Andrea, who had lived his early work life in an office and not on the land.

“I know what farmer's do wrong,” he told Giancarlo. “They do not know how to schedule!”
Giancarlo tried to explain to him, “But agriculture cannot be scheduled. It is not an office job where if you do not finish the outline tonight you can finish it tomorrow morning.” Giancarlo's friend was convinced he had the answer, though, and bought a farm to try his hand at agriculture. After five years of learning and struggle, he returned to Giancarlo.
“You were right! I did not finish something one day in the fields. It got late, I got tired. It could wait till the morning, anyway, I thought. No big deal. Well, morning came, and it was raining. I said I would wait until it stopped raining. They next day it continued. Then it stopped, but the ground was wet. When the ground dried, it started raining again. By the time the ground was dry, it was too late and I had to wait until the next year.” Agricultural timetables are extremely precise and important...yet they are entirely dependent upon and vulnerable to outside factors.

*Serious, respectable farming is what Giancarlo uses when he means the utmost of organic. It is farming that does not reap benefits at the expense of the land. This means it respects natural cycles, respects how much the earth is able to bare, and does not attempt to collect more.