Strange world

Tuesday. Overcast, nice fresh autumn air. Yesterday was sunny and cold. In the morning, the meadow was covered with frost, the sun shore over it, it was so beautiful. I guess, that's the advantage of living in a place where it rains a lot. One gets to enjoy the sun so much. Just like summer in Quebec.

This place here is quite surreal in many ways, and quite enjoyable too. The atmosphere is such that the surreality feels quite funny.

I can start with this house and farm building, the story of which is striking in itself.

I am not sure if the house should be called a house, it is rather some sort of house/castle. It used to be a huge brick farm, with lots of stables. The previous owner converted it into a house on one side, on the other a studio, and office space in between. The house part contains gigantic rooms of all sorts, a huge workshop, and a room that looks like (or is?) a dance hall. The office space contains several rooms only separated by walls, the ceilings being all opened on the beamed roof, and it contains also a kitchen and two toilets. The studio is another insanely huge room. (I keep thinking on how much energy must be used to keep this entire building warm.) The house is surrounded by another gigantic grass garden, with some trees, and a quite big brick and cement barn, and some fields and meadow behind.

The man who did all this conversion work had big projects in mind, we don't really know which (perhaps he didn't quite either). To get this work done, he borrowed money from several banks, and lied to the banks and gave the house as insurance for the loans several times. Then he didn't get the job from his step-father as he thought he would, and he went bankrupted. And the parents from Viola bought the place, and invited Viola and David to come and farm the land.

Viola's parents live in the house part, Viola and David and their two children (and the wwoofers) in the office space, and a student rents the studio. My bedroom is one of the biggest rooms in which I ever slept. It has a huge door/window, a bed, a sofa, a shelf, a desk, and it still feels empty.

This previous owner man was rather imposing in height and breadth, and he wanted to make all the doors larger and longer. So he got the openings made bigger, but then he realized that it would cost too much money to also change all the doors, so he got the openings turned back into their normal size. Indeed, inside the toilets, one can see that the tiles on the wall above the doors have been cut and that the joints have been remade. Now that I know where this comes from, when I sit on the toilet and look at the tiles above the door, I cannot stop thinking about this man who wanted to make all his doors bigger.

Now, this village in which the house/farm/castle finds itself is also quite surreal. The village lies about 40 kilometers from Hamburg. The area is completely flat, and mostly covered with fields. The village used to be composed of only farmers, and today there remain only... 20 (says David)! Twenty farms in one village! In fact, the village has a couple of shops, and a gas station. They are all conventional farms, relatively big I think. There is only one bio farm in the village, and it is the one of my hosts, Viola and David. The houses which are not farms anymore are now suburban cottages which look like they have been used just yesterday to shoot the Truman Show; grass perfectly cut, flowers perfectly blooming, windows perfectly clean, fences perfectly straight.

So as of direct neighbors, Viola and David have on the right, one such suburban cottage, homing a retired couple, of which the man, says David "talks a lot". It is such a marvelously strange sight, to come out of the cow stables, after having cleaned the shit, or to come back from having fed the ever-hungry pigs, and to encounter, right in front of you, this perfect suburban cottage, with perfectly clean windows, and perfectly cut grass. Perhaps the man would be outside, smoking a cigarette. At times they order some vegetables or meat from the farm, in which case Viola crosses the fence, with a big pumpkin in the hands, because they "want to have some pork chops and salad for lunch, and pumpkin would go quite well with it". This is the neighbor next door.

The neighbor in front of the house is one of the twenty farmers. The son now runs the farm, and the father, 80 years old (but you would never think), is still there. They have enormous tractors and dumpsters of all sorts, constantly coming and going, often parked in front of the farm, and which make you feel, when you meet them on the road, like the country is going to war. I didn't know that they have those cord-walky-talkies inside those huge tractors, just like they do on the huge road trucks in America.

One day the grand-father came over, and we chatted a bit. He was impressed about my German (which all Germans are, and I could never understand why, as my German is poor at best, but someone recently told me the key to this riddle; in fact, none of the foreigners who speak English ever bother to learn German, so it is very rare for Germans to meet anyone who can say more than a few words in their language. I feel a bit sorry for them...), and he asked me how old I was. He sounded not so happy to hear the answer. David later explained to me why: he asks their age to all the girls who come here, because he has a 17 years-old grandson for whom he wants to find a girl. (This amuses David quite, as many other things.) The grandfather also always wants to know what's going on here on the farm, and he checks on every single thing that is being done here, and David said that as soon as he turns the tractor on, the neighbor gets out of his house to see what is going on.

Now, in the middle of this surrounding, you have to picture my hosts and their farm; among these enormous fields, these farms dealing with hectares and animals not by the dozen but by the hundreds, here are: two hectares of land, two cows, seven pigs (three adults and four babies), a dozen geese, about 10 chickens, and less than 100 meters square of garden.

David comes from England, 23 years old. Viola grew up near Hambourg, and is 26. They have two small children. They met in England, and traveled and worked on farms in South Africa and Japan, and they wanted to traveled more, but then the babies came along. So they settled on a farm, first in the middle of Germany, and now here. Viola studied social care, for handicapped people. Her mother says that she is just naturally wonderful at this, and I can believe it; she simply seems to be an angel just fallen from the sky. When she smiles her eyes light up the most benevolent and friendly and innocent glare one could think of. She is graceful and gifted with everything she does, and everything, from feeding the baby to shoveling shit, seems to be just purely simple and easy.

David has been doing farming since he is 15. Since that age he knows that he wants to do farming, and he also knows that he wants to do it "small". He is quite passionate about farming, yet not a frustrated way, and he still manages to at the same time be very aware of the complete absurdity of how we deal with food now, to be very well informed of how things in the real world work, and yet remaining peaceful and cheerful. I find that quite amazing. Both he and Viola are, in general, among the most peaceful and cheerful people I ever met, and it seems as though they are not even aware of their peculiarity.

(When David said that word, "small", I had to think again about that mechanic's words, back in February in La Creuse, who, when Julie told him that they had a bio farm, but small, replied, "of course, it's hard to do bio and big". For him, it was just so obvious. Now I am thinking, we tend to think that there is no relationship between nature of things and their scale, that anything can come in any size, but it simply isn't the case. I think now of cells, which can't be bigger than a certain diameter, above which the surface area of the membrane cannot anymore match the needs of the volume inside for gas and nutrient exchange with the outside.)

As one could guess, the farmers of the neighborhood at first thought not so good of David and Viola's endeavors, and thought they were crazy, and they were not so friendly to them. But now apparently things are going better.

David said about the conventional farmers, "They cannot understand me, and I cannot understand them". They not only live in a different world, but have a totally different job. Conventional modern farming is more about management than farming, about knowing how to deal with budget and numbers than how to deal with animals and plants. David said that in fact it is quite difficult to be a conventional modern farmer, as one has to be quite good at these things; management, budgets, numbers. I think that it is in England where, he said, today to study farming one takes more semesters of management courses (two years), than of farming courses per say (one year?). In this kind of farming, one always has to do calculations of all sorts, and, David said, he could not do that. And they, they could not do what he does. If anything, because the animals and plants that they are thought to farm could not survive to the "natural" handling that they get here. More on that later.

Die Familie

I find myself now in the north of Germany, in a small village near Tostedt, between Bremen and Hamburg. This morning while feeding the animals, my hands and feet froze, for the first time since last Winter; I had forgotten how much I don't enjoy this feeling.

I have a lot to say about this new place and people, but I still wish to say a few words about the last farm in Baden-Württemberg. For some reason I have trouble writing these days, but I must make an effort and record at least something about this family with whom I spent these two weeks. All I have written about it is a complaint about the silly conversion of petrol into milk by sick cows (although I just learned that in this area they do something which sounds even more silly: growing corn to make biogas, more on this later).

I don't know how. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to explain... The morning when I left, Hilse and Helmut and Oma all had tears in their eyes when I said goodbye. Tears that they didn't want to show, that they quickly hid behind a smile, and just to think about it I want to cry as well. And I could not say why. We are quite different in many ways, and yet, we love each other so much. This is all quite strange.

They were all such interesting characters.

Oma ("grand-mother").

She is 90 years-old, but you would never guess. She has trouble walking now, but her mind is sharp as an eagle's beak. All day long she works in the kitchen, preparing food for at least seven people every day, and besides the stable times, I mostly worked with her in the kitchen. She had an infinite patience and understanding, and it seemed that you could do all the mistakes you wanted and that she would never get angry.

Once, I cooked lunch, and made and experimental leek pie. The next day Oma said, "so today I will experiment as well", and she mixed left-over lettuce and brussel-sprouts for the salad. She seemed to feel quite rebellious doing that.

The farm used to be hers and her husband's. In her time, they farmed a little bit of everything. For a long time she had to do every thing herself because her husband got injured first on the farm and again in the war. One day, she told me that had been against the farm becoming so big.

Siegfried, the helper (picture on top).

He is 70 years old and slightly mentally handicapped. He has been working on the farm for ages, and now that he is so old, they would have returned him to his family - but as of family, he only has a sister, who is even more deranged than him - so they kept him. He still works every day, cleaning the stable, feeding the animals, sending the cows to milking - and seems quite happy about it.

Siegfried mostly smiled, and looked at you straight in the eyes when you looked at him, and often I wondered if he was not the bright one amongst all of us. It seemed as though in the end he never said anything stupid.

He used to be alcoholic and to drink several litters of apple-schnaps every day, until the day when he ended up in the hospital and the doctor told him that if he didn't stop then he would die; so he stopped.

One evening, as we were both going to our respective bedrooms, Siegfried invited me into his. He showed me his collection of Teddy bears, his tape-player on which he plays german folk music every night when he goes to bed (very loud, because he is a bit deaf). Some of the Teddy bears could make a sound when you pressed them, and he particularly wanted me to hear those.

One day, Siegfried dressed himself quite clean. I asked where he was going, and he happily joked that he was going to find himself a young wife. In fact, explained Hilse, he was going to some pig celebration in the neighborhood.

Hilse and Helmut.

Helmut is Oma's son. Hilse grew up in a neighboring village. The two run the farm today. They had three children, and of them one still works on the farm. Hilse: The first moment I saw her at the train station, when she picked me up, she was smiling - and she never stopped. Always full of energy, she always does everything well and fast, and she seems to have infinite joy and love for life and people and animals. Helmut: often he was not present at meals, because he had to take advantage of good days to go work the fields with the tractor. He asked me lots of questions about what I want to do with agriculture, and he was interested to know what is permaculture, and he wanted me to go and visit a school-farm which is in the area.

And I could still say lots of things about the other people (the grandson and the two other helpers who were there, a mexican girl and an australian one). They were all so special, such strong people.

***********

The work.

At the beginning, I thought it was abominable. I had a lot of trouble not to be disgusted by the shit everywhere (for, to increase milk yield, the cows are fed silage, fermented grass and corn, which gives them diarrhea), on the floor, on the milking tubes. The shit which would splash onto us, in the milking hole, when the cows above would shit on the concrete floor. I was disgusted to see Hilse and Helmut's clothes and hands always stinky and covered in shit.

The first days, I was horrified to give milk to the calves to drink in a bucket (because the calves in conventional farming are usually separated from the mother, because it's inconvenient to keep them together). At the beginning, they don't quite know how to drink in this way, and they desperately search for a teat to suck, and they plunge their head fully in the milk and half drown.

But then, after a while, I got struck to notice that I started to half enjoy all this - the shit, the cows, the calves drowning in the milk buckets. I found myself laughing, yes, laughing, when the calves could not drink in the bucket, but instead mostly made lots of bubbles in it.

How striking. What I had, at first, found horrible, could become, after two weeks, almost enjoyable. This reminded me of Georges Orwell's account of the spanish civil war ("Looking Back on the Spanish War"). I had been struck when reading it, by how badly he wanted to fight, and by how much, in the end, as awful as the conditions in the trenches were (even though there was no fighting), they enjoyed it. Now I think that it must be the feeling of brotherhood that does that.

And I am so shocked to see this in myself as well, in this travel. I would much rather dig shit every day all day long with people with whom I get along, than do the most beautiful and meaningful work with people with whom I don't.

A friend of mine who studied anthropology and other social things, says that the greatest need for humans is to be recognized by a group. More and more, I think that she is probably right.

Ah! le bon lait

Samedi. Pluie encore.

Une ferme laitière conventionelle dans l'état de Baden-Württermberg. Avant de venir ici, plusieurs personnes m'ont demandé sur quel genre de ferme je m'en allais. J'ai constaté que je ne savais pas quoi leur répondre. En effet, j'ai reçu si peu de réponses de la vingtaine de mails que j'ai envoyés à des fermes en Allemagne, qu'à la fin j'ai dit ok à presque tous ceux qui m'ont écrit, sans autre forme de procès. Et heureusement car, si j'avais su à quoi m'attendre ici, je ne serais sans doute pas venue, mais maintenant que j'y suis, je suis ravie de faire cette expérience; j'ai le sentiment qu'elle a quelque chose d'assez fondamental.

Car en découvrant le fonctionnement de cette ferme laitière très standard, j'ai l'impression de découvrir vraiment le monde tel qu'il est. Voilà d'où viennent vraiment tous ces litres de lait, de fromage, de yaourt, et de crème glacée que j'ai ingurgités au cours de ma vie (jusqu'à ce que je réalise qu'ils me rendent malade...).

Pourquoi est-il devenu impossible de produire de la nourriture de façon saine, et d'en faire suffisamment d'argent pour se maintenir dans le système? La réponse m'apparaît si clairement ici sur cette ferme, au milieu de tous ces tracteurs dont les roues sont plus hautes que moi (au moins 5): c'est parce que nous mangeons du pétrole et du minerai. Voilà ce qui nous a permis de passer de 90 à 10 % d'agriculteurs. Parce que les tracteurs travaillent pour nous.

Et oui, ça paraît évident. Et pourtant, j'ai l'impression que je ne l'avais jamais réalisé avant. Avant de voir ces vaches qui passent leur vie dans l'étable, nourries à coups de pelleteuse. Avant de voir ces hectares de champs qui ne voient plus passer sur eux que des pneus. Avant d'entendre le bruit des tracteurs, à longueur de journée, dans cette belle et verte campagne.