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.
