---
title: "Meditations of a farmer"
date: 2024-02-06T14:00:00Z
draft: false
images: [/images/farm.jpg]
description: "What's not to love about being a farmer?"
---

![](/images/farm.jpg)

Since 2014, whenever I would meet someone new, I have been able to give a pretty unique answer to the question "so, what do you do?". Being a farmer is part of my identity, and the fact that I was able to not only continue with what my grandfather built, but also do it in such a way that was according to my values (I have always tried to put Nature first) is still something that fills me with joy. But all good things come to an end, and this is no exception. This is an attempt to put down my meditations on all these years of having what's, perhaps, the most idealized job in the world.

Some contextualization is needed to understand what I'm about to write. Not because it requires any special knowledge, but rather it's what influenced my farming adventure and thus sits on the background of any and all attempts at drawing conclusions from said adventure. During those 9 years, I had the pleasure of taking care of two kiwi orchards that totaled an area of around 8 ha (or almost 20 acres, for my non-metric readers). I didn't plant them - that task belonged to my grandfather -, but I was able to improve on what was already done. 

By virtue of managing such a large area, I had two full time employees to help on the farm, which were already my grandfather's employees. But this meant that I was ultimately hit with the reality that the world changed quite a lot between my time, and his time: due to the degenerative disease that caused his untimely death, he had not only amassed quite a large debt in unpaid wages, but as well let the operation of the farm fall in disarray. Ultimately this all meant that the choice staring us in the face was either pack up and leave, or continue in a _professional_ manner, abandoning the familial nature of this activity to instead have a _entrepreneurial_ activity. This meant the establishment of an limited liability company, with proper accounting procedures, and ultimately the intermediation of every relationship through a bureaucratic process. 
 
Perhaps the most important realization I had was that being a farmer was barely half of what I was doing. I wasn't a farmer as much as I was a business owner, a business whose revenue ultimately came from farming - but a business nonetheless. Of course this shouldn't surprise anyone in the XXI century, but I was lucky enough to catch one of the last glimpses of the old world and unfortunate enough to have to manage its transition into the new world. I made a point to always consider the impact of my activity on Nature, and to have my employees working the minimum possible while earning above average wages, but this was only possible insofar as I could turn a profit at the end of the year. This is the reality of the modern world.

Profit wasn't a primary consideration on anything I did, but it was still a necessary condition. The implications and ramifications of this are quite hard to grasp, and it took me a long while to balance it all out. Allow me to illustrate: one of the changes we promoted was a conversion of the orchard to the organic mode of production. At face value, this is was something obvious; if we professed our love for Nature, this was the bare minimum. But there's another side to this: a kiwi is now a commodity. Unless you're getting them directly from the producer, there's not much you can do to differentiate one kiwi from the other. Certifying our kiwis as organic was a way to differentiate them from the rat race of a commodity market. 

This meant that I was now able to fetch a higher price and access new, and more lucrative, markets - those of Central and Northern Europe. But get this: an organic kiwi is still an organic kiwi is still an organic kiwi. There was very little to differentiate my kiwis from the kiwis with the same certificate coming from, say, Greece. There were for sure some qualitative differences, but ultimately it all boiled down to the price I could offer.

Let all this sink in for a minute. Not only, in our pursuit of a more sustainable way of farming in the context of the modern world, were we being pushed towards having to ship our fruits a few thousand km away (with all the costs, monetary and other, that are associated), but we hadn't actually achieved what we set out to do - namely, to differentiate our kiwis, and escape the rat race. While it's true that we were more profitable (but not by much, as the change to organic also comes with a decrease in quantity produced), it's quite hard to say that we had achieved anything of importance.

But perhaps the most insidious part of it all isn't even this, but rather the dissolution of almost all of the local bonds that could be formed. Instead of selling to a local company (or, imagine this, directly to consumers!), we were pushed towards to the export market, with all that it entails. One of the most significant outlays we had during the year was the purchase of manure to fertilize the orchard - and due to the necessity of having said manure certified, it had to come from the other side of the Iberia peninsula. All transactions were registered in several different forms - a shipping note, an invoice, the bank transfer proof, and so on. And don't get me started on the certifications - what a morose, completely inadequate thing. The only place where we could still fight it was in the permanent and temporary workforce we had to help us perform the jobs needed during the season - and while we were successful in only hiring local people, the pressures to hire migrant workers were very present.

And for all our professed love for Nature, let's be honest: the whole operation is not _natural_. The amount of area we manage is too large, which means we're forced to introduce machines into our midst: we need a tractor, even if we use it for ~15 days through the year; we need battery powered scissors, that make trimming the plants on time a reality with the full-time employees we have available; we need a very powerful water pump to irrigate the orchard, otherwise the plants are very likely to wither away during a heat wave; and all the plastic necessary to carry the water from the artificial pond (lined with rubber to avoid leaks) to the trees themselves. And so on, and so forth. Thank God we can manage without using any sort of pesticide, herbicide, fungicide, or one of the million ways to wage chemical warfare on Nature; but still, there's a feeling that there's a bit of spiritual warfare still at play here.

While talking about all this with a friend, he told me I should still be proud of what I accomplished. For all matters and purposes, and given the context of this modern world, all I did was still a good thing. And, for sure, it could've have been done in a much more destructive fashion. If our measuring stick is the rest of the modern world, then we did make the world a better place - and I do believe that. But the problem is that it only works because of the piss poor state of what's around us. And that realization is kind of hard to let go of.

I'm at peace with the fact that I'm not a (professional) farmer anymore - hopefully I'm still one at heart. This was something I knew was coming for more than two years now, and that has given me enough time to process everything. In the meantime I've already had the pleasure to experience the life of a normal person, one who works for a wage. And this has also lead to some interesting conclusions.

Maybe it's just my personality, but being so engulfed in my job was just opening an avenue for yet another facet of the spiritual war that characterizes modernity. And let me tell you, I _deeply_ cared for what I was doing; I was continuing my family business, I was taking care of land that belonged to us for a long time, I cared for the people that worked for me, and I really saw this as a golden opportunity to launch the foundations of something that my kids (which I'm yet to have) could one day work on. 

And it seemed that all of this was _used_ against me in some form or other. Let me tell you, there's no feeling like having to put payroll on a credit card! Or the feeling that you'll lose the whole production because a pump decided to stop working right in the middle of the largest heat wave of the season. Or that a pipe burst during the night, and of course that it's the 20m of pipe (out of more than 1km) that are passing under an asphalted road - so what the f-- do I do? And so on, and so forth.

The most wonderful thing was that we were almost always able to find a solution. And even when no solution was to be found, things still strangely worked out for the best after a while - I went through more than one situation where even though at first I was hopeless with how things happened, it actually turned out that what happened was for the best. There's a deep feeling that I wouldn't have found Christ without all these trials; and it's not that I believe that these were _tests_ or some other silly thing, but rather just part of the growth process needed to get there. I'm not proud that my spirit bent so much with all these difficulties, but for sure I'm happy and grateful that it never broke down. Just like a tree in the wind, I guess.

