La Vita e Bella

"So, you have decided to become a peasant?" Was the first reaction of Italian cousins to news that I had decided to switch over to beef farming from journalism. I was in Italy for Easter after hitching a ride with my parents and I was trying to explain the complex rationale behind the decision, while at the same time trying to work out what 'life change' might be in Italian without referring inadvertently to some sort of painful transformative operation. 

"In England we call it becoming a gentleman farmer," I said.

"But you still have to shovel crap?," my cousin replied.

"Well, yes."

"So you are a peasant."

I gave up explaining at that point. There are few words more loaded with meaning in Italian than 'contadino' (peasant) and it tends to be used exclusively in a pejorative sense i.e. He is such a contadino, meaning uncouth, ignorant and unrefined. This is in many ways the ultimate insult to an Italian as the majority of the population are perhaps only one or two generations, at most, from the land and can't the bear the possibility of returning to their roots. In their eyes, they had the good sense to disappear years ago into the heart of urban Italy where jobs are better paid and the possibility of escaping your mother is greater. This is why Tuscany, Le Marche, Puglia and Sicily are full of the empty farm houses that British buyers love to renovate, and which are then burgled by organised Albanian gangs.  

It is understandable then why in the industrial north, where my family come from, that the notion of willingly returning to a less profitable and harder working way of life makes little sense. However, there maybe a slowly changing attitude driven by Italy's almost interminable economic crisis. To visit the country is to realise how lucky we are to have never entered the Euro. The entire place is littered with half completed building projects and unused apartments - Veneto alone is estimated to have 220,000 empty industrial and residential properties for which there are no buyers at all. The negative flip side to this is that youth unemployment is hovering at 40 per cent, while farming is starting to look attractive as a source of possible employment. Italian farms benefit from higher subsidies because of their smaller size, while at the same time growing highly commercial cash crops like soya and grapes. Also there is no currency risk as subsidies are paid in Euros. It is unsurprising, then, that young entrepreneurs have come out of university and gone back to revitalise the long abandoned family plot with agri tourism ventures or brand-new wine production facilities.

Grape growing in particular seems to have taken off to an extent that was unimaginable 20 years ago. The reason for this is that international food supply chains have grown longer and longer. Italian grape surpluses are often shipped to regions in Europe where there is a shortage and the same is true of grapes from Georgia and increasingly Armenia. The key point is that grapes are then fermented and bottled in the nominal country of origin, which is why producers can say "made in France/Germany/Italy" on their wares. However, like everything else, our food and drink is subject to the inevitable market force that home production cannot meet international demand, so must be bulked out somehow. For the most part, the system works well, until you find a horse in your lasagne. Pass the Barolo....

Asolo, also known as the jewel of Veneto, or the city of a 100 beautiful views. Hemingway got drunk here once. 

Down the deep lanes

The farming project has hit a hurdle, in this case what appears to be a global shortage of hurdles. There are apparently no metal gates with sheeting to be found anywhere in the United Kingdom for at least another three months. No one knows why, though I suspect the number of crush barriers evident at the London Marathon has a role to play.

Luckily, stoicism comes with the job and I have, in any case, rapidly adjusted to the peculiar demands of"farmer time." This is where any job carried out by a contractor, supplier, neighbour or friend takes a minimum of 6 months from the first approach and filters down as far as adding an extra hour to an agreed meeting time at the pub. Everyone understands the system as farmers are not really constrained by deadlines, as such, but rather the cycle of the seasons; if it is suddenly sunny and settled you cut the hay rather than disappear to a dinner party agreed three months in advance. On the other hand, it is never wise to lend money to people who think in terms of seasonal solstices, which also rules out Druids and warlocks of all kinds. 

The delay is frustrating enough to make me wonder whether I couldn't galvanize a load of steel myself in one of the old sheds. My neighbour tells is that all you need is an acid bath and a load of molten nickel so it can't really be that difficult. The gates are vital because cattle now need penning for regular TB testing and the only way to pursuade a 450 kg heffer to cooperate is to herd it into a crush and lock it tight with a yoke. The other method, which I had to learn at Bicton college, is to subdue a cow by sticking your fingers in its nose and locking its head back tight. In theory it won't go anywhere, and neither would you if a burly farmer stuck his fingers in your nose. Anyway, no gates means no cows for now. So I am instead going to Italy to see the family. 

I did have an interesting trip to see a cattle crush in North Devon. Unfortunately it was too small for my chosen animals, but it was a fascinating trip into James Ravilious country. North Devon is defined as North of the A30 corridor and boy doesn't it take a long time to get there. The total remoteness of the area has conspired to preserve the last of the small tenanted farms in Devon from an invasion of pony paddocks and commuters. North Devon villages are the last place to see proper tumbledown barns and acres and acres of corrugated iron roofs in their full rusting glory. It is rather like the Devon I remember from my childhood when a decent cottage in Ashton cost £10,000. Anyway, James Ravilious, son of the artist Eric Ravilious, documented the lives of North Devon folk as part of the Beaford archive. This is well worth checking out as one of the great social documentary experiments in modern Britain. Ravilious took over 60,000 photos as part of his effort to capture the landscape and nothing better defines a labour of love. 

Deutschland over all

I disappeared from the farm for a few days to visit friends in Frankfurt. I had had enough of hedge clearing and chainsawing and decided to return to the land of my fathers to swap agricultural for cultural pursuits. 

My friends have moved from London to a small village, really an outer suburb of Frankfurt, and have made quite a stir. To begin with they don't own a car, which marks them out as dangerously subversive in such a car mad culture, and secondly they dared to buy a wreck of a house and renovate it much like the British would do. Now the Germans are not afraid to proffer an opinion if they think it is in your best interest, so it was no surprise that the next door neighbour actually came out, uninvited, to tell them while they were moving in that they were making a mistake in buying the place. I can testify that the only problem with the house is that it stands next to the neighbour's ugly 1980s block of flats. 

Inevitably, it isn't long before observations about german farms start creeping in and it was interesting to note the differences in farming culture between the UK and Germany. To begin with, walking around a German village you can still detect the smell of a manure pile in even the most yummy mummy of family areas. This is the result of an accident of history which means that instead of wild and lonely Devon-style farmhouses, most German farms are located within a village limits for security and mutual defence. Unlike our culture, which has seen few real instances of burning and pillage since the civil war, or a night out in Torquay on a Saturday, German farmers have faced a succession of invasions and preying robber barons over the centuries. Sticking together made sense, even if in a modern context everyone is likely to moan about the smell of your barns. Indeed, village manure piles can be a hazard, I remember my father had to rescue "a tired and emotional" neighbour who failed to negotiate the bend leading to his house and ended up in the local farmer's muck heap. 

Inevitably, the business side is harder in Germany as farms are universally small and landownership tends to get split up by inheritance claims - in Germany you have "Erberecht" (the right to your inheritance) which often condemns farms to be endlessly subdivided amongst squabbling siblings. However, the basic smallscale of the system works to its avantage. The European subsidy system tends to reward such enterprises with higher payments, which combined with far lower costs (no need for tractors if your animals are shut in a barn all the time) means a relatively better living. To illustrate the point, while I was in Germany, the Suddeutsche Zeitung had a rather good interview with a young German dairy farmer who had just been named "Bavarian milker of the year". Bizarrely, this is based on a theory test (?) but the most interesting point in the interview was this young man could make a living out of a mere 160 dairy cows.  British farmers would look on in envy at this as 350 is now considered the minimum level of economic viability for milking herds. 

So, in conclusion, in the Fatherland small is beautiful when it comes to agriculture (agrikultur?) which doesn't apply to cars, or thankfully, beer.