act12

“Learning to cultivate the Land is a process. For those of us who were fortunate to grow up in a family in the countryside, we had an apprenticeship since childhood, and you don’t realize how much you’re learning watching your parents work for a lifetime. You begin to learn a lot of things without even realizing it.

When I try to teach people with no experience, I realize how difficult it is to make them understand what I know, things that I don’t analyse or I don’t even question, because I learnt them during my childhood. When trying to teach these to people from the city, one realizes how difficult is for them to learn quickly something that I’ve learnt through a lifetime.
If I were to advise, I’d say mostly to observe, a lot of love, and specially to trust and imitate traditional farmers. Their knowledge can’t be learnt through any book in the city.
If you observe there’s a language that clearly shows you when to work the Land. For example, when grafting a tree, you look at nature, there’s no specific date to do it; around March or later depending on the kind of tree, you have to look at the pattern if the sap is already moving and the tree is budding. You have to watch the language of Nature because every year is different.”

“Love for the Land is manifested in the way you treat Her. That soil is alive; your point of departure is the idea that the soil is alive, it is not inert, thus one has to work it with care, as a live Being. One cannot go against Nature in its cycles of cultivation, understanding and loving what the soil is, in order to know what to do. Then She will let you know how you really have to do things.”

“The price we set is fair because we don’t speculate. On our farm, we set the price at the beginning of the season and it doesn’t change. We don’t go with the fluctuations of the market. The prices we set don’t change throughout the year, and there are times when our prices of organic are cheaper than conventional food. It is important because this way you achieve loyal customers, because they trust what you do and what you tell them, and they see the market fluctuations, while we don’t alter our prices. We have to put ourselves in their shoes; they need to trust you’re telling them the truth, and that the price you’ve set is fair so we can make a living. It is a fair and dignified way for farmers to live off the Land.”