A nostalgic elderly farmer leaned against his walking stick as his grandson ploughed the land using a tractor equipped to plant seeds and harvest crops automatically.

The machinery, together with an automated irrigation system, which was partly financed by EU funds, is in stark contrast to the suffering his forefathers used to endure.

Sitting on a stone slab, because he could not stand for long, Wiġi Muscat, 88, admitted that the demonstration had sparked memories of the days he would work the land by hand.

“Rain or shine we would work by hand and barefoot, breaking the hard soil to harvest the crops or digging through the mud for the vegetables,” he said.

Asked how long he had been a farmer, he said he could always remember working the land, only sparing some time to go to school.

“I was born in the fields, where I worked round the clock with my parents, brothers and sisters,” he said.

Back then, his fields were in Ħal Far, not in Tal-Maqluba in Qrendi, where he sat yesterday. His biggest challenge was working the land during WWII.

“Since our fields were close to the airfield, the air force would hide its aircraft among the carob trees so they could not be seen by the enemy,” he explained.

“Those were the hardest times for us and I still vividly remember running into a shelter, followed by a soldier who shot at the enemy with a machine gun from the doorway,” he said.

During a press conference yesterday, he was flanked by his son Salvu Muscat, 47, and his grandson Michael Caruana, 23, who has taken over the fields, focusing on the potato industry.

“Last year the country exported 50,000 tons of potatoes,” said Rural Affairs Minister George Pullicino, who visited the fields with Parliamentary Secretary Chris Said. “In the past, farmers only exported to one country but today they are exporting to five, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, England and Switzerland,” he added.

He partly attributed the growth in the industry to the financial assistance being offered to the rural sector by the EU over a period of six years. Totalling about €100 million, the funds target several sectors, including the purchase of machinery. With the programme now well past its halfway mark, a training scheme is expected to be launched in the coming weeks.

“Infrastructure and machinery are not enough. Farmers do not only have to know what to buy but also how to use it,” Mr Pullicino said. “Of all the member states, we are the country that has ­progressed most with the ­programme,” he continued.

“We wanted farmers to benefit from the scheme as early as possible even though we could have launched it as a political exercise before a general election to look good.”