Last Sunday, I felt very much like I was starring in some Hollywoodian Perfect Storm movie. Rainwater flooded the kitchen; the old glass windows did not stop rattling; the rickety doors hung on by a hair’s breadth; the garden looked like a Florida garden post-hurricane… at one point I was half expecting (the real) George Clooney to walk into the living room and say something like ‘No rest for the weary’.

Each time I looked out into the garden, I craned my neck and squinted through the rain-lashed glass panes trying to gauge the state of our tiny vegetable patch. Will my three broccoli and 10 firmly planted seeds of ful (broad beans) withstand the force?

Which of course made me think of the last standing country lane in Lija. There’s a field there where only weeks ago the farmer had been painstakingly planting potatoes. Would he be in his old Toyota truck, with his faithful tal-kaċċa dog beside him, watching over his crop as the gale unleashed? Possibly. But there was very little he could do – the 101 kilometre per hour wind had no mercy for anything in its path.

What followed was a week of heartache for farmers as they came to terms with the extent of the annihilation of their crops and their plant houses. My daughter came home from school shocked that “the huge greenhouse in the valley was gone, just like that, blown away”. So many greenhouses were billowed away, so much valuable produce lost. A vegetable seller told my mother that the crops in his Kalkara fields were all ruined by the rush of sea spray which reached as far as his inland terrain. One farmer told this newspaper that he had to uproot about €17,000 worth of potatoes.

I despaired as I read each story from the ground. Already farmers are having to keep up with the increasing expenses of equipment, and having to fight with foreign competition, now they also had to take a battering from the beastly weather.

What struck me most were the words of 60-year-old farmer Mario Mifsud, who has worked the fields in Dingli all his life. “There’s not much of a future for small farmers,” Mr Mifsud said. “Farmers are losing heart. I am not going anywhere but younger people are not going to bother.”

Farmers’ only concern was always that they were taken completely for granted by society

It made me terribly sad, because you could tell that it was a plea coming from an anguished heart. I have always looked whimsically at farmers toiling their land and often murmured to the Significant Other how ‘when I grow up this is what I want to be’. I’ve always envied their being at one with nature, with the elements, away from the backstabbing and the ego-pumped noise of the urban world we live in.

Of course in my mind I’ve always imagined being woken up by sunrays, then cycling to a field in that last standing Lija country lane. I’d arrive to be greeted by a mummy sheep and her two cute lambs, frolic with them for a bit, then put on an apron and feed the chicks while singing.

Then I’d jump on a tractor and plough the field as the golden grain rustles in a gentle breeze like a cheering wave. At sun down, I’d head home with a wicker basket full of hens’ eggs and freshly cut vegetables (covered with a red-and-white checked cloth).

It’s so easy to envy that which you don’t know. What a reality check last weekend was. My skippety-skip dream went poof! as the gale wind howled back the reality of a farmer’s life.

Essentially it’s hours on end spent crouching, digging, planting, and more hours hoisting, heaving, hauling. When that’s over you stretch up and pray for friendly weather: for just the right amount of rain, and the right amount of sun, and cross fingers that all sorts of pests will go into hibernation until it’s time to harvest the crop. What are the chances of that happening smoothly?

“Never,” a farmer told me about a year ago. The last time he had been on holiday was 15 years ago, for a short three-day honeymoon because “I cannot leave my crops unattended”. His wife told me that whenever they go out, no matter how late it is, on their way home they always stop at the fields “to check everything is fine”.

They spoke matter-of-factly, without the slightest hint of longing for a cubicle in an office and a nine-to-five job.

In fact, all the farmers I’ve met talk about their hardships, however, the glint of passion for their work and the challenges it brings with it was always evident. Their only concern was always that they were taken completely for granted by society.

“We need farmers every single day of our lives, beginning to end, no exceptions,” the author Barbara Kingsolver wrote, but we fail to appreciate that, and consequently farming is a dying business. Soon, even in Malta, farm-to-table food will be something of the past and children will think that vegetables grow in plastic bags.

I fervently hope that one day Mr Mifsud will see his work taken up by eager young ones. But for that to happen we all need to do something about it: taking an interest in food and where it comes from; changing our attitude towards farmers and farming; supporting the farmers’ markets and buying local now more than ever.

Finally, perhaps some of us simply need to pluck up our courage and trade our desks for dungarees.

Incidentally the three broccoli and 10 fuliet survived, maybe that’s a sign of life?

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece