A Precautionary Tale

by Philip Ackerman-Leist

  Any sense of solitude in the Alps usually comes by way of feeling diminutive in the presence of mountains. In a small Alpine village, however, one seldom feels alone. But when Günther answered the phone on that fateful day and heard the voice of the toxicologist deliver the results of his hay sample analyses, he had never felt quite so isolated, despite being in the middle of the village that had nurtured him for his entire life. There was no silver lining in the report. Every sample that he had sent in had tested positive for residues of multiple pesticides. He’d been kicked and rammed around by cattle his whole life, but he’d never been knocked breathless by a phone call. The follow-up email detailing the results only added to the darkening reality.

  The lab results might have been conclusive, but Günther felt like they generated more questions than answers. How was he going to explain the results to his neighbors who had sprayed the pesticides? What was he going to do with the contaminated feed? What substances were detected and what did they mean for the health of his animals and his land?

  Günther spent the rest of the day and most of the night on the phone and sending out emails. Even if it was unclear to him at the time, this was the first sign that his life as a dairy farmer was about to change, and he was about to be dialed into more people and networks than he’d ever imagined. Phone calls, emails, and letters were about to fill every narrow crevice of his daily schedule, and the village’s image of him as the gangly young farmer with the ever-present hat would soon include him holding his cell phone to his ear.

  However, none of the conversations helped alleviate the feelings of isolation and fear. If anything, the consequences of the analyses were becoming ever clearer, even if they were bewildering. His first call after receiving the results was to his certifier at Bioland, the organic cooperative to which he belonged. He’d long believed that the membership fees he paid to the cooperative were ultimately an investment in the betterment of his own farm. It wasn’t simply a contractual relationship. Bioland also held farm tours and seminars and offered a social network for farmers who too often felt like they were going it alone in their farming ventures. Günther was about to find out if Bioland also provided a safety net for its members.

  It didn’t feel so positive at first. His certifier at Bioland informed him that in order to keep his organic certification—the keystone to his farm’s economic success at the moment—he would have to dispose of the entire first cutting of hay that he’d harvested in areas adjacent to the new orchards. Winter had never looked bleaker.

  However, summer seemed just as bad. He would have to take samples from his next two hay harvests, too, and it seemed all too likely that they would also test positive. To boot, he would have to pay for even more analyses while also buying organic hay from another farmer at a premium price, if anyone had any surplus for sale. It was a coveted commodity.

  Finally, there was the ironic reality that illuminated the absurdity of the whole situation. In order to maintain his certification, he had to dispose of the tainted hay crop and document that it had left the farm. He actually had to find a buyer for it—someone who would take the hay, despite the fact that it contained pesticide residues. Ordinarily he would walk out of his house and be down at the local bar, the Gasthaus Lamm, to have a drink to commiserate with his friends. For the time being, though, he had to figure out his best course of action. A turf battle in a small town is guaranteed to get personal, but to Günther the issue seemed much bigger than him alone. And if it didn’t get resolved now, in a good way, he was sure that it would turn into an ugly battle that would stretch far past his generation.

  The people of Mals had just elected a new young mayor who seemed much different from the usual politicians in the South Tirol. Günther decided to reach out to him first to see if he had any insights. Little did he know that he was inviting the mayor to join him in careening down a path that neither could have expected—in fact, it would turn out to be a path that no town had ever gone down before.

  A striking but soft-spoken figure, Ulrich Veith—known by most locals as Uli—isn’t anyone’s image of a stereotypical mayor. Perfectly comfortable in a crisp Italian suit and fashionable footwear, he can play the part of mayor in traditional table-and-chair ways. However, he seems most at home when he is casually walking the streets of Mals, greeting virtually everyone he bumps into with a fitting salutation, be it in Tirolean dialect, Italian, or on one knee, for the smallest of his patrons.

  Though he’s in his midforties, Uli’s trim physique and casually groomed wavy hair give the impression that he is a decade younger. His slightly bronze, fit appearance isn’t an artifice created in a spa but rather on the hiking paths, bike trails, and ski slopes in and above Mals, often in pursuit of his super-athlete wife, Marian, with their young son in tow. Neither unaware of custom nor flippant about cultural expectations, Uli is nonetheless just as likely to appear at an appointment in fashionable athletic wear as he is in a suit. He always seems ready to take advantage of the best that Mals has to offer in year-round outdoor activities—or perhaps he is in constant training to keep up with Marian, an avid rock climber and mountain biker who is at least as nontraditional in her mother-athlete role as Uli is in politics.

  After more than a decade of traveling the world for business, Uli had returned to his native Mals with no real political aspirations—in fact, he was not even registered with a political party at the time. He did, however, have a deep desire to see the Upper Vinschgau make its way forward into the twenty-first century, building upon the best the region had to offer. That desire eventually led him to a victorious run for mayor of Mals in 2009, and he was eager to represent his townspeople as well as he possibly could. So when Günther called to set up a meeting about a problem he was having, Uli immediately invited him to his office in the town hall.

  You would be hard-pressed to find a better measure of contrasts in Mals than Uli and Günther. Günther will show up to almost any function in a T-shirt, work pants, and heavy leather farm boots, while Uli will appear looking fresh and dapper, if not aerodynamic, in his perfectly tailored suit or formfitting running outfit. Günther’s handshake will feel like he’s about to squeeze milk out of your four fingers while Uli’s firm but uncallused squeeze is a testament to his habit of making acquaintances from all walks of life. In a moment of uncertainty, Günther might run his hand over the tingle of his buzz cut while Uli slips his hand through his wavy hair during a pensive pause. Günther will insist that he can speak only Tirolean dialect and high German while Uli will shift fluently between both before jumping in with English or Italian.

  But they always shared one thing in common: a deep passion for what they both dubbed a sustainable future for Mals. Before long, they would both add another descriptor to the future they envisioned for their town—healthy.

  Dairy farmers don’t tend to embrace politicians or meetings very readily, but as far as he could tell, Günther had limited options for people who would comprehend the full scope of the dilemma, much less have the means to help address the looming issues. When he met with Uli, he described the problem as succinctly as he could, framing it as not just his issue but a quandary facing all of the 5,300 citizens in the eleven villages of the Mals township.

  With the small field sizes that dominated the Mals landscape—usually just a few acres—and the renowned Vinschgerwind, the legendary wind of the valley blowing for days or weeks at a time, the drifting of pesticides applied by any single farmer onto other farmers’ fields was inevitable. In addition, with the town’s waterways, bike paths, playgrounds, and schoolyards in such close proximity to fields that might be converted to intensive fruit production, the health of the people and the environment was in peril.

  Mals was going green but the future was looking gray, at best. With organic farms, traditional grain growing, bike touring, agritourism, herbal products, and even the region’s first organic hotel all in the works and on the rise, an influx of p
esticide-dependent fruit “plantations” could mean the collapse of so many collective dreams.

  Günther was adamant: Farmers should be able to manage their farms the way they wanted to, but only up to the point at which their decisions negatively impacted others. If the situation he faced was just the beginning, which certainly seemed to be the case, then any hope of Mals being the last regional bastion of sustainable and diversified agriculture seemed doomed.

  Uli concurred and agreed to help find a solution. Neither quite realized what they were agreeing to. They were about to challenge the way things were done not just in the orchards and vineyards of the South Tirol but also in the ballot box. Stirring things up is a messy business.

  CHAPTER 2

  Roots of a Rebellion

  Fully armed and having traded the burden of hand-forged armor and mail for impenetrable rubber, I was a battle-ready American mercenary, waging war to protect the bounty of a medieval castle in Italy. Located on the crumbling edge of a promontory sticking out over the entrance to the Vinschgau Valley, Brunnenburg Castle has maintained the ideal position to keep an eye on what is happening below since the thirteenth century. With its commanding view and southern exposure atop a heap of glacial till, it’s also an ideal location to grow grapes, apples, pears, and a host of other fruits for which the South Tirol region of Italy is famous.

  However, things weren’t going so well on this particular day. I ripped off the respirator and jumped from the tractor, pulling hard at the cuffs of each sleeve, eager to shed the impermeable rubber raincoat. It was like shedding a reptilian skin as it peeled away from my sweaty body. I was one of the only guys in the Alpine village opting to wear any kind of real protection, but even on days like this one, with temperatures well into the 90s and the sun beating down, I questioned my sanity, wondering if I was just an overly cautious American ninny.

  I’d just driven the tractor back up through the vineyard and to the shaded comfort of the castle, eager to grab a drink of water at what I hoped was the end of my workday, or at least the end of my unsavory task of spraying the vineyard with its biweekly dose of pesticides. I ducked into the earthy coolness of the wine cellar, stooping to avoid the bruisingly low stone lintel of the medieval doorway, and filled a glass with water from the bottle-washing sink, resting for a moment amid barrels, tubs, and tools.

  The smell of wine-soaked wood and gravel emanated from every crevice and corner. But any hope of a new harvest seemed to depend on me getting back to work to protect the terraced flanks of the castle with whatever armaments I had, so I downed a last glass of water and went back out to the tractor. An orange Goldoni tractor, small by American standards but with a low center of gravity, it articulated in the middle, easily negotiating the treacherous paths and tight curves of the castle farm, as long as you paid careful attention to the positioning of heavy loads.

  I popped the black rubber lid off the stainless-steel sprayer tank on the back of the tractor and checked inside to see how well I’d calculated on this round. With the sun almost directly overhead as the noon hour neared, a shaft of circular sunlight lit up a portion of the frothy blue potion beginning to settle after the rough uphill ride from the bottom of the vineyard.

  Damn it! I still had about a fifth of a tank left. It was bad enough to start in the cool of the early dawn and spend five to seven hours dragging around a hose and brass-tipped spray pistol, dousing the entire vineyard once. I really hated the idea of donning all that hot and smelly gear again and going back down to spray a second coating of the copper-based fungicide somewhere, just to empty the tank. My other option was much simpler but less palatable: I could open the drain on the bottom of the tank and let the leftovers disappear through the steel grate of the drainage pipe at the wash station, eventually making their way to the Adige River down below.

  A portion of what I was spraying would eventually end up downstream anyway, so it seemed like I was just prolonging the inevitable. Spraying on the precarious slopes of a mountainside in the Alps lends a certain drama to any notion of “downstream impact.” In this case, I could simply look out from under the grape trellises and see the Adige River churning its way through the valley, gradually winding its way toward the Adriatic Sea many miles away. In the end, even though I dreaded donning my modern armor one more time and dosing a section of vines with another round of chemicals, my misery was ultimately a result of my own miscalculation.

  It was always a challenge to estimate the liters of pesticide needed to cover the upper and lower leafy surface area of the vines spread out on the elaborate trellises tracing the mountainside below. In shed-roof fashion, the pergola trellises followed the contours of the irregular terrain below the castle, sending the vines up and over each trellis, sprawling outward to catch the sun and movement of the air while protecting the large clusters of grapes from hail and intense winds with a green roof. The pergolas offered just enough clearance for me to spend the day walking slightly hunched under beautiful bunches of ripening grapes, waving my magic wand in the hope of vaporizing any evil spores or multi-legged creatures intent on turning the leafy Paradise into an operations base for wreaking havoc on the wine harvest.

  The pergolas were so low and the paths so narrow that I had to park the tractor and sprayer at the end of each row and unreel more than 150 feet (46 m) of blue hose to access the farthest reaches of each row. Once there, I would begin spraying the upper canopy of the vines, then walk backward, retracing the path of the hose as I sprayed up into the leafy roof, making sure to thoroughly coat the dangling bunches of grapes. It seemed I could never back my way out of the rows fast enough. Once the underside of the canopy was doused, the pesticides would drip off the foliage and grapes and onto my hat and coat, inevitably finding their way inside my sleeves and down my neck. No matter how careful I was, some exposure was inevitable, and one gust of wind could ruin a day’s worth of caution in a second or two.

  Eager to find my way to the shower and a double lathering of soap and shampoo, I suited back up and drove down to an area of vines that I hoped would appreciate an extra dousing. If an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, perhaps a liter of prevention would yield sixteen more liters of fine South Tirolean wine.

  But when I peered anxiously through the murky blue concoction for the bottom of the spray tank on that sweltering August day in 1994, only one thing seemed clear. I was deciding between two bad choices—and two bad choices never yield a good solution. Both had far-reaching consequences, whether examined on a map or on a time line.

  After three years of spraying, I couldn’t do it anymore. It was time to leave the South Tirol, the place where I’d found the kind of diversified agriculture I’d never quite encountered in the cropland of the American South. I’d first come to the South Tirol as a college student at the Brunnenburg Castle and Agricultural Museum semester-abroad program in 1983, and I was immediately smitten with the carefully tended gardens, manicured hayfields, Alpine pastures, medieval architecture, and blended wafts of woodsmoke and manure. Even though most of my time living and working there involved orchards and vineyards—familiar realms for me thanks to my own grandparents’ fruit operation—I was particularly attracted to the lives of the Bergbauern, the mountain farmers whose holdings clung to the mountainsides with a tenacity seldom found in our modern world. They tended fields of hay, grains, and vegetables near their steep mountainside farms and in the valleys below, and they sent many of their cattle, goats, and pigs up to the Almen, the high pastures above tree line. Under the watchful eye of an Almmeister, the head shepherd at each pasturage, the animals would graze the protein- and mineral-rich Alpine grasses between 5,000 and 8,000 feet (1,524–2,438 m) in elevation.

  My vista of those precarious lifestyles was often from the passenger seat of a variety of Italian straight-drive vehicles driven by Siegfried de Rachewiltz, my boss and mentor, the owner of the castle. Gears would wind out as centrifugal forces pulled me left an
d right, leaving me to make a human triangle for safety, left hand gripping the edge of my seat and right hand latched in a death grip on the overhead handle, when there was one. One of the best-­respected ethnographers in the region, Siegfried would graciously take me along for his interviews and film productions with mountain farmers or to heft and haul donated tools back to the castle’s agricultural history museum, which he had founded. It gave me a window into a disappearing world that few Americans would ever see—but it was a white-knuckle view that framed the fragility and resilience of the mountain farmers all in one glance. Fortunately for me, the Vinschgau and its side valleys were his favorite destination, and the valley became my classroom, first as a student and later as a teacher.

  It was always a relief to leave the intensively managed landscape of orchards and vineyards and escape to the upper reaches of the Vinschgau Valley, where life seemed richer but less profitable, less predictable but more diverse. The mountain farmers’ wisdom and lore on how to survive —indeed, thrive—on those steep slopes had me completely hooked, and it seemed much more aligned with the ebb and flow of the surrounding ecosystem than the constant battles in the vineyard. Somehow the farmers of the valley had endured not just for hundreds of years but for millennia. And they’d even done it without pesticides.