It was a contrast in agricultural systems that I would ponder for the next few decades, although I never expected that that same valley would later become the setting for a standoff between those low-input and chemical-intensive systems. Ultimately surprising even themselves with their successes—despite the odds and obstacles—a troupe of unlikely small-town activists in Mals raised the curtain on the problematic plots of industrial agricultural interests and, in the process, set an international precedent for the role of community mobilization and direct democracy in creating a pesticide-free future.
When I unhooked the spray machine from the Goldoni tractor for the last time in 1994, I felt relieved but not decoupled, either from pesticides or the South Tirol. It was simply time to try to find an agriculture that made sense, on my terms, although my next step seemed, at first glance, completely contrary to that intent. In the supportive company of Erin, my future wife, whom I’d met when she came to Brunnenburg, I went back to the United States to help my grandparents on what would end up being their last year on their farm in the Sandhills region of North Carolina, a place famous for its peaches.
My grandfather was instrumental in building the peach industry and its reputation in the Sandhills. A plant pathologist at North Carolina State University, he had established the Sandhills Research Station with his colleagues, and they developed more than a dozen new varieties of peaches geared to the landscape and markets of the sandy-soiled South. They also tested a number of grape varieties in the hope of rebuilding the wine-grape industry that had been decimated during the Prohibition era and the subsequent monopolization of the grape juice industry. Their ultimate goal was to create disease-resistant varieties of fruits, but with the insect and disease pressures of the hot, humid climate, he and his colleagues were also charged with developing cultivation and pesticide programs that would create the best fruits possible.
A burgeoning fruit industry was a beacon of hope for economic opportunity in rural areas that could supply the growing urban areas in the South. While worker and consumer safety was a clear priority for my grandfather and his fellow researchers, the concept of safety was established within a paradigm of the necessity of pesticides, complete with the vocabulary of thresholds, maximum exposure, and parts per million. For someone who had seen the economic destruction wrought on his sharecropping family by the cotton boll weevil, in my grandfather’s mind, pesticides made up for what plant breeding couldn’t quite accomplish—or at least not quickly.
The pesticides we used at Brunnenburg were relatively low in toxicity. Many of the sprays consisted primarily of copper and sulfur, and we almost never used any insecticides, except for a few sprayings against the destructive Rote Spinne, the European red mite. However, the pesticides used on my grandparents’ farm were much more dangerous. Methyl bromide fumigant was used to treat the soil in the nursery where peach trees were propagated, and a slurry of names only the agrochemical companies could market were mixed and blasted through the foliage of the orchards and vineyard. My grandfather didn’t hesitate to use what he and other scientists had produced in order to give consumers the blemish-free and full-sized fruit that they clearly wanted.
One day selling fruit at our roadside peach stand was lesson enough in consumer disdain for any fruit with a harmless spot, catface, or discoloration. A carful of travel-weary vacationers would sort through bushel basket after bushel basket before deciding on a peck of edible peaches. While one or two customers might ask about the reason for an imperfection, virtually no one would ask about how those imperfections were avoided—and customers would almost always choose a large or particularly beautiful peach variety over a much tastier variety that was smaller or slightly blemished, regardless of our recommendations.
In the process of helping my grandparents that year, I had hoped to find some alternatives to the high chemical inputs used in the fruit industry. In the mid-1990s, however, the national organic movement was nascent, and I didn’t find the local successful models of less toxic management approaches that I needed to convince myself, much less others, of viable alternatives for tree fruits. Nonetheless, no one could assure me—someone who had already spent too much time in pesticide-laden fields—that pesticides were definitively not going to impact my health, much less that of Erin and the potential offspring we might bring into the world.
As it turned out, I spent almost as much time that year caring for my grandparents as I did for the farm. My grandfather had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease several decades prior, and he’d beaten the prediction of being wheelchair-bound by almost as many decades, in large part because he just never would quit farming. While I was living with him, though, the disease overtook his quiet obstinacy. Up until the end of his time on the farm, he would determinedly stumble around its sandy furrows, usually with a hoe or pruners in his hand, taking care of business. In a sense, the farm had saved him—at least we thought so. In subsequent years more and more studies strongly correlated on-farm pesticide exposure and Parkinson’s disease.
It became clearer that Erin and I were going to have to search further for answers and try out some different kinds of agriculture—in a place with the mountains that we so desperately desired. With a reputation for organic farming, the Green Mountain State sounded perfect, and as luck would have it one of my former employers, Tom Benson, had headed to Vermont to transform a beautiful but dilapidated New England campus into an “environmental liberal arts college” in his role as college president, with a goal of creating one of the most sustainable colleges in the country.
I went to visit the campus and traipsed through the deep February snow, examining the barn and outbuildings that had once been the heartbeat of the college farm. Leased out to several local horse trainers, the old facility looked ideal for the testing ground of a big idea: What alternative models of agriculture could we develop on a college farm that would be truly sustainable and also educational for a new era of farmers, entrepreneurs, and food advocates?
By the time the winter’s heavy snows had melted and the new leaves were unfurling on the campus sugar maples, Erin and I had moved to Vermont to begin answering that question, both at Green Mountain College and also on our own homestead and farm. Since then we’ve experimented with a number of crops and animals on a homestead scale while simultaneously building a grassfed cattle operation with American Milking Devon cattle, a breed with nearly four centuries of adaptation to the New England landscape. Farmers like Günther were models of sorts as we experimented with livestock and crops in our rugged, off-grid terrain, without electricity or running water for nearly eight years.
For the past two decades I have worked with an extraordinary cohort of students, staff, faculty, and growing numbers of alumni to build a certified-organic college farm operation that exemplifies pesticide-free methods, as well as high-quality animal welfare practices and low-input energy systems. Along the way we’ve found that producing vegetables and livestock without synthetic chemical inputs is not only practical and economical on our scale, but also much easier and more enjoyable than mixing and applying all sorts of pricey concoctions with hefty generational price tags.
After leaving my grandparents’ farm, I stepped away from intensive fruit production. Growing and marketing organic perennial fruits at the farm scale seems the most challenging of all organic production sectors. Whereas you can rotate vegetables and livestock on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis, rotation among tree crops is a long-term strategy at best. Rotation of crops and livestock helps break certain pest and disease cycles—a management tool seldom available to orchardists and viticulturalists.
In the process of building the college farm operation, my colleagues and I have created undergraduate and graduate curricula and programs. One key offering is an opportunity for our students to go to Brunnenburg Castle and learn from the museum and farm operation there as well as from other farms in the area. Ironically, it was when I led
a recent study tour to Brunnenburg that I found my way back into the looming questions of fruit production and pesticide use. I also found myself having experienced life on both sides of the fence, or in the buffer zone, given my time working in both fruit and livestock farming.
In the late summer of 2014, I was sitting at Brigitte de Rachewiltz’s castle kitchen table as we finalized the details of a South Tirol study tour that was to begin two days later. “Turning Traditions into Markets” is a graduate course I designed to explore the agricultural traditions and foodways of the South Tirol. It’s also my way of keeping in touch with the farmers, chefs, and food entrepreneurs who bridge the region’s deep agricultural history with modern markets. With Brunnenburg as our base, we explore the valleys and high pastures in search of ideas that might inspire students’ professional or academic work in the United States.
Brigitte, a longtime mentor and friend, mentioned that an unusual referendum was about to take place in Mals, a place she knew I loved from an extended walking tour I would lead there every semester while working at Brunnenburg. Citizens in Mals had put forward a ballot measure for a “pesticide-free future,” so she thought that it might be interesting for me and my students to learn more about this unusual intersection between democracy and agricultural practices.
I was floored: It was the first time the citizens of any town in the world had ever voted on whether to eliminate the use of all pesticides in their community.
On the surface, it sounded absurd. How could the citizens of any town ever get to that point, much less think that they might succeed? It was a story I wanted to learn about, and it seemed like an excellent opportunity for the students to explore what could be a global first. I shook my head in slight disbelief as Brigitte picked up her cell phone to call a new acquaintance in Mals who could introduce us to the referendum initiative. Was there really an international precedent happening in a place that I’d been studying for more than three decades?
I certainly didn’t imagine that one field trip with my students, exactly twenty years after I thought I’d parted ways with my spray gun in the South Tirol, would vault me back not only into the complex questions of pesticide use but also into a dramatic David-and-Goliath story.
“Just drive toward the village of Plawenn and ask for Konrad,” Brigitte had said.
She hadn’t taken into account our bus driver’s unfamiliarity with the area. About an hour and a half after leaving Brunnenburg, we’d finally gotten to the upper end of the Vinschgau Valley, and our driver saw a sign for PLA . . . She didn’t bother to read any further before starting the steep and windy ascent to what would turn out to be the village of Planeil instead of Plawenn. Ordinarily, such a mistake wouldn’t make much of a difference, but in this case the road was so narrow in spots that there was no room for another vehicle to pass our sixteen-seater bus. Mirrors at the hairpin curves did little more than provide an impending sense of doom coming from the opposite direction. Even our seasoned driver was nervous.
We got to Planeil, a stunningly compact village clutching to the mountainside at 5,249 feet (1,600 m), only to discover that there was no space to turn around at the tiny parking area just outside the village. Only pedestrians, residents, and authorized guests were to enter the village proper, with its tight, twisting streets. It was clear that the medieval mind was focused on shelter rather than passage, with houses and barns hugging every available thoroughfare through the village. The villagers had long ago tossed aside the notion that right angles are a prerequisite to construction. Planeil’s buildings are constructed to fit the available space, and if that means sacrificing the sanctity of a rectangle, so be it. Tucked into the contours of the mountainside, they seem to melt into one another with the overlap of white plaster. In fact, they are so tightly knitted together that separate fires in 1985 and 1986 nearly destroyed the village’s future. Both times, flames moved effortlessly from one structure to another. Despite having fewer than two hundred residents, the village rallied and rebuilt, maintaining its ancient character.
With no other option, our driver drove down the narrow village street and managed to find a convoluted turnaround into a guesthouse parking lot. With the smell of a burning clutch, she managed something resembling a 183-degree turn (no right angles) on a crazy upward incline, and we made our way back down to the main road in search of a sign for Plawenn.
The idea of asking total strangers for a guy named Konrad seemed just shy of absurd, but our driver slowed to stop as we neared a farmer raking the straggling strands of hay bunched up along the edge of the road. “We’re looking for Konrad—Konrad Messner. Do you know him? Do you know where we can find him?” she asked the old farmer.
“Konrad? Messner Konrad?” he asked, putting the family name first, as is customary in a region where long family histories take precedence over the relatively short life span of individuals. He peered at her sharply with one eye squinted shut. “Up there. The pink castle,” he said, and he turned back to the company of his wooden rake. It all seemed a bit surreal for our driver, so she asked me for the cell phone number that Brigitte had written on a scrap piece of paper. She called it and got an answer—“Ja . . . ja . . .” Yes . . . yes . . .—and nodded as she looked intently at the village’s distant facade. She hung up, mumbled a veiled curse in dialect, and popped the bus into first gear, leaving the farmer to his solitude. He looked askance at our puff of diesel exhaust, shaking his head.
We could barely make out the unusual salmon-colored crenellations of a building—located at 5,577 feet (1,700 m) and set against a dramatic backdrop of craggy peaks—bounded by the more traditional wood-and-white-plaster farmhouses and barns. Bordered by hayfields and outlined by utility poles, the sinuous road took us up to the village edge.
Our American invasion surprised at least one villager: A topless sun worshipper grabbed her towel and scurried through an open balcony door. As we stepped down out of the bus, the village seemed hauntingly still, except for the distant clink-clunk of cowbells in outlying pastures and the occasional lowing from the shadows of the village barns. Given the activity we’d seen in the fields, it seemed that most of the roughly forty-six village residents were out helping with the midday hay harvest.
CLUB OF MULT—I had no idea what it meant, but the decorative sign was on the front of the unusual building, so I began to search for an entrance. I walked up the tiny street paralleling the courtyard wall toward what I guessed must be the entrance of Konrad’s rather unusual guesthouse. Billed as a “culture club” rather than a restaurant, it was obviously a word-of-mouth affair. Still spooked by the almost total quiet of the village, I jumped when a barn cat shot out of the cracked doorway of a nearby farmhouse just as I was homing in on two doorbell buttons to the left of a low-lying gothic-arch doorway. Tipping up my sunglasses, I got to choose my own adventure: either FAMILIE MESSNER or CLUB OF MULT. Giving the trending uncertainty of the day, I pushed the latter.
With the thickness of the medieval walls, I couldn’t tell whether the bell had actually rung inside, and I couldn’t hear anyone coming. I went to push it again when the heavy wooden door flung open and out popped more energy in one human form than I had encountered in quite some time. “Konrad!” he said, sticking out his hand. “You must be Philip.”
Before I could utter an answer, he flung his arms wide and greeted the group—who had just caught up with me—in German. “So do you all speak Chinese? If so, we can have a good conversation!” With that, he whisked us all in, signaling to everyone to duck so that no one would leave flesh and blood on the low-hanging stone lintel.
We swept back a heavy curtain shielding the entrance to the lower level of the house from cold air that would cascade in during winter months and made our way down the stone stairs into a vaulted gothic hallway, all plastered in white stucco that revealed only a hint of the stone texture underneath. Konrad flung open a rustic door to a wood-paneled Stube, the traditional gathering
space in a Tirolean house, and ushered everyone inside, signing with a finger that he would be back in one minute. He disappeared like a fleet-footed sprite back out into the hallway and ducked into an adjacent doorway that turned out to be his kitchen. Once an ancient chapel, its ornate gothic arches were still intact, but the ceiling was now covered in soot from several centuries of smoke spilling out of what must have been a series of cookstoves. Long wooden poles ran the length of the blackened ceiling, ready to hang the traditional cured meats at a moment’s notice.
His facial features and his quick moves gave me the immediate impression that we’d just met the Tirolean version of Robin Williams. He danced back and forth between the kitchen and the Stube with glasses and pitchers, followed by baskets of bread and several cheese boards. With each delivery came a quip framed in English but sprinkled with German and Italian. Sporting a handsome tanned and ruddy complexion, Konrad had a smile that would erupt from a nearly expressionless facade a fraction of a second before any of us had fully grasped the intent of what was consistently a humorous poke. His eyes squinted each time he burst out in contagious laughter as he handed out glasses and teased us one by one. Whenever he would make room for a quiet pause, it was simply bait for a razor-sharp one-liner that would make its comical incision before the victim had any sense of what had just happened.
Before long, we all had a combination of glasses on the tables spread around the room, and students at different tables were trading tastes and impressions of the mix of breads and drinks that had appeared without a single order. The taste of homemade Hollundersaft, elderberry flower syrup and mineral water, blended with scents of fresh-cut hay pouring through the open windows, and the floral bouquet of several carafes of white wine only added to the sense that we were ingesting the best of a South Tirolean summer day. Once he was satisfied that he could shift from bartender to raconteur, Konrad moved a wooden chair beside the centerpiece of the room, a tall barrel-shaped masonry stove covered in white plaster. It was easy to imagine the yarns that would emanate from that spot in the winter when everyone would huddle next to the radiating warmth and pass the long days with stories steeped in bittersweet concoctions.
A Precautionary Tale Page 4