A Precautionary Tale

by Philip Ackerman-Leist

  Just as comfortable in the role of a teller of tales as that of waiter, Konrad stretched out his legs, leaned back into his chair, and paused to gather his thoughts as he smoothed out the wrinkles of his charcoal-colored apron.

  “Ja, so . . .” He looked at me. Then, with an air of contrived seriousness, he asked me in perfect English, “Where do we start? The beginning or the end?”

  In professorial form, I answered smugly, “The beginning, of course.” Little did I suspect that one story could have so many beginnings. But we started in the middle—the middle of the Vinschgau Valley, where one family was living the nightmare of pesticides without buffers and monoculture without limits.

  CHAPTER 3

  Bufferless

  Forced into a translucent bubble of their own making, the four generations of the Gluderer family were the unfortunate harbingers of what Günther and Uli most dreaded was coming their way. Just a few short years after they transformed their family farm into an organic herb operation, they found themselves directly in the path of Big Apple as it rolled up the Vinschgau Valley.

  They could have uprooted everything that they had worked collectively to build and tried to find another farm, but they decided instead to cover their assets: They went from planting and harvesting their organic herbs out in the open to spending their entire year cultivating their crops under plastic. Soon all the crops on their 1.5-acre (0.6 ha) farm grew beneath enormous steel-framed high tunnels. The structures were the only way to protect their herbs, their consumers, and their organic certification from the pesticides that were infiltrating their farm from every direction. They also gave the youngest Gluderers a safe place to play. Toy tractors, backhoes, and garden implements are always strewn about underneath the high tunnels, clear evidence that the Gluderers are cultivating the newest generation with the same care they give the herbs and flowers.

  Separated from Mals by 19 miles (30 km) in distance, 1,300 feet (400 m) in elevation, and a decade of change, the Gluderers are located farther down the Vinschgau Valley, and they had seen that wave of the future coming for several decades, although it was more like a slow-moving tsunami in the way it advanced upon them. A tsunami may be nearly indiscernible far out at sea, but when it comes closer to shore and meets the upward incline of the coastline, its immense energy is transformed into a wave of ever-increasing height and potential for destruction. The Gluderers had watched the growing power of the wave as more and more of the trellised orchards moved up the valley, and they began to wonder if they should rapidly gather everything that they’d worked so hard to build and run for higher ground. Their organic herb farm seemed likely to be swallowed up, rent asunder first in the intensifying power of the oncoming surge and then again in the devastation of any later retreat. With so many apples flooding the valley and the marketplace, a wholesale retreat seemed inevitable at some future point; it was just hard to say whether the collapse would be economic or ecological, or a combination of the two.

  For now, though, it seemed like the tide of Big Apple had worked its way up the Vinschgau Valley and eventually reached its logical—albeit absurd—conclusion in their town, until they were adrift and seemingly alone in a sea of apples. To most of their neighbors, however, the inundation was just a fact of life in the village of Goldrain; there was nothing to be done about it. Besides, almost everyone seemed to see apples as the most lucrative option for the small plots of farmland so characteristic of the valley—even the Gluderers had had a small plot of apples before going into the organic herb business.

  But for the Gluderers, the invasion of apples finally became too overwhelming. It wasn’t the fog of war that pushed them to the extreme; rather, it was the war against fog: They had tried growing hedgerows to protect against the pesticide drift coming from their neighbors, but that hadn’t been effective enough. Then they installed a 26-foot (8 m) high Wassersprühnebelwand, an enormous “water curtain” that sprayed upward from a series of water jets positioned around the perimeters of their property whenever the neighbors were spraying. However, the clouds of pesticides and their residues continued to make their way onto the Gluderers’ farm, sometimes from farms much farther away. They decided that they had only two alternatives: wave a white flag of surrender from the top of their “castle of herbs” storefront or stubbornly duck and cover. They chose to cover.

  Flanked on every side by apple orchards, with nothing but failed buffers between their organic herbs and the orchards, they felt the only way they could retain the family business was to shield their fields of crops with expansive greenhouses covered with plastic on the top and a breathable fabric on the sides. Despite the fact that it would cost them more than 150,000 euros (around $200,000 at the time), it seemed the only way to protect their organic crops from the onslaught of pesticides coming from all directions.

  They had invested much more than euros into building a business that now supported four generations of their family—all without applying pesticides. But that didn’t mean pesticide residues wouldn’t be detected on their crops. With apples on three sides and surrounding them up and down the valley, it was only a matter of time.

  For Urban Gluderer everything had happened so fast. Nothing in the valley resembled what he remembered from his youth. “Apples were only part of life here back then,” he mused. “They were only one of many things that farm families raised, so the landscape was more open and diverse than it is now . . . now it’s nothing but apples.”

  Like his herbal goods, Urban is clearly a product of mountain air and sunshine. Tan and muscular, he still leaps from delivery trucks and heaves cases of packaged herbal products with no sign of effort. You wouldn’t guess that he is in his early fifties, much less a grandfather of five. Sporting a close-cropped salt-and-pepper goatee, he is a multicultural entrepreneur who can, at a moment’s notice, switch from his high-velocity Tirolean dialect to a slower-cadenced but lilting version of Italian.

  Urban long wished that his children and grandchildren could somehow inherit the vistas he’d taken for granted as a child. It was some consolation to have his parents, Karl and Rosa, still on the farm as a touchstone to a past that had been sliced and upended like the sod from a moldboard plow. Whatever might have been plowed under and replaced by apples and other fruits was still very much alive in Karl and Rosa’s memories, and Karl’s stories could stitch landscape and tradition back together with a fine thread and a deft needle, even if the events of a week before sometimes eluded him.

  When asked about the changes he’d seen in the area during his lifetime, Karl reminisced about how much the topography of the valley floor had changed since the 1960s. Pointing outward with his gnarled mason’s fingers, he fanned his arm from one end of the valley to the other in a series of undulations. “The valley wasn’t flat when I was a child,” he said. “It was filled with little hills, and if you were looking out from here on a winter day, you’d probably see kids playing on their sleds. But then in the 1960s they brought in the bulldozers to flatten it all out to make it easier to plant apples and other crops.” That bucolic scene was a far cry from what was now an uninterrupted mosaic of interlocking orchards, with trellised apples, trained and true, holding their ground in every available niche.

  Growing up, Urban could look across the Vinschgau Valley from his family’s farm and see hay meadows, mixed livestock in their pastures, and a mix of grain and vegetable plots. He remembered chasing butterflies and grasshoppers and watching bats flit their way through the summer darkness in hot pursuit of tiny prey. Now, while tending his crops several decades later, he can’t see past the opaque coverings of the greenhouses that protected all of his organic herbs and flowers from the tainted mists threatening to drift onto his farm from every direction. Since covering his herbs with the high tunnels, he is a bit relieved not to see apple trees every time he looks up from his work, but he misses bearing witness to the constant testing of wills between incoming weather and the defiant
mountain ranges just to the north and south of the farm. “Our hope is that these high tunnels aren’t the final solution. The real goal is to be able to remove these structures within ten years, presuming we can get people to farm in a different way, without pesticides. Besides,” he said, wiping away the light beads of sweat on his forehead, “there’s no way to enjoy working in these tunnels when it’s 113°F (45°C).”

  It isn’t as if he didn’t understand how it had happened: He’d once been an apple farmer himself. Like almost everyone else in the valley, he and his family had seen apples as a reliable means of making a good side income with an acre or two and even a reasonably lucrative living with around 10 acres (4 ha). Those economic possibilities contrasted sharply with the subsistence living that his father and mother had witnessed during the early portion of their lives, with the difficulties of Alpine life only exacerbated by World War II. Karl would not only hold court at the long family dinner table but also hold unwitting customers hostage, regaling everyone with stories of a world now relegated mostly to picture books and documentaries.

  Urban had grown up in the village of Goldrain, the place where he and his wife, Annemarie, decided to raise their family. It was familiar terrain for Annemarie, too, as she had grown up only 6 miles (10 km) away in the village of Tschars. In 1990 Urban’s parents gave them 0.9 acre (3,647 m2) that was planted with apples—a handsome gift in a region where every square foot of productive ground was coveted. Their family managed the orchard conventionally with pesticides, like most of the orchards scattered throughout the area at that time, and it yielded a nice side income.

  Urban didn’t have a farming background, but his interest in working with people recovering from psychological illnesses led him into organic agriculture. He and a colleague had decided to establish a local job training center designed to serve people coming out of hospitalization for psychological problems. Their clients needed to learn new workplace skills while also reacclimating to the rigor of regular working hours. Urban and his coworker opted to focus on teaching organic horticulture, providing their clients with a therapeutic environment and skills geared to a profession that would give them a positive sense of purpose. However, that meant inviting a nearby organic farmer, Peter Teppeiner, to train the instructors before they could set out on their new venture. Little did Urban realize that what he would teach his clients would eventually lead him and his family not only to a new business but also a new understanding of agriculture.

  Given the medicinal qualities of herbal teas, Urban and his colleague decided that their clients would benefit not only from consuming herbal teas but also from learning how to develop a product from seed to tea bag. They would teach the students each part of the process from planting to market. Unfamiliar with growing herbs, much less organic growing methods, Urban and his coworker tapped their neighbor’s wealth of organic agricultural knowledge to teach them the proper cultivation techniques so that they could pass on the skills to the participants in the program. In a sense what they were teaching was nothing new—the use and lore of medicinal herbs certainly dates back to the earliest human settlement in the region. The astounding range of soil types and microclimates in the southern Alps has long provided people living there with a living apothecary.

  Urban found himself unexpectedly smitten by the beauty of growing herbs and flowers, not to mention the historical wisdom and lore associated with each of them. Pulling open drawer after drawer of different flower petals from his carefully regulated dryer and sifting through the intensely colored flowers, all separated by species, his fascination with the wonders of nature’s bounty is clear: “The intensity of the colors and the smells reminds me all the time of the biodiversity that we have to protect here in this monocultural desert.”

  His mentor in the project also got him thinking about how he could manage his home orchard organically. However, Annemarie wasn’t easily convinced. “I thought he was crazy,” she said. She’d grown up on a farm with an orchard, and for decades her father had done the spraying in the traditional manner of running a pump from a concrete trough to the apple trees by way of a hose and sprayer. When tractors became more common and sprayers were mounted on them, her father bought a tractor and had her brother get his licenses to drive and spray. But after her brother left home for his required military service, Annemarie’s father asked her to get her driver and spray licenses, too. She took the requisite pesticide applicator’s test and adopted the techniques and mind-set associated with pesticides in those days.

  Even after Urban returned from a biodynamic agricultural conference and described how they were going to convert their apples to organic management, Annemarie was skeptical, to say the least. “When everybody does the same thing in the same way all around you, you accept it,” she explains. “Urban eventually convinced me, not with his words but by what he was able to do.”

  It wasn’t long, however, before Urban realized that his interest in apples, even organic apples, was waning. His real passion was the cultivation and use of herbs and flowers. The colors, fragrances, and diversity had seduced him. He gradually began to think about ways of selling them, perhaps even turning his newfound passion into a business.

  Urban delved deep into the principles and techniques of organic agriculture, and with the support of various associations and a small network of organic growers, he began investigating not just organic and biodynamic apple production but also different business models for his family’s plot of land. He began to plant small experimental pockets of herbs and flowers between apple trees in his orchard and think out loud about his business ideas with Annemarie, who was slowly coming to appreciate Urban’s evolving interests and business ideas.

  In the end, turning forty was a watershed moment for Urban and the rest of the family: Either he and his family were going to find a way to tap into what seemed to be a viable business niche, or he would simply continue his job at the training center until retirement. When Urban announced that he wanted to quit his job and begin building the infrastructure necessary for an organic herb farm, Annemarie’s first reaction nearly put an end to the dream. “This time, I didn’t just think he was crazy —I actually got really mad at him.” It took a lot of discussion among the entire family, but eventually they all decided to pool their talents and resources and pursue the dream. That dream was much more than just one family’s entrepreneurial venture: If they were successful, it might also offer a new path forward for other organically oriented entrepreneurs.

  With apples dominating the mind-set and the market, it looked like they could tap into a niche with minimal competition. Besides, an agricultural economy built almost exclusively on apples wasn’t any healthier than a diet of nothing but apples. They began to chart a different way forward. They wanted to set an example for others. Before long, however, others would be determined to make an example out of them.

  Next to the power of their combined skill sets, perseverance would prove to be the Gluderers’ greatest asset. From the outset, nothing proved easy as they worked to build a business out of little more than ether and enthusiasm. Instead of waiting until they had the infrastructure in place to quit his job at the training center, Urban opted to quit earlier so that his organization could more easily find a replacement for the upcoming growing season. That gave him more time to begin setting up the meager beginnings of their business, but they still needed a building permit. “We didn’t know how difficult that was going to be,” noted Annemarie as she described the labyrinthine permitting process they encountered. Pioneering a new concept is never simple.

  When they applied for a building permit, Urban and Annemarie had submitted their plans for their new facility to the town with little reason to doubt that local officials would share their excitement about this new kind of agricultural venture. However, despite the fact that herbs were the quintessential blending of Alpine and Mediterranean cultures, the idea of an herb processing, storage, and retail facilit
y was completely foreign to their town officials, and they were perplexed by how such a small plot of land could possibly support a farming venture. Whenever most locals inherited a piece of property, they tended to put it into fruit production, not create a vertically integrated production facility that involved growing, processing, distribution, and sales all in one small location. The local officials were befuddled by the request simply because they hadn’t seen a parallel business model. It didn’t fit the norm, so they said no.

  The family was surprised by that first rejection. They resubmitted a revised proposal in good faith, but the planning commission still didn’t know whether the model fit the provincial standards, and they weren’t inclined to go and research that for themselves. At that point, some local officials suggested that they ask the province for help in interpreting whether their business plan could fit within the intent of the development regulations. They had only one more chance to submit a permit for review, so Annemarie used her connections as a municipal employee to gain the support of several provincial officials who provided documentation that the Gluderers’ request fit the necessary guidelines. At the same time, the Gluderers took the time to meet with the individual planning commission members and explain precisely how their project conformed with the law.

  By the end of fall 2003, Urban had left his day job and turned his entire focus toward getting their plans approved. When 2004 came into full swing, they finally received the needed permits and began construction. As the year drew to a close, they had completed the building and passed the final inspection.