The USGV worked with organic farmers, organic farming associations, the South Tirolean Farmers’ Association (Südtiroler Bauernbund, or SBB), the Laimburg Research Center, politicians, and others to convene and discuss different options through a series of meetings in the summer and fall of 2010. All three of Günther’s hay cuttings that summer had tested positive for multiple pesticides, and the USGV decided to sample other areas for pesticide residues to gather data on the degree to which drift was already impacting the town.
While the level of alarm was high among organic farmers, livestock farmers, and grain growers, everyone also recognized that the issue could quickly lead to intense polarization among neighbors, not a pleasant scenario in a town of 5,300 inhabitants. It didn’t make sense to create a toxic social atmosphere that would distract from dealing with the real toxins under discussion.
In general, almost everyone agreed, at least in public discourse, that farmers could manage their land in whatever ways they saw fit—as long as other neighboring farmers weren’t negatively impacted. However, as discussions progressed, it became harder and harder for some participants to see how side-by-side coexistence could ever really work in a town with such frequent winds and small parcel sizes. And many Malsers began to wonder whether compromise was, in the long run, the same as surrender.
The chill of late-summer nights began to seep into daylight hours as the sun’s arc fell lower, stretching the shadows of surrounding mountains farther and farther across the valley floor. Each village in Mals threw its last summer fling on different weekend days in September, celebrating the return of the cattle back to their home farms for the winter. Coaxed on by their respective farm families, rowdy cows trundled down stony paths from their designated Almen, or high pastures, finally bursting into the narrow village streets with a mix of certainty and fear. Most of them knew exactly where to go, but a few bovines always decide that it’s their last chance to assert their independence before giving up long summer days of free-spirited grazing for winter stalls and tight barnyards. So they do, and neighbors pitch in as necessary with woots and calls, amplified at times by the beverages being poured from kegs and bottles in the makeshift concession areas.
The smell of manure-splattered streets mingles with wafts of sausage, french fries, and cigarette smoke. South Tiroleans begin to get serious about the party when the cows come home. Once the four-legged critters are all in their respective barns, the real party begins and continues well into the night while the animals settle back into their on-farm routines.
It was a seasonal pattern that stretched back for millennia, ingrained into humans and livestock alike. When the cows come home, so do the cheeses, butter, and other cured items crafted in the mountains over the course of the summer. The bright yellow butters and creamy, aromatic cheeses produced high in the mountains are all distinctive—every alm has different grasses, legumes, herbs, and molds. Even the mineral content of the waters varies, and of course each person crafting the various dairy products has different methods, cultures, and tastes. Some of the milk is transported down to central creameries for processing, with mountain milk bringing a premium price for the farmers, but the pride of the region isn’t in the commodities as much as it is in the individual character of the products made in each different location.
Turn any direction in Mals and look up, and somewhere above you is likely to be a summer Alpine pasture tucked up between tree line and the shifting snow line, a place inhabited by people and animals reliant upon each other to fulfill a covenant established thousands of years ago. It’s an unspoken promise but one that is nonetheless silently renewed and codified into culture and calendar. To give up that covenant would be to cast aside culture, but the economic pressures continued to escalate, while the work and long hours never got easier. The question of whether livestock agriculture stood any chance of surviving the encroachment of Big Apple was a question that would simmer in the background that winter, rattling quietly like a cast-iron pot capped confidently with a heavy lid—with an occasional splatter and hiss signaling when things got too hot.
Farming in Mals is an annual redaction—reflecting on what the past season brought and transforming those lessons into what will work best for the coming year—and winter is the peak season of that redaction. Families spend their time huddled around their masonry stoves, and friends meet in bars and cafés to while away dark hours and usher in brightly lit holidays. People trade stories, compare notes, and hash out differences of opinion. Throughout it all, farmers glance back, albeit with an eye toward the future.
If 2010 was the initial wake-up call in town, 2011 would be the year of collective awakening, spurred on by a few early risers. And the ringleader of these “woke” Querdenkers was Alexander Agethle. A dairy farmer and cheesemaker, Alexander’s motto is a phrase borrowed from a friend: Ohne Kultur kein Käse. Without culture, no cheese!
Of course, the opposite might also be true if Big Apple got the upper hand in Mals.
Alexander Agethle grew up in the tiny village of Schleis, a puzzled assemblage of house and barns clustered around the village church, all tucked tightly into a mountainside halfway between Burgeis and Laatsch. Situated alongside a fast-flowing mountain brook that surges down a cleft in the mountainside, lending its gurgle-and-roar oscillation to the aural backdrop of village life, Schleis sits almost out of eyesight from the main road through the Vinschgau. Barely more than a blink of the eye in the age of fast-moving autos, the village quietly harbors what was and what matters still, at least to the Malsers.
About half a mile west of the main two-lane highway through the Vinschgau, Schleis is denoted only by a single blue-and-white arrow that directs drivers to bear sharply to the left. Most drivers don’t take notice of the village, its tile roofs barely visible from the road, unless they are somehow compelled by curiosity to see what others might have missed. Halfway to the village, the rounded end of a World War II pillbox nudges out of the angled turf just below the road. With tufts of grass commandeering the turf on its bombproof roof and mosses and lichens gradually camouflaging its sloping sides, the bunker recedes further and further into the past. As if to add insult to its modern-day irrelevance, one of the newest orchards in the town took control of its commanding view, tauntingly surrounding it in militia-like formation.
The view from the pillbox tells the story: What had been a patchwork of square fields with hay, grains, cabbages, and root crops had turned into a chessboard. Smallholders were about to become pawns, unless they found a way to promote their interests and hold fast to their positions.
For Alexander, holding ground in what was looking to be a fast-paced game of winners and losers meant carrying on more than two centuries of tradition for his family. Nestled in the heart of the small village of just over one thousand inhabitants, his family’s farm is typical of the smallholders in the village. While their fields are scattered around the outskirts of the village proper, all of the farm infrastructure, including the farmhouse, is packed into the already tight confines of the village. Alexander’s barn, outbuildings, and house all seem to blend together with the smooth flow of plastered walls and interlocking timbers.
The cheese facility and the hay barn both abut the village’s meandering main thoroughfare, their earth-tone plaster walls offset by decorative white trim and the dark brown of weatherworn doors and windows. A steep driveway bisects the two buildings with a zig and a zag that offer a semblance of visual privacy. However, privacy doesn’t pay the bills—visitors do, and it doesn’t matter if they speak German, Italian, or anything else. Cheese is spoken there, and it’s universal.
Whether informed or unsuspecting, visitors are lured by the farm’s modern logo, a nearly abstract H transformed into a cow with the addition of a simple dot for a head: Hofkäserei Englhorn—or, if you’re more Mediterranean-inclined, Caseificio Englhorn. Either way, the point of the name is that Englhorn is a farmstead creamery, and the Ageth
le family has turned a tradition into a market.
Once you zig, then zag, the tight-knit beauty of Englhorn opens up. Customers to the left; cows to the right. That is to say, if you hang around long enough, you’ll see customers ducking into the cheese shop on the left and cows entering and exiting the dairy barn on the right, likely being led (on a really good day) or prodded (on an ordinary day) by Alexander’s children. His parents offer backup, as needed, stepping out of the medieval-era house or the surrounding gardens to remind the cows that the kids have reinforcements if any bovine thinks there’s an opportunity for mischief.
Englhorn is a tightly managed operation, even amid the vagaries of weather, animal health, and tricky markets. A welcoming air of levity permeates the farm operation, with Alexander’s wife, Sonja, and his mother handling most of the direct sales while Alexander manages the bigger sales and operates the farm machinery. Sonja has a presence all her own. Her tousled curls impart a sense of a person on the move, with a moment here and there to sweep her hair back before taking on the next task, and, indeed, she runs between children, the cheese shop, and her job as a whole foods cook in her family’s hotel in Mals, carrying her broad smile all the while. Her lilting greeting whenever anyone comes for a visit or a purchase sets the tone for high-spirited banter that is slowed only when the cheese samples appear and customers’ replies turn into guttural affirmations, inevitably punctuated by a string of superlatives from across the European continent.
Alexander matches Sonja’s charm with a boyish smile embedded into sharp-cut facial features that are often mellowed with a 24/7 five-o’clock shadow (that’s what happens when you’re on the clock at five on both ends of the day) that seasonally morphs into a beard or goatee. His piercing eyes are alert to every movement happening in the busy courtyard of their farm complex. Children dart in and out, mixing chores and play, while customers duck in even as cows are being herded out. All of the hubbub swirls around the one place where chaos is banned, the cheesemaking facility. Inside, Maximilian, the cheesemaker, controls everything he can: time, temperature, pH, microorganisms, and casual visitors.
No culture, no cheese is true enough, but financing such an operation matters, too. A diversified farm the size of Englhorn is doomed in today’s globalized markets unless it can produce what gets lost in those markets. Like Günther, who opted to tap into the premiums offered by the organic dairy markets, Alexander and Sonja had to find a way to capitalize upon their small herd of traditional cattle. Instead of finding a niche, they built one . . . paid for by a currency they created themselves. First, however, they had to build a financial model that others would trust.
With 12 milk cows, 25 acres (10 ha) of fields, and the vestiges of a medieval farm complex that had been in Alexander’s family for more than 200 years, the Agethles knew that economic survival depended upon a blend of creativity and community support. They decided that their best option was to build a cheesemaking facility and turn their 132,000 pounds (60,000 kg) of milk into a high-quality cheese. In the face of daunting construction costs, they combined their own funds with a loan from an ethical lender and then sought out the additional balance needed—180,000 euros (over $200,000 at the time)—from supporters.
After vetting their idea through some of the most feared bureaucrats in the country, the Italian tax authorities, they got the go-ahead to create a ten-year “Englhorn currency,” complete with cow-cameos on the so-called Englhörner, the bills that they offered in several denominations. One Englhörner was valued at a kilogram of cheese, priced at about 23 euros per kilogram. The idea was to presell a certain percentage of their cheese for the first ten years of production, offering a minimum investment of 500 euros and then different levels above that amount. By the time all was said and done, they raised the entire 180,000 euros from 167 investors. Each January the investors are given their Englhörner Gutscheine, or Englhorn bills, along with an update of news from the farm, and they can swap their fancy notes for cheese not only at the farm but also at two organic food stores in the nearby cities of Meran and Bozen.
The Agethle family encountered one unexpected issue in the investment phase of the project. Several people wanted to invest more than 1,000 euros in the project but felt sure that they could never eat that much cheese. Alexander and Sonja pondered the dilemma and then came up with an intriguing solution that they also had to run by the tax authorities. Sonja’s family runs the Hotel Greif in Mals, a small hotel in the middle of town renowned for its superb and health-oriented fare. They set up a deal in which Englhorn investors could use their currency to pay for their vacations and meals at Hotel Greif; the hotel would, in turn, purchase its cheeses from Englhorn using the currency given to them by the investors.
They replicated that model with a high-end restaurant in Munich, five hours away, where investors can either pick up or eat their Englhorn cheese at the restaurant. Most of the investors were from the Vinschgau and South Tirol, while others came from German-speaking areas of the Alps and even as far away as France. Alexander and Sonja had transformed not only culture into cheese but also money into relationships, relationships that would grow with their business and put them on the map throughout Europe.
But with the accelerated march of Big Apple in their direction, they risked being wiped off the map in fewer years than it had taken to claim their position. When they heard of Günther’s predicament, worry turned to fear. Ninety-eight percent of their cattle feed was hay and grass; the other 2 percent was supplemental grain to keep the milkers in good condition. If their fields were to be surrounded by apples, their whole system would collapse—their landscape, herd, customers, and financial model were all doomed. Once again, the coming turf battle was all too literal: It was about hay.
“Heu hat für mich, für diesem Betrieb ein absolut grundlagen Bedeutung,” Alexander explained: Hay has for me, for this business, an absolutely fundamental meaning. Healthy humans depend upon healthy animals for milk and meat, and those animals are reliant upon the keystone of Mals’s agriculture, healthy hay.
Alexander could summarize the dilemma in one sentence: “The cow is the filter between humans and their environment.” Of course, there was a caveat: The cow has limits, not only as to how much it can filter when it comes to toxins, but also as to how much it can withstand before its own health is compromised. Alexander believed that a healthy local economy was dependent upon a healthy landscape, and Big Apple threatened all of it. His goal had long been to leave the land in at least as good a state as it was when he inherited it, but he and many of his fellow farmers in Mals were clear on the legacy left by a conventional apple grower: They would leave behind an Apfelwüste, an apple desert, filled with toxins and shortsighted dreams.
Big Apple even posed an existential question for Alexander: Was the fruit it produced actually food, or was it just an industrial product? The question mattered because of Italian tax policy. When the goal of farming is to export a product for the highest financial return, with minimal concern for human or environmental health, much less the future of farming in an area—should it still be rewarded with tax breaks?
Alexander appreciated the intent of the Italian tax policy to support the production of food at a reasonable cost by not requiring farmers to pay income tax on their food sales. However, like Peter Gasser, he questioned the wisdom of creating a virtually tax-free economic model that wreaked havoc on soil, plants, and the landscape—leaving the rest of society to pick up the costs of overseeing pesticide production, distribution, and use and addressing its impacts. Not only did that tax system give the chemical-intensive farmers the economic capacity to push out farmers like Alexander and Günther, but the near-certainty of pesticide drift meant that organic farmers, livestock producers, and grain growers were in peril. Paradise was under siege.
Beware the moment when Querdenkers begin to align. They are masters of parody, and parody would soon be Paradise’s closest ally.
Today, temptation by apple is nearly as common a theme in regional tourist brochures as it is in South Tirolean churches. The allure is much the same—there are just more clothes involved in the modern version. In the areas of the South Tirol where the seduction has played out in full and orchards dominate, tourists are enticed to visit during blossom and harvesttimes. When apples are all that’s left, farmers and the tourist industry both bank on what they’ve got to sell.
Alexander and a group of friends had long discussed the intensification of monocultures in the Vinschgau, and they realized in 2011 that it was time to turn their concerns into action. Josef Thurner, a farmer and town spokesperson; Jürgen Wallnöfer, an architect; Armin Bernhart, an educational scientist; and Konrad Messner, the cultural provocateur and guesthouse owner from Plawenn, joined forces with Alexander to jump-start the dialogue.
An inventive lot, with a self-described penchant for cheekiness, they decided to launch an initiative called Adam & Epfl—Epfl being the dialect word for “apple,” with a certain similarity in pronunciation to Eva, the German version of Eve. They chose a painting by the famous German artist Lucas Cranach from the 1500s to represent the predicament in the Upper Vinschgau: A serpent in a tree coaxes unwitting victims to partake of the tempting fruit in a quest for promises of a better life. It was the motif for what was to become a movement.
As far as Alexander and his friends were concerned, taking the apple wasn’t predestined. It warranted discussion and perhaps even a bit of mischief in the long run. But the first task was to get people to mitreden, to talk with one another, and spring was the time to do it, before farmers got busy and temptations and the sound of yet more concrete posts being driven into the ground echoed throughout the valley.
On March 19, 2011, Adam & Epfl convened an information session for citizens to discuss a single question: “To what end is intensive fruit production seducing the Upper Vinschgau?” It was a question that had been discussed among families and friends, but it was the first time that a public forum had been organized to consider the creeping seduction. Held in the Mals Kulturhaus, a spacious cultural center located in the middle of town, the event drew a full house, surprising even Alexander and his fellow organizers.
A Precautionary Tale Page 12