Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Peter writes:
“Funny, they don’t look like farmers,” said one of the painters working on the barn across the street, clearly loud enough for me to hear, when we first moved in. And just in case we hadn't heard, he repeated it a bit louder, obviously reflecting the hostility towards us (the new outsider “farmers”) emanating from their employers, the unfriendly “locals” who own the barn. That age-old battle! Rolling my eyes and biting my tongue, I wondered, “What does a farmer these days look like?” Indeed, “What does a farm look like?” While traveling through Turkey these past few weeks, these questions resurfaced. Rural areas in Turkey are not punctuated with the kind of farm assemblages we take for granted: the red barn, the white house, the silos, chickens coops, and fenced fields and pastures. In Turkey, one passes long, narrow, unfenced strips of land, side-by-side, planted in different crops, each strip individually owned. No one lives on these strips, and there are no outbuildings. The farming population lives in a nearby village, usually consisting of a tightly packed cluster of cottages, storage sheds, and simple mosques. In my experience, Turks do not usually refer to this population as farmers but instead as peasants or villagers, a group with a very different culture from that of the urbanized, often very secularized, Turks in the cities and towns. Each day, the village men and women go out at sunrise to work their narrow plots, returning to the village at night. Usually, the men have come by their plots through inheritance or marriage. In some instances, the plots are farmed by the owners’ family; in others, by the collective work of the village. Farm chores are sexually defined: the men do the plowing, work on irrigation ditches, and tend to general maintenance, while the women do most of the planting and cultivating. Now that the men or village collectives have tractors, the larger part of the burden tends to fall on the women. Usually, both sexes work the harvest. It is through this ancient system, so unlike our own, that Turks (who, incidentally, eat very well), receive most of their food, and the Republic of Turkey earns income from such cash crops as tobacco, figs, hazel nuts, and olive oil. This system, despite certain recent developments, is still the primary mode of agriculture in Turkey. In certain areas of Turkey, those with rich alluvial plains, an entirely different system has evolved, one more like our Southern plantations. Vast tracts are owned by a single individual, but the land is worked by a hired peasantry. Ironically, in Turkey, it is this landowner who is referred to as a “farmer," though his relationship to the farm is, at most, managerial. Historically known as “agas”, these "lords" once presided over a feudel system. Today, the workers are paid wages to produce cash crops, largely for export.
While traveling a few years ago through the steppe country surrounding the ancient oasis city of Konya, I was surprised to see that the great grasslands, which had once supported huge nomadic tribes and their flocks of sheep and goats, were beginning to be plowed up. Vistas that had once been empty as far as the eye could see, but for the grass, flocks of sheep, and sometimes an occasional wheat field, were now interrupted by clusters of long, narrow metal sheds. On the roads, I saw tractors pulling long trailers piled high with something that, upon drawing closer, I realized were sugar beets. To my dismay, I was witnessing the introduction of industrialized farming to Turkey. This suggested that the same mistakes that have devastated parts of our own country were being repeated there. Also, sadly, this industrialized mode of agriculture was replacing the meat-and-wool producing pastoral nomads who historically had lived in black tents or yurts, following their herds up to the highlands in summer and the lowlands in winter. Yet not every agricultural development in Turkey is bad. On the south coast along the Mediterranean, a region not long ago that was virtually depopulated, there has, in the last few decades, developed a thriving greenhouse agriculture. The combination of its southern California-like climate with a vastly improved road system and the development of a food distribution system has given the region a California-like role—providing the rest of Turkey with vegetables and fruits during the winter season.
But California with a difference. The rocky, infertile soil together with slightly cooler temperatures and the availability of cheap sheet plastic have brought forth an agriculture that takes places almost entirely inside greenhouses. Indeed, so prevalent are these greenhouse “fields” that I have sometimes driven down a mountainside thinking I was looking at a huge lake below, only to see as I drew closer that it was actually a valley floor covered in greenhouses. Thus far, this new mode of agriculture seems to follow the older mode, in that the greenhouses are on small plots of land owned and worked by the peasantry. But, disturbingly, on this trip, while driving through Thracian Turkey, I witnessed my first industry-owned complex of greenhouses devoted to vegetable production. Where, I wondered, would this lead? Farming, it now seems to me, has so many different ways of being that a farm combined with a law firm, a kilim gallery and a travel business, as ours is, hardly seems a strange animal at all. This is particularly so when one realizes that local farm families have for quite some time now subsidized their farms by working at other occupations. A near neighbor is a liquor salesman, his wife is a home economics teacher, others are truck drivers, nurses or caretakers. The tough economics of the small farm, it would seem, demands all kinds of compromises, all kinds of ingenuity. So maybe, seen in the larger context, we do look like farmers after all. —Peter Davies
