Rural Intelligence bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: Back from Turkey, but one would be hard pressed to call it a vacation, as Peter organized and led the trip, introducing the group to sites he knew intimately from years of living and visiting there. Nor were we entirely liberated from the cares of the farm, as Darlene and Alana, in whose competent hands we left the place, felt compelled to consult us long distance over the handling of a cow, Daisy’s mother M2O, who, like her daughter before her, was unsuccessful at calving. [See: A Harrowing Mother's Day Tale and Remembering Daisy] Luckily, this story had a happier ending than Daisy’s. The vet was able to extract the stillborn calf relatively quickly, and without performing a surgery he feared might be necessary. As we moved around Turkey, we were pleased to get messages that, thanks to Darlene’s and Alana’s assiduous follow up care, including penicillin shots and special feeding regimen, the grieving cow recovered quickly and rejoined the herd. The trip was nevertheless an escape and an enlightenment. As we proceeded through several climate zones of that extraordinarily productive country, we could observe both Turkey’s agricultural intelligence, and its mistakes. We met an architect whose passion is sustainability and whose family farm propagates native species for landscape use. We saw agricultural supply stores in provincial towns advertising organic products, and we observed the traditional symbiosis of farmers and transhumant herders, in which sheep and goats are invited in to graze on the stubble of harvested fields and leave their droppings behind as fertilizer. But we also saw the great expanses of Turkey’s central high plateau being carved up into fenced plots, ploughed, chemically fertilized, and planted in sugar beets, to the detriment of both soil quality and the herds that once grazed there. Of the ten people accompanying us, seven were neighbors from this region—Tivoli, Germantown, Old Chatham, Canaan, and Spencertown—and some of them were extraordinarily attentive in observing the livestock and the agricultural practices.
Curiously, I gained my greatest insights into the relationship between the Turks and their land during the week we spent off shore on the Tanem, (right) a gulet (wooden sail and motor yacht) built in a traditional Turkish style that sailed along the Mediterranean coast. Early one morning, I went up on deck and found our captain, Cengiz (Genghis in our spelling), carefully watching a honey bee walking on his index finger. He told me he had scooped it off the deck because it was too cold, and he wanted to get it into the sun. He explained that his father kept bees. Over dinner that night, we learned that Cengiz’s wife and three young daughters live with his parents on the farm, about 40 minutes from the port of Bodrum, where the boat usually berths. Cengiz was welcoming the end of the sailing season, so he could get back for the olive harvest, from which they press almost their entire year’s supply of olive oil. They make their own cheese from the milk of the cows they keep, and they grow apricots and pomegranates, as well. Cengiz craves his months on the farm, and would not even think of bringing his wife and kids to live in the comforts of glitzy Bodrum. Our crew of five also included two brothers, Mustafa, 26, and Fatih, 20, who hailed from the plateau lands above the eastern Mediterranean. Mustafa was studying hotel management and trying to decide between a boat captain’s career and a more sedentary job. But when pressed a little further he spoke of his personal vision of bringing agri-tourism to Turkey.
Mustafa pulled out his laptop and gave me a virtual tour of his family’s summer highland location. It became clear that he was just one generation removed from the migratory herding life that characterized the tribal populations of the Anatolian interior before the recent economic revolution. I saw his father wearing the massive traditional felt poncho (similar to the one in the photo at left), that herders wore to shelter themselves from inclement weather, and his mother using a drop spindle to spin wool from their herd of fat-tailed sheep. I saw the basic wattle and daub cabin structure he anticipated adapting to house the European agritourists who would come and pay to help work with the herds and the crops. In Mustafa’s animation, I felt the enthusiasm of a youthful dreamer, but also something more. Like Cengiz, he seemed to have a deep and abiding allegiance to the land, and to be seeking a way to maintain his connection to it, even as he took his place in the new tourist economy. One sees the same sort of enduring connection even in the massive metropolis of Istanbul, which, as it attracts millions of migrants from rural Anatolia, permits them to cultivate substantial vegetable plots in the shelter of the old Theodossian walls. Industrialization and then urbanization in America was accompanied by an extraordinary alienation from the land. Leaving the harsh conditions of rural life behind was sometimes experienced as a sort of liberation. The continuing connection sought by Cengiz and Mustafa suggest that in Turkey the process may achieve a somewhat better balance. —Mark ScherzerFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
