AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter Davies writes from back in the states.
After four weeks of traveling throughout Turkey, it occurred to me, upon returning to our farm in Germantown and attending the Sheep and Wool Festival this weekend in Rhinebeck (left), that not once did I see a single example of the kind of farmstead we take for granted in our part of the world: no big spreads of fenced pastures and planted fields surrounding gracious, old wooden (usually white) houses and red painted barns.
Indeed, those who farm there are, for the most part, known as “villagers” not “farmers,” since they traditionally live not on their land but in a cluster of tightly packed village cottages, venturing out to their plots when they need to work them. Instead of owning many contiguous acres, as is customary stateside, Turkey's “farms” are composed of scattered plots, many accumulated through inheritance, as part of wedding dowries, or possibly by outright purchase. These plots may consist of arable plots for vegetable and cash crops such as tobacco, cotton, or wheat; orchards or vineyards; woodlots; or small pasture areas for grazing. Their agricultural holdings might even include olive trees and other fruit trees but not the land itself (it being possible to own trees but not necessarily the ground in which they are planted). In the densely packed villages each cottage yard is crowded with sheds, haystacks, and corrals for overnighting their cows, sheep, goats, and poultry. The villagers and their livestock, by our standards, live in very close proximity to each other. The typical Anatolian village, not surprisingly, relies on a highly communal mode of living, much in contrast to the very independent character of our farmers on their scattered farmsteads.
The villagers usually recognize a “headman,” and in the spring they can be found working together clearing irrigation ditches, plowing the individually owned plots, and sharing other agricultural chores and equipment. The communal nature of the village is expressed in village folk music, dance, dress, and life rituals pertaining to weddings, births, and deaths that differ markedly from the culture of urban Turks. The baggy shalvar (pants) and head scarves of the village women are much in contrast to the various stages of western styles worn by women in the cities. Tightening even further the communal bonds, the matchmaking within such villages has favored the arranged marriages of first cousins, thus assuring that the family keeps its plots of land and wealth intact. Until recently, the world of the villager and the urban Turk have been distinctly separate, almost like two parallel cultures. As an indicator of this, the daughter of one of my former Turkish students, who grew up living a very privileged life in the very westernized world of Izmir, asked me an interesting question as she was preparing to go to Virginia as an exchange student. “What do you think is the single most important difference between life in Turkey and life in America?” Without hesitation I replied that it was that there was no peasant culture in America as there was in Turkey, that here there was not that great a difference between the life styles of the rural and urban population. She looked at me very skeptically, and I heard her softly say to her mother, “Is this really true?” Not that there are no modern adaptations on the traditional Turkish village model. For instance, I was intrigued to see, perched on hillsides on the Black Sea coast, what looked like clusters of four- to six- story concrete and brick buildings resembling our apartment houses but incongruously surrounded by a huddle of livestock sheds, haystacks, and other signs of agricultural activity. Often these apartment houses were planted to the very door steps with hazelnut or tea bushes or vegetable garden plots. The buildings actually house, unlike our usually impersonal apartment buildings, several generations of the same extended family, or closely related families of the same clan: a vertical farming village. As with our farming trends there are other less welcome changes taking place in the Turkish tradition of farming. Peasants are losing their plots to speculators putting together larger farm units. In some regions, a form of industrialized farming is beginning to displace the old ways. Much of the rural population has been forced to migrate to urban areas.
In America today we see our old barns standing derelict or collapsing one by one (left, from Germantown); and formerly productive fields growing up with a jungle of junk trees, and vines, and young people leaving the region; in Turkey we are beginning to see the vanishing of village cultures as whole populations in the eastern region pick up and migrate to become squatter settlements surrounding the major cities of west and central Turkey.
In both our world and theirs, there seem to be inexorable forces relentlessly moving towards a large scale industrialized form of farming dependent on an increasingly smaller work force and hence a smaller rural population. It is not just that people are moving from one place to another, it is that, sadly, an entire ancient way of life is vanishing before our eyes.
