Last Days of the Bus Club (25 page)

If you’re lucky enough to own a farm, albeit a not entirely feasible peasant farm that you maintain mainly for the pleasure of the sheep, you can’t help feeling that it ought to be able to produce crops for people beyond its incumbents, and at least defray its running costs. Ana and I believe fervently in this dream and we have kept El Valero ticking over, hoping that one fine day we might no longer just live on the land, but from it, too. After long and careful consideration, Ana decided that there were two ways in which we would achieve this goal. We would apply for organic certification, thereby increasing the market value of our produce, and we would greatly develop the fruit-growing potential of our land. Oranges were the obvious crop to start with,
as we knew these were of a high quality, but once we’d established our market we’d expand into pomegranates, a fashionable miracle food that had the advantage of growing spectacularly well in El Valero soil.

In Spain, to become organically certified, you need to have kept your farm free from agrochemicals and petroleum-based fertilisers for five years, to ensure that no residues still linger in the soil. From the beginning of that period no product must be used that is deemed unacceptable by the governing body, the CAAE (Comité Andaluz de Agricultura Ecológica). This includes seeds – which must be from organic sources – as well as fertilisers, pesticides and sprays. You also have to keep a book in which to note down assiduously all your agricultural operations and activities. Once a year an inspector comes to snoop around the place for signs of any of the forbidden chemicals and check that you have filled in the requisite pages.

Given that we had been running the farm on sound natural and ecological principles for the last twenty years and had not only banished agrochemicals but had been derided by our neighbours for doing so, we should have been rather smug about these checks. Yet, unaccountably the thought of the inspector calling left us apprehensive. There’s something about being inspected that triggers a guilty consience, even if the visit involves nothing more than a morning entertaining an idealistic young man, brimming with interesting ideas gleaned from agricultural college.

The usual pattern is that we wander round the terraces counting trees and sheep; pick some fruit and eat it; then have coffee together while he tut-tuts over the fact that we haven’t filled in the operations book … and then we fill it in together, with careful fabrications. It’s hard to remember
exactly when you did what, and, indeed, why. Finally he signs us off and walks back to his car with vows of undying friendship and a bag of earth for analysis, to make sure there has been no skulduggery.

The sheep, though they tick almost all the organic boxes, are kept out of the equation as I’m loath to fully commit to a regime that might leave them defenceless against their fiercest or most tenacious foes. Take fleas, for instance. There will always be fleas about if you live amongst cats and dogs and sheep, and most of the time they are manageable, but every so often – and there’s no knowing when – some mysterious combination of elements causes them to multiply exponentially, and what you get is a nightmarish explosion of the flea population. It starts in the sheep-shed, where one day you walk in and look down to find your legs and trousers literally black with fleas. You rush out, tug off your trousers and submerge them in a bucket of water with a big stone to keep them down. Meanwhile, the dogs go in for a nose round in the sheep-shed, and come out caked from head to toe in a living mat of fleas. The dogs sleep in our bedroom, and within days the connubial bed itself has become what the locals call a
pulgatorio
, where a
pulga
is a flea. You can’t sleep at night for the tickling of hosts of tiny creatures all over your body, and your every waking hour becomes a torment of itching and scratching.

And even the water treatment with the trousers is to little avail. I have left trousers beneath the water for ten days, only to discover when I put them on again that they were still alive with fleas. The cunning creatures creep into the tucks and seams, where there may remain the tiniest air pocket, and there they hole up waiting for the day. When you put the trousers on, they lie low for a bit, until
the warmth of your body awakens whatever notions it is that fleas have, and they come skittering out of their hiding places and head for the warmer and more enticing parts of your body, notably your nether abdomen. And there they play havoc with your parts, doing whatever foul things it is that they do.

You can’t mess about with fleas. It’s no good spraying them with preparations of mares’ tail, nettles or garlic soaked in spring water; you’ve got to hit the bastards hard with some virulent chemical. Similarly it’s no use pussy-footing with the intestinal parasites to which sheep are prone; you need strong stuff to combat these. The sheep graze, when not on the hill, in a river valley: ideal conditions for parasitical snails, which they ingest with the plants that grow in the riverbed. In order to keep the flock in good health, we have to zap them at least once a year.

Fortunately, the sheep don’t seem to mind being left out of the organic regime. And it matters not a jot when it comes to selling them, as we have more than enough customers with a taste for hill-and herb-reared lamb.

You might imagine that after a wait of five years there would be some sort of fanfare about making the grade as organic fruit producers – a ceremony, perhaps a little like getting a university degree, with capes and mortarboards, to welcome you into the exalted community. Yet all we received from CAAE to confirm that the conversion process was complete were a stack of new forms to fill in, more pages in which to note down our agricultural activities, and some stickers. These sport the CAAE logo – a green leaf and
a yellow celestial orb. It didn’t seem much, and yet in the days that followed I noticed a subtle shift in my estimation of our farm and, by association, my self-esteem as a fruit grower. Our oranges had undergone no greater change than ripening slightly from one day to next, yet they seemed to glow with added lustre. All of a sudden they were no longer run-of-the-mill oranges from a mountain farm, but properly certified organic fruit – more prized than, say, the identical crop hanging from identical branches on Juan Barquero’s side of the river.

If truth be told, though, I’m a little unsure about organic farming: I believe that without the agrochemicals the land takes less of hammering and that with careful and thoughtful management the soil should become ever more productive, ever richer with humus, and easier to till. I also believe that the soil is, along with the fish of the sea and the forests, one of the fundamental inheritances of man, so looking after it properly is unquestionably the right thing to do. But I am unconvinced that it can feed the population of the world. It’s hard to imagine how the great grain-growing prairies of Russia and the Americas can be farmed without the addition of artificial fertilisers, nor how the quantities of food necessary to feed the burgeoning urban billions can be produced with the addition of nothing more than compost and dung.

However, a tiny mountain farm like ours does not lend itself to the practice of agribusiness, and so, gladly, and perhaps appropriately, we have gone organic. And indeed, a few weeks after the stickers arrived we got a call from Federico, our local representative of an ecological fruit-buying company based on the Almerian coast. At least, that was what we
thought
he said. It was hard to know exactly,
as he insisted on speaking in a bizarre approximation of English, with random German- or Dutch-sounding words. It seemed that the only language he was unwilling to hazard was his own. After several false starts, he eventually used just enough Spanish for us to infer that he and a man called Antonio, possibly his boss, would come the following Tuesday and take a look at our fruit.

A couple of days later, Federico and Antonio came clattering over the bridge. Antonio, a short, solid-looking man, dressed in blue overalls, had the quiet authoritative manner of an experienced farmer. He seemed hugely relieved to discover that we spoke Spanish and immediately fell into a discussion with Ana about her plans to develop fruit growing on the farm. Meanwhile Federico bobbed and weaved around us, interjecting the odd comment in cod-English.

Antonio was a man who liked to keep his cards close to his chest, but even he seemed impressed by our Washingtonias. Everyone is. ‘How many kilos can you give me of good, unblemished fruit?’ he asked, gazing thoughtfully up at a tree through the thicket of leaves. We estimated about five hundred and, after a few more questions, impeded by a few more unfathomable sallies from Federico, we finally struck a deal. He would pay us a euro per kilo.

This sounded to us like good money, certainly more than we’d ever been offered in the past. Antonio had also shown an interest in the pomegranate harvest – an up-and-coming market, apparently – although being a citrus man himself he offered to put us in touch with a pomegranate expert when we felt that the trees were ready. The fruit market is highly specialised in this way.

We harvested the oranges and lemons on two warm sunny days in March. Antonio brought us a couple of
hundred plastic crates, and Ana, I and Christophe, a French friend and enthusiast for organic farming, set to the harvest. We started with the lemons, picking only the perfect ones. If you see lemons on sale in shops and markets, you may be unaware of the extremely varied morphology of the lemon. There are some really weird lemons about, in particular what are known as ‘Hand of Buddha’ lemons, which resemble nothing so much as an octopus. Occasionally you get one of these aberrations on a normal lemon tree. Others are less spectacular, but still too weird to be considered acceptable. Lemon trees have wicked thorns, too, and many fruit are damaged by the effect of the wind rubbing the fruit on the thorns. So all in all only about sixty percent were acceptable to the buyer. The rest we left on the trees.

Christophe and I climbed ladders and clambered about in the thorny trees, filling sacks tied around our waists with what we thought were the most perfect fruit. Then Ana, down on the ground, would inspect each one and put it in a crate for selling or in a reject sack. As one might expect, her word was final, and nearly every time we tried to argue the case for a marginal lemon, our plea was rejected.

We filled about thirty crates with perfect, gleaming, yellow lemons, and then started on the oranges. It was the same process, except that we have many more orange trees and they are, if anything, even more thorny. Ana again subjected the picked fruit to the same draconian selection process, and at the end of the second day we loaded the crates onto the back of the Land Rover and drove them across the river to where Antonio was waiting. He was impressed by the rigorous quality control Ana had instigated. It looked like the harvest would bring in a profit at last – not huge, but a sign that the farm might begin to pay for its upkeep.

As well as our harvest, we ended up with dozens of sacks filled to the top with slightly blemished oranges. This would have been depressing if we hadn’t already done a bit of research and discovered that the food bank in Granada was only too pleased to take any oranges that were spare – and they didn’t give a tinker’s toss about the blemishes. These city food banks are feeding millions in Spain at the moment and they need every bit of help they can get. It felt good to know that none of our labour would be wasted and that the reject fruit would have its own social value rather than having to be discarded like the windfalls.

In celebratory mood after delivering the properly shaped citrus to Antonio, we packed the Land Rover again, this time with the sacks of misshapen but equally delicious fruit, and drove off to Granada. The food bank was in a shed-like building in the centre of town and staffed by a small gang of volunteers, most of them recent immigrants from Africa or Latin America. As I parked up alongside, two tall Nigerian men and a sturdy-looking Colombian woman hurried out to help unload the sacks. They had made a large holding pen for the produce out of stacked tins and milk cartons in the centre of the hall, and tipped the oranges in to form an appealing centrepiece. ‘These’ll be gone within a couple of days,’ they cheerfully told me.

Rounding the bend to the river track on the way home we noticed Domingo hard at work in the field beside his house. Domingo, despite initial scepticism about organic farming, had also begun the conversion process for certification and had only another two years to go. Since gaining the deeds for the farm he had been working tirelessly, fencing in and cultivating parts of his land for his latest projects: the expansion of a nursery specialising in local Alpujarran plants and
the cultivation of a small plantation of goji berris, a shrub of Chinese origin, for the wholefood market.

Like pomegranates, goji berries – which are sold dried, the fresh berries having a curiously bitter aftertaste – are considered a superfood, supposedly packed with all manner of antioxidants and healthful qualities. I tend to creep past Domingo when he’s hard at work on the plantation for fear of being invited to come and sample the crop. The berries really do taste much better dried and even Domingo’s enthusiasm for them has diminished slightly after reading on the Internet that they need to be harvested wearing rubber gloves, as contact with human skin taints the fresh fruit and turns them black. Nobody likes wearing rubber gloves, especially when it’s hot (and in the Alpujarras it’s hot most of the time), and it’s not quite the done thing for us farmers to be seen wearing such prissy protection.