I look enviously at big fields, imagining what I would do with land like that, visualising the way the water moves beneath the surface, fantasizing about where to put fences, plant trees, how to graze it. Land is like a canvas to be painted on. I don’t have big fields. I have tiny fields, tucked away in a little valley. The hillsides are steep, the terraces older than time. Some of the land is barren, while some of it is rich. There is pasture, old growth forest, desolate wasteland.
I love it, but it ain’t easy. Our land is composed of modest amounts of many great things, none of which could support us singularly. The challenge is to develop a system of farming that can connect and utilize all these assets. If we pull it off, then it would be an extremely resilient farm, with many small forms of income and different kinds of food and materials that we could use.
Infrastructure is key. I’d love to own a tiny tractor, which I could use to haul heavy objects throughout the valley and beyond, but the terrain makes that difficult. The entire north facing slope used to be plantation, and now needs to be regrown and redeveloped into something more useful and ecological. I think I’ll be optimistic and leave space for a tractor to go up and down the slope, to be completed upon the purchase of a tractor (when we can afford it).
I daydream about all the ventures to renaturalize the land and improve productivity, then I see lowland farms1, already finished, ready for use out of the box, so to speak. What a privilege it would be to own one of those farms. Our place will be like that one day. I wonder who will take responsibility for the land when we are too old to bear the burden. I hope our son will do it — a normal wish for farmers — but he might not want to. Occasionally, I wonder what we will be able to give him when he comes of age. We could give him a very modest lump sum of cash, he could have a really nice holiday with that, but it wouldn’t change his life or anything.
I often think of the Amish2, how they handle inheritance. It may differ between families, but typically the younger sons will inherit wealth from the parents, while the oldest son must buy the family farm. (They are very patriarchal, not something to admire, in my opinion). The Amish tend to have a lot of children, and each son must own property or have a trade to be a functioning member of society, so they need to buy lots of new land to fuel the exploding demand from a growing population. All that is very interesting, and I could say so much more about it, but the bit that interests me is the part where the eldest son (or whichever one takes on the family farm) buys the land from the parents.
My vision is that we make a deal with the land; we take care of our home, and it supports us in return. It needs to see us through retirement as well. We won’t have pensions that could support us, so we might need to sell it one day, then trade down for a little cottage with a garden, a workable plot to live out our final days. When I’m an old man and the place looks like my dreams, it won’t be so cheap as it was when we bought it. The value of land has already skyrocketed since we bought the place in 2019, but we’re not in it to flip it3.
I want our family to form a lasting relationship with the place we live and work. If our son wants to follow in our footsteps, he'll need to pay for it, like anyone else, the true gift to him would be the functionality of the place.
If it's our son that takes the place from us, he's more likely to rent than sell, unless he goes away and comes back with a fortune. That's fine, he'll inherit everything in the end anyway, paying us rent in the meantime will mean that we survive retirement. In my view, the best thing we can do is get the place ready for him, in case he wants it. He can take over when he's ready. If he decides to do something else with his life — as so many have done before him — then we'll keep doing what we're doing, and one day we'll sell everything to strangers or outsiders. Either way, we have to work on the place to ensure that we don't die destitute.
Handing over the beacon to the next generation, it's something that occupies much of my thoughts. If he takes over, I don't want to get in his way. I think that is a problem in some families, the older generation being stubborn and causing tension when the younger generation comes up with new ways of doing things. Maybe it won't happen, maybe we'll always see eye to eye. That would be nice, but it's probably not a good idea to bet on. No matter how much I love the land, I'll have to give it up one day, and even though the thought of being the steward till the end of my days is comforting, it might not be that long.
Twenty years sounds like a long time, but it doesn't seem that long to me. I know, I'm young, but I had to learn to think in long terms and be patient when we came here. I like to watch the grass grow, to become familiar with as many saplings as I can. In the city, a skyscraper can reach the clouds long before one of my oaks even grows to the height of my belt... I might only be the steward for twenty years, if my son genuinely wants the place, then he should start taking control by that time.
I shouldn't just be thinking about preparing the land for my son (or for an eventual sale if he doesn't want it), I'm thinking about how I can prepare myself for the possibility that I will no longer have the land to take care of. I got a head start on many things in life. I skipped the end of school, I left my family, home, and country, at the age of sixteen. At the age of twenty-three, I married, got a job, bought land. When I was twenty-six, our son was born, then we came here. If he becomes steward to the land, then I may be out of the job before I even reach fifty. That's way too early to retire.
That's the question, I know what to do with the land, but what will I do with myself? Perhaps it would be a relief, to stop worrying about all the jobs, the trees to be cut, the holes that need digging, maybe I could forget about the breath I've taken, and focus on the one I must to go on. Maybe I'll take the flock and spend my days wandering the Serra. I always wanted to be a craft’s person, to make things out of wood and leather. Before we came here, I naïvely thought I'd be able to spend my time making and selling bespoke wallets, spoons, and other little things. Well, there's no time for that now, but maybe one day.
There is another way, too. If our son does not want to work on the land. He can have whatever we've managed to save up for him in any case. I can still imagine handing the farm to the next generation. I know that there are many young people who want to farm, but could never afford to do what we've done. Maybe we could find someone else in their twenties or thirties, someone similar to us, but not necessarily the same as us, who could step into that role.
When I'm in my forties or fifties, I could see myself taking on a kind of apprentice, with the understanding that it would mean the gradual transition of management and handing over of the beacon from one generation to the next, even if it is not within the family. Maybe we could find someone who is willing to spend a number of years learning the nuances and secrets of our farm from us, learning how to operate whatever businesses we've been able to build, and then begin taking control, one step at a time. Many people come here because Portugal offers a chance to own land, but land owns us too, and it needs continuity.
Spring
Spring has taken longer to unfold this time around than it did last year. The Loquats are only now ripening. In other regions, that already happened weeks ago. It's not a year for cherries. One year ago, I was writing about the abundance of spring, everywhere I looked, there seemed to be bucketloads of fruit ready for the picking. It's not quite as intense this time around. Many of the fruit trees had a decent amount of flowers blooming, but the late rains knocked many of them down, resulting in less fruit. I'm hopefull for the olive harvest, they were the last trees to bloom, so they didn't suffer from the rains. In my opinion, the blooming of the olives heralds the coming of summer.
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