After eight beautiful, mucky, frustrating, biodiversity-filled and fulfilling years of giving voice to farmers—for who better to narrate the highs and lows of life on the farm?—the much-loved “Letters From The Farm” series is drawing to a close. And so we invite the doyenne of the series, our very first contributor, to guide us into a series of closing reflections. Welcome back to Chiara Garini’s forest garden at the foot of the Italian Alps.
Eight years after my first Letter from the farm, I find myself writing the last of this series. And fittingly, this ending arrives together with some important new beginnings in my own story.
Quite a lot has changed in the last year. We now have two new people in the team, and one new, still very small person in the family.
The last one has probably changed everything the most.
Motherhood, even though economically quite challenging (especially as a self-employed farmer, as support is partial and maternity payments from the national welfare system arrive only long after they are actually needed) has also been, unexpectedly, a time of strong connection to the present, and of a clearer reflection on who we are and what we are doing.
In the turbulent and often overwhelming emotions of becoming a mother, I found myself looking at our farm through a different lens. A more sentimental one. A lens I do not usually allow myself to use when talking about agriculture, sustainability, business plans or production figures.
But perhaps that sentimental perspective is where everything started.
Lately I keep coming back to a very simple question: Why? Why all this effort, all this uncertainty, all this constant exposure to things not going as planned, when, given my background and my academic path—my Masters thesis was published in an international journal, which I know is not always the case—I could have chosen something much more stable and secure, like a job in academia?
The answer, I realised recently, is surprisingly simple. It all started from love.
Love for humans, for the planet we live on, and for food, which has always been for me one of the greatest ways of experiencing the pleasure of being alive.
At the end of my Bachelor studies, some years before 2015, at a time when climate change and the negative impacts of agri-food systems were still not part of the mainstream conversation, I started to notice something I could no longer ignore. That the pleasure food gives often comes with hidden harmful consequences. Harmful for the planet and for people.
The food itself remained beautiful. What changed was my awareness of what was behind it.
That realisation planted the first seed that slowly grew into a direction. It is what led me to study agroecology in the Netherlands, at a time when in Italy there were still no real university paths in agroecology or organic food production.
There I discovered a world of ideas, practices and possibilities that showed how food could be produced differently. Food production did not necessarily have to degrade landscapes, exploit people or deplete resources. In some cases, it could even regenerate them. That idea captivated me.
Producing food while improving the health of ecosystems and communities felt like one of the most beautiful ambitions imaginable.
But just reading and studying about it was not enough. Not even observing, researching and contributing to it. I wanted to put it into practice, to actually make food using those methods, and see whether they could produce something real, edible, and also genuinely delicious.
That was the second seed. From studying to doing.
And from there, the step into the uncertain waters of agri-food entrepreneurship, leaving behind what could have been a stable academic path, and doing so with almost no entrepreneurial skills or education, and in a sector—agroecological and especially agroforestry production—where everything takes time, very little is straightforward and where constraints are many, generally many more than most of the other food businesses around you.
Looking back, I realise how fortunate I was to have had the chance to follow my dreams and ambitions. Through the support of our families, I had access to land, capital and knowledge, opportunities that many people hoping to enter agriculture today simply do not have.
What surprises me is that even with those advantages, establishing a new agroecological farm business has been a very hard path. So I wonder what makes this sector so difficult to access. From my own small perspective, I have the feeling that the reasons lie in broader systemic and societal dynamics, though that is not a story I feel qualified to tell.
After all these years, with all the challenges and satisfactions, the big mistakes but also the small successes, the moments of hope and the moments of uncertainty, I am proud that, starting from that simple position of love, our agroforestry food business still exists and continues to grow and that, season after season, we keep trying to produce the beloved experience of eating while reducing the hidden harms.
And perhaps what makes me proudest is that the original motivation has not disappeared and it is what still keeps me imagining and planning new futures for this farm.
I can’t think of a better way to close this series than with this love letter from—and to—our farm.
A heartfelt thanks to Chiara and to all of our letter-writers over the years for sharing their stories. Without your thoughtful insights, poetry and generosity of spirit, this very special series would not have been possible ♥
Look out for the next parting glass in this series, coming soon after the summer break!
Read the whole series from Chiara’s farm
Letter From The Farm | What worked from the 1st growing season?
Letter from a Farm – Ruminating on the First Two Years in Italy
Letter From The Farm | Three Years In: Realism And Planning For Utopia
Letter From The Farm | Cresting the Peaks of Constant Change
Letter From The Farm | Seven Years In: Realising Our Agroecological Vision
