53 say “All done, now.” And it will be a retirement like what you perhaps experience when you have a good day and say “I did good work,” so you go to bed and sleep well. And so for me, for my last day, I would expect to be able to say “All done, now”». After all, I tell him – and he agrees wholeheartedly – that a farmer never retires. It is here that I tell him the story of my father, ninety-one years old, a farmer all his life: «He is fifteen years older than me. Maybe he's too good to quit,» Götsch remarks with a smile. He actually is, I think to myself. I tell him that he was born in Sicily in the 1930s, when Sicily was a very different place compared to today. He started farming as a child by seeding the soil barefoot, learning farming the way my grandfather taught him, but then, growing up, he converted to the new post-WWII way of farming. He ended up growing flowers on a big scale, using artificial fertilizers and pesticides. When he retired, he started growing vegetables for the family on a small piece of land. My siblings introduced him to the teaching of Rudolf Steiner and convinced him to change his approach. And it’s peculiar, to think that he is ninety-one years old and he is now partially relearning something he already knew, and lost. The father of Syntropic Agriculture listens to me attentively, and with a touch of empathy confesses: «I had similar experiences with my father. I can understand your father because he had been submitted to a very intensive brainwashing in the beginning of the 1950s. Even in our small Swiss village of about sixty inhabitants, two Americans – this was in 1952 or 1953 – came to explain that Switzerland no longer needed to do this or that. They showed people films they had never have seen before, with all of these war machines along with agricultural machines used in the United States, and the toxic chemicals they called sterilizers and pesticides. They told us “All you have done up to now is obsolete.” And nobody would like to be obsolete. No, no. That was so wrong. Farmers had to somehow forget what they were doing. And many, very many of them have actually forgotten it». And continues with the story: «In the beginning of the 1950s, my father cultivated potatoes without the use of any pesticides, covering the soil with more than twenty centimeters of straw, mixed with a little bit of cow dung, no plastic over it. He planted at the end of March. And in mid-June the potatoes were at the point to be harvested. No diseases. Beautiful potatoes. One day, he sold his farm and bought a small piece of land about 100 by 60 meters, cultivated what he needed for himself, and bred a few sheep. This time he did all what was done in modern agriculture. He was one of the first who bought at that time, because he could afford it, some herbicides to clean the borders of his place. And so one day I was visiting him and said “Father, why do we do that? We could cultivate the potatoes in the way you cultivated in the past,” “Oh, in that way. No, but that is not normal to do,” he told me. “Why not? Could you give me a small piece of your land to cultivate?” He said yes, and so I asked him, “Father, don't apply any toxic chemicals, any fungicides, no insecticides to my potatoes.” He said, “If you believe that it's necessary to grow them without those medicines, then fine, I will give them nothing.” Then I came back in June, when he had harvested both his and my potatoes. He said to me: “Honestly, your potatoes are more beautiful than mine! And now I remember what you said, that's what it meant when you asked me that.” Since the end of last World War, the same language and philosophy were used systematically to brainwash. No longer teaching people useful things, but turning humankind into something like slaves by the ones who consider themselves as the owners of this planet. And everybody learns it at school, at university, and repeats it. In order to get your degree, you have to swallow what you learned, and repeat it afterwards; only if you do that in a convincing way, you can get your degree».
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