#5 – All good things come to an end: our last week in Uruguay.
The end of a great first adventure!
As the end of the first step approaches, we would like to talk to you more about the motivations that led Fred and Uta - with whom we have been working for a month - to change their lives and move to Uruguay to work in a farm.
As mentioned in our previous articles, the farm Isla Verde would never have been possible without the strength, determination and passion that these two people put into their daily lives.
Born and raised in East Germany in the late 1960s, they were young and full of hopes when the Wall fell. But soon, these hopes have given way to disillusionment. The Western world did not suit them. Getting into what they call "the matrix" to serve an individualistic society without conscience was something they could not accept.
And most of all, there was one thing they could not tolerate: the way food was produced in this society. Of course, there is nothing more profitable than large monoculture with massive amounts of fertilizer. But this is not without consequences. For the planet, first: soils are depleted, deteriorated, and in 50 years it will be impossible to feed the 10 billion we will be. And for our body then: we do not know how our body suffers from these products that we consume every day. That's at least what Fred and Uta felt, and what pushed them to act, to take the lead and create their Garden of Eden.
Unlike many people, Fred and Uta have therefore chosen their lifestyle. We can praise or not their ideal, but their merit is undeniable: they live a live full of consistency with their ideas and create the world they hope, without complaining or wait for others to do it for them.
At 6:45 am, the eyes still full of sleep, we happened to see Fred starting his day by watching his fields shouting "Vamos a cambiar el mundo!"(Let's Change the World). Isn’t it more seducing than those who don’t stop complaining about weather and subway delays?
To make it short, Fred and Uta know why they get up every morning. Is it a force of their own or something that we will find among many farmers? We will have the answer all along the journey. Living with them has taught us much about the basics of agriculture, but also about the unexpected possibilities that can reside in a few motivated and organized individuals.
Fred and Uta
For the first time in our short life, in this farm, we have worked with concrete tasks. New tasks were progressively assigned to us, but we have never had a global vision of the management of the farm. This may seem negative, but it is for us a discovery: studying how to become a manager, we are used to understanding the organizations globally and to being sometimes disconnected from their concrete activity.
If we had come here as HEC students, we would have taken the following figures: kilos of each kind of fruit harvested last year and number of hours worked by type of fruit tree last year.
With this data and thanks to Excel, we could have got a ranking of the most profitable kinds of fruit trees in terms of time invested by kilo of fruit. We could have finally advised Fred to focus on one kind of tree to maximize its profit next year, before getting away from the farm after a half day, with the misleading impression of accomplishment.
Without denying the value of such calculations, we are happy to have been able not to think that way during that month, and to have just worked with our hands. We aren’t revolutionizing anything here, and we just learn some simple things that make us truly understand the daily life of this farm.
As explained in our previous articles, we have only made a rather repetitive work in this 1st farm: few tasks to be repeated regularly.
For example we talked to you about watering fruit trees. It is a small 8 letters word that you have read in half a second. But for us during a month, it has represented several hours of work, several days a week. As for Fred, the total would be impressive! Fortunately, the landscape being what it was (read: incredibly beautiful !) we managed to do it.
A short video taken from the old mill of the farm to give you an idea:
This first month in Uruguay was amazing, just like we expected ... but better! Uruguay is known for its relaxed pace of life and its unique meat, we therefore logically got up every day before 7 am and we did not eat an ounce of a steak for three weeks. More seriously, we learned to drive a tractor and backhoe, plant tomatoes, cut acacias, pine and olive trees, harvesting figs, apples, plums, watermelons, melons, cucumbers, bad weed... This is not much but still a lot for us!
Our next step is to be discovered in the short video below!
See you next Sunday from Mexico !