The Clash of Care Between Farm Workers and Landowners on Italian Lemon Farms 

By Anna Notsu, Leiden University

Amid a growing trend of transitioning to tropical-fruit farming in Sicily, I spent three months working at several lemon farms in order to investigate how farm workers perceive and converse about climate change. When I arrived in January 2019, it was surprisingly cold. I saw the workers wrap up each foot with a plastic bag for warmth and I made sure to do the same before I went out in the farm. The temperature in early mornings could be as low as 5 degrees. The cold, waxy lemon skin with morning dew was almost unbearable. As the workers harvested in a different part of the farm each day, depending on the landowner’s request, my day started with having to look for them first. The ground, muddy and frosty, would stick to the bottom of my Wellington boots. Walking through long lawns and arching branches of lemon trees was a lonely and difficult job.

In a matter of hours the scenery changed drastically. The eerie silence disappeared, the sky became clear, and the temperature went up by 10 degrees. From buzzing bees to tractor sounds, the farm regained a sense of life. Alongside these shifts, the workers changed their attire. ‘There is no time’, they told me as they swiftly removed the plastic bags and changed into hiking boots.

As I participated in farming, I soon learned that this routinised pattern of labour altered relative to seasonality and client order, and due to varied climate change impacts. Faced with degradations and disturbances, the workers endeavoured to sustain the farm condition and their work performance by devoting their limited time to harvesting efficiently, through which they articulated their care for the farm. However, I noticed, the landowner interpreted it differently. While they each cared for the environment they engaged in, different understandings of climate change between the workers and the landowner brought about a clash of care.

Time, pride and care

As climate change was intensifying, unusual extreme weather events and sharp temperature fluctuations wreaked havoc on the farm, which inevitably led to additional labour. Aside from damage control, the workers had to deal with increasing numbers of spoiled products, what they called scarto, resulting from such ‘freak weather events’. In the meantime, they were inundated with client requests amid a myriad of things to do at the farm. So they sped up. To expedite the process of harvesting, they bulldozed outgrown weeds and wildflowers in-between and around the lemon trees. Not merely as a strategy to respond to the time pressure, but as a way to put their pride and care into ameliorating the environment as a farmer. One worker said, ‘Plants are like us, you cannot just leave them. We take care of them, it is our job’. 

While one made a clear path, others went up a wooden ladder and looked for ‘good’ lemons that were perfectly round and yellow, with almost no blemishes on the surface. But the rarity of finding such lemons prompted some to climb up to the top of the tree, where even the ladder could not reach. They stood on tiptoes and went through the thorns. While grabbing one, their eyes already scanned the surrounding to search for the next. This repeated until the bucket was full. Once filled, they shouted my name. I stopped harvesting for a moment, then carried the bucket to the tractor, emptied it and ran back to them with an empty one. With the tall grass being removed, it was easier for me to go back and forth to the tractor.

‘So much better, don’t you think?’ said the worker standing by the tractor, glancing over the visibly improved conditions. There were no more wild plants that were almost outgrowing the young avocado plants. I saw it as a sign of mutual achievement. From clothing to the way they peeled an orange, I devoted my time to imitating what the workers did. This participant observation, or what Paxson called ‘participant labour’ enabled trust building and collaborative labour. In so doing, I observed how they expressed, nurtured and shared with me subtle forms of care toward the farm and those who maintained the environment.

More than just a lemon farm

The workers’ care for the farm was, however, not necessarily received as such by the landowner. While impressed by the progress they made, she lamented that the workers did not see those wildflowers as an important part of the farm: ‘The workers only know one way of farming’. The flowers can attract bees and may help the process of crop pollination. Precisely as she was conscious of the fast approaching ‘tipping point’, her foresight led to seeing the farm as an ecosystem. For this reason, the workers’ attempts to take care of the farm through their dedicated work performance were, to her, another kind of damage to such ecosystems – she ruefully remarked, ‘they only care about the work speed’.

Contrary to the workers, the landowner ‘slowed down’ the speed of production as a form of care. Her focus was drawn to retuning the production process toward climate futures by utilising available resources and existing infrastructures. She wished to minimise unnecessary human interference over the present ecosystems and having a self-sufficient and ‘regenerative’ farm. Instead of mowing, for instance, she preferred to let her horses feed on the grass and use the faeces to fertilise the soil. Beehives were set up and wildflowers were kept next to the avocado orchard that she recently made in anticipation of the transforming local climate. Long lawns became a playground for the dogs. The farm was more than just a lemon farm, as she considered it an accommodation of different life-worlds and extended her care toward diverse life cycles.

But still, despite these practices of care, global climate change has taken a toll on the environment, where humans, plants and other animals, live, work and play. Due to the nature of climate change to exponentially proliferate in a chain of causality, the farm’s environment was becoming unprotectable and irrecoverable. The lemons were getting smaller and harder to meet the shipment standard despite the high degree of care. This cycles back to the question of resilience and the workers’ capacity and willingness to take care of the farm. Or does it?

Care to struggle?

In his monograph Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon quoted Aldo Leopold’s claim – ‘We can be ethical only toward what we can see.’ Climate change, for many, still remains outside the everyday reality because of its abstract presence. Worldwide, environmentalists and activists desperately beg others to take immediate action and care for the planet that we share. However, albeit the increasing sense of moral obligation, what does it mean to care for disappearing species? How much capacity do we have for caring?

Speeding up or slowing down, some of the farm workers and their employers I met during my fieldwork articulated varied, at times conflicting, forms of care in dealing with climate change. While the landowner regretfully pointed out the way the workers harvested, interestingly, it was that work speed and pattern of labour in which their care was manifest. And yet, in the meantime, climate change was further influencing the relations between the landowner, the workers and the farm, as it deteriorated the ecological conditions of the farm.

The landowner’s teenage daughter told me one afternoon, ‘I remember [the farm workers] were happier before, because the animals and trees were happier too.’ Perhaps, this kind of multispecies entangling at play in farming is what we (collectively) need to pay closer attention to.

References

Nixon, Rob. 2015. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Notsu, Anna. 2022. Climate change in plain sight: anthropological contribution in the time of climate crisis. 07 February. Accessed October 28, 2022. https://www.leidenanthropologyblog.nl/articles/climate-change-in-plain-sight-anthropological-contribution-in-the-time-of-climate-crisis.

Paxson, Heather. 2008. “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 15-47.