Letting the land breathe

We’re outside the church of Panayia Kousouliotissa near the village of Flasou, surrounded by pine, eucalyptus and prickly pear. The field next door looks cultivated, and I wonder what it might be; “Black-eyed peas,” says Marios Skoutellas instantly, giving it a cursory glance. He knows this area well. Just out of sight, behind a row of olive trees, is one of the five locations where he makes his living as a small-scale organic farmer.

Marios isn’t necessarily Marios. Most people – maybe not up here, in Solea valley, but certainly in Nicosia, where he grew up – know him better as Feelix [sic]. That was his ‘graffiti name’ as an adolescent (he’s now 35), the signature he scrawled on random walls as one of the island’s then-handful of street artists.

He studied Multimedia at the University of Nicosia, and hadn’t always planned on becoming a farmer – but things happened (shall we say) organically. More than a decade ago, he and his partner Marilena came to visit friends who’d bought a house in Solea, and liked it enough to find a house themselves. He did other jobs for a while, often commuting to Nicosia – but meanwhile he was also reading books on organic farming and especially permaculture, and decided to give it a try.

Going organic was – and remains – uncommon in Cyprus, and is often belittled. “Some people say it’s all nonsense, that it’s all the same,” he admits. Some like to claim it’s a fad, or a scam; after all, such farmers like to point out, “’Even when we spray, it’s not like it stays on [the fruit]’… You know, you get all kinds of views”.

Marios shrugs resignedly. He’s tall and soft-spoken, with bright, very brown eyes and a shaggy beard; an old, silent hound named Bou (short for Caribou) sniffs and pads around us. As for himself, he explains, “I just wanted to prove – I don’t know if I wanted to prove it to myself or others – that you can plant and mass-produce vegetables organically, without spraying, and be just like those producers who do spray.”

Actually he goes even further, edging close to permaculture (defined as using land in a way that creates as little waste as possible). Most official courses on organic farming – probably to make it easier, and increase uptake – actually retain (he says) many of the methods of conventional farming. The only difference is that farmers are expected to spray with biological, non-chemical pesticides – but they’re still allowed, even encouraged to practise monoculture, i.e. growing only one type of crop per field.   

Marios, on the other hand (and/or Cocoon Organics, his market brand), likes to diversify, growing as many as 10 or 20 different things across his seven fields.

Right now, for instance – he cocks his head, trying to list them all – there’s “tomatoes, cucumbers. Courgettes just finished… Black-eyed peas. Prickly pears just finished… Peppers, aubergines. Chili peppers, two or three kinds. String beans, sweet potatoes.” Broad beans are joining the list pretty soon, meanwhile he’s already planted winter vegetables – broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, peas, lettuce, beetroot – to be picked in a couple of months.

“What else…?” he muses – and in fact there’s more. He has sugar cane, indeed he’s planted extra this year to try and make molasses. He has olive trees, enough to press his own oil. Lemongrass. Various kinds of berries. Fruit trees are mostly citrus, plus a few plums and peaches. Fruit is hard to grow organically, especially at relatively low altitudes – Solea is only 300m above sea level – where the dreaded Mediterranean fruit fly runs (or flies) rampant. Apples are almost impossible, ditto apricots; “I think apricots and apples are probably the most-sprayed products,” he observes mildly.

The list is impressive – but in fact even that list is incomplete, as becomes apparent when we leave the church and drive to one of the five locations, in Flasou itself. The smallish field teems not just with peppers and tomatoes but also kale, basil and late-season melons, none of which Marios mentioned earlier. He, meanwhile, seems a bit more relaxed now, looking forward to getting stuck in. He was friendly at the church but seemed to have one eye on the clock, waiting for the questions to be over. There’s work to be done.

The work never ends, despite the hours he puts in: 7.30 to midday in summer (the heat can be hellish for farmers) then from 4pm till it gets dark, and about seven hours a day – nine to four, or thereabouts – in winter. He also has a mini-greenhouse set up at home, where he grows the seeds to saplings before planting. Conventional farmers usually skip this step, buying the saplings direct from plant nurseries – but nurseries charge too much to do it organically.

Being organic is one part of his extra burden. The other is that “I don’t have any workers. I do everything myself. Whereas all other farmers have three, four, even five workers”.

Take the process of weeding a field, for instance. A conventional farmer may use chemical pesticides designed to be selective, killing weeds while leaving the plants unscathed. Those who don’t will usually just “pay a Vietnamese girl” to go and weed the field. Marios does neither of those things: he’ll clear the aisles with a cutter – but, when it comes to the weeds around each plant, he’ll crouch down and tear them off by hand. No wonder he complains that his back hurts.

Can’t he afford to hire people?

He shrugs: “I dunno – I just got used to doing it this way”.

Financial reasons are surely part of it, though the economics of being a small farmer aren’t too onerous: you get an annual subsidy from Koap (the Cyprus Agricultural Payments Organisation), he explains, which, though low, is usually enough to pay the rent on each field. In return you follow bureaucratic rules, like notifying the ministry before each planting – and, if organic, submitting to regular inspections by a private certification company.               

It’s not just the money, though. He probably could hire a worker to help, if he wanted to – but organic farming comes with a certain mindset, just because it tends to attract people with a passion for doing things differently.  

Most farmers are old, but Marios is in his 30s. Most of the young ones are carrying on the family business, but Marios chose this work – and could surely have been successful in visual art or design, given his early talent in graffiti.

There’s a purist, permaculture aspect to his mindset, a respect for – a desire to connect with – the land itself. Not only does he weed the fields himself, by hand, but he also tries to spray as little as possible, even biologically.

“I’ve been a farmer for almost 10 years,” he says, “and I haven’t sprayed for the past four months… Some people, when I tell them, think I’m crazy. Even I sometimes wonder if it’s okay,” he admits with a chuckle. “Yet it seems to be working.”

He tells a story from a few years ago, about a local tomato farmer who became indignant when he heard about his methods. “I said something about being organic, and he got annoyed,” recalls Marios. “I spray every week, and look at this!” said the farmer – and showed him batches of fruit perforated by the so-called ‘Tuta absoluta’ or tomato leafminer, a formidable foe in the world of tomatoes.

That indignant farmer’s point was that ‘Even I, who spray all the time, have these problems’ – yet it didn’t seem to occur to him that Marios didn’t have the same problems, or indeed that constant spraying may have contributed to his problems by killing what Marios calls “the good insects”, the ones that’ll often (not always, of course) take care of pests, if the land is left to its own devices.

In the end, organic farming seems to revolve around precisely that concept. Leaving the land to its own devices, letting it breathe; letting a natural balance play out, rather than trying to take over with industrial methods.

Thus, for instance, Marios points out an aromatic bush growing wild on the border of his field – the kind many farmers might’ve cut down, but he keeps it to attract bees that pollinate the plants. Thus, for instance, using weeds as compost, rather than destroying them. Thus, for instance, ‘companion planting’, basil planted right next to aubergine: aubergine lends the basil shade, basil deters various beetles that might otherwise ravage the aubergines. Thus, for instance, diversification, so that if – for instance – a tomato plant gets sick it won’t infect all the other tomato plants, because he has cucumbers and peppers in between.

Thus, for instance, tilling as little as possible then planting right away after he does, so the soil doesn’t bake in the sun. The quality of soil in Cyprus is a whole other chapter, and a depressing one: in intensively farmed areas, like Kokkinochoria in the Famagusta district, “the chemicals from pesticides have reached five or six metres below the surface, into the soil,” he says. (So much for the canard that sprays don’t stay on the fruit.) Even if farming were to stop tomorrow, it’d take years for that soil to recover. 

Marios is too soft-spoken – not to mention busy – to talk very much about the subject, but there’s certainly a lot we could say about the lack of respect for the natural world in Cyprus.

Another dog joins Bou as we sit outside the church; he’s a stray, almost certainly dumped by a hunter (“I see more of them every week”). Fly-tipping is another problem; go down the road, he says, and you’ll find mounds of garbage. He’ll sometimes see a fellow farmer cutting up rubber for this or that job, then just dumping the leftover pile on the ground. He says nothing. What can he say?

That’s the unfortunate context of being an organic farmer in Cyprus – a context where the land is being degraded, where very few young people go into agriculture anyway, where demand for organic products is decidedly niche, and where the few practitioners try to make it work, mostly by keeping costs down and planning their lives around their circumstances.

Marios and Marilena make it work. They’re a team: he works the fields, she stays home making jams and pickles – then, every Saturday morning for the past five years, they head down to the farmers’ market in Nicosia, where their particular business model (selling small amounts of many different goods) can be an asset. The rest of the time they just live, spending time in this unassuming valley.

Being a couple also helps to stave off loneliness – though in truth, that’s no longer a problem. At first, having grown up in the city, he’d sometimes think “‘What am I doing here? Why did I come here?’,” he recalls. “You get thoughts – idiotic thoughts. And then after a few years you’re like, ‘I can’t be bothered to go to Nicosia, what would I do there?’. And when you go, you can’t wait to come back.”

This is his life, the fields, the crops, clearing and planting and clearing and planting. And the future? Marios is only 35, and already his back aches. Some might say the way of the organic farmer – more rewarding, sure, but also more exhausting – has no long-term future. Others, however, might look at our rapidly diminishing land, pest-ridden crops and burned-out soil, and come to the opposite conclusion: going organic is the only future.