Harvest Notes from a Borrowed Field

The field is not owned by anyone who works it. It belongs to a family who live in the city and have not farmed for two generations, and each year it is rented by a small cooperative of growers who plant tomatoes and peppers on it from April to October. The crew who pick the harvest are hired by the cooperative for eight weeks at a time. Most of them come back every summer. Some have picked this field for longer than the cooperative has rented it.

I spent three weeks with them last August and went back for a fourth in September, when the last rows were cleared. What follows are notes, arranged roughly in the order of a working day, because that is the only order the field recognises.

Before dawn

The day begins at half past five in the car park of a closed petrol station on the edge of town. There are usually four cars and a minibus. Nobody talks much. Someone has brought a flask of coffee and someone else has brought bread, and these are shared without discussion, the way things are shared among people who have done this many times.

The drive to the field takes twenty minutes on a road that follows a dry riverbed. By the time the minibus turns onto the farm track, the sky above the hills has gone the colour of thin milk and the first birds are starting. Rafael, who has driven the minibus for six summers, switches the radio off at exactly the same bend every morning. I asked him why on my third day. He said the signal drops there anyway, so he might as well be the one who decides.

The crew

There are fourteen pickers in the August crew, eight men and six women, aged between nineteen and sixty-one. They come from four countries and speak at least six languages between them, although the working language of the field is a practical Spanish of about three hundred words, most of them numbers, directions and the names of vegetables.

The oldest picker is a woman called Teodora who has worked this field for nine summers and who is treated by everyone, the cooperative's foreman included, as the person who actually knows what is going on. She can tell by looking at a row whether it will be ready tomorrow or the day after. She moves along the plants at a steady pace that never seems fast and is always, by the end of the morning, ahead of everyone else.

The youngest is Ilias, in his second summer, saving for a driving licence. He is quick and careless and Teodora corrects him constantly, in a tone which suggests they have been having the same argument for two years and both of them enjoy it.

The owners

I tried to speak to the family who own the land and was told, politely, by their lawyer, that they preferred not to be involved. The cooperative's lease is renewed every winter by post. The foreman, Mateo, has met the owners once, at a funeral. He says the rent is fair and the family never interfere, and that he sometimes forgets they exist until the renewal letter arrives.

This arrangement is common in the valley. Much of the land is owned by people who inherited it and live elsewhere, and farmed by people who rent it and do not expect to own anything. The field is borrowed twice over: once by the cooperative from the family, and once by the crew from the cooperative, for eight weeks, in exchange for a wage.

The work

Picking starts as soon as there is enough light to see colour. Tomatoes are picked by hand into plastic crates that hold about eighteen kilos when full, and a good picker fills one in twelve to fifteen minutes. The crates are left at the end of each row and collected by a small tractor that runs back and forth to the shed at the edge of the field, where two women sort and weigh them.

The work is not complicated. It is repetitive and physically hard, and it asks for a constant stream of small judgements. A tomato picked too green will not ripen properly. One picked too soft will split in the crate and spoil the fruit beneath it. Pickers learn to judge by colour, by touch and by the slight resistance of the stalk. Teodora says she can tell by the sound the fruit makes when it comes away. I listened for a week and never heard it.

By half past ten the heat is serious. The crew stop for twenty minutes in the shade of the shed. There is water, bread and tinned fish, and once a week the foreman brings melons. Talk during the break is mostly about other fields, other summers, other foremen. It is a kind of spoken archive of the agricultural year, passed around in the shade, and I learned more from it than from anything I read before I came.

You think you are picking tomatoes. You are not. You are reading the plant. It tells you what it can give today and what it wants to keep for tomorrow. Take what it wants to keep, and it pays you back next week.

Teodora said this to me on my fourth morning, while she showed me how to hold the stalk. I wrote it down in the shade of the shed and she watched me do it with an expression I could not read. The next day she asked whether I had written down anything else she had said. I told her I had. She said good, because otherwise nobody would.

You are not picking tomatoes. You are reading the plant.— Teodora, ninth summer in the field

Borrowed land

In the second week the foreman walked me around the edge of the field and showed me its history. There is an old stone wall along the northern side, half fallen, which marks the boundary of a much older property. There is a concrete irrigation channel from the sixties, still in use, and a newer drip system that the cooperative installed at its own cost four years ago and cannot take with it if the lease is not renewed. And there is a single fig tree at the corner of the plot, which nobody planted, nobody owns and everybody eats from.

The drip system is what Mateo worries about. The cooperative paid for it, but it is fixed to the land, and if the family decide to sell or to rent to someone else, it stays. He has worked out that it pays for itself in three seasons. It has been in for four. Every year it stays, the cooperative is a little further ahead. Every year the renewal letter arrives, he opens it standing up.

This is what it means to farm borrowed land. You improve something that is not yours, knowing the improvement may be handed to someone else. You plan in single seasons. You learn a field closely enough to know which corner floods and which row gets the late sun, and you know that all of it can be ended by a letter.

The pickers stand in a similar place, one step further down. They know this field better than the cooperative does and far better than the owners. They know it for eight weeks at a time and then they leave. Teodora has worked it for nine summers and has never seen it in winter.

The fig tree

I want to say something about the fig tree, because every member of the crew mentioned it to me, unprompted, at some point during those three weeks.

It stands at the southwest corner of the plot, outside the rows, on a patch of dry ground that is neither irrigated nor farmed. Nobody knows how old it is. It fruits in late August, just as the tomato harvest peaks, and for about ten days the crew eat figs at every break, at the end of every shift, and sometimes in the middle of a row when the foreman is not looking.

Ilias told me the tree belongs to the owners. Rafael said it belongs to the cooperative, because it is inside the lease. Teodora said it belongs to whoever is standing under it. I think all three are right, in the way that people who share something without owning it are usually right.

Afternoon

The working day ends at two in August, when the heat makes picking dangerous. The crates are counted, the numbers go into a notebook the foreman keeps in his shirt pocket, and the minibus takes the crew back to the car park of the closed petrol station.

Most of the pickers rent rooms in town, in a block of flats near the market that fills with seasonal workers every summer. The rooms are small and hot and shared, and several people told me they sleep in the afternoon and live in the evening, when the town cools and the square fills up. I spent a few evenings with them there. They talked less about the work than I had expected and more about home, which for most of them was somewhere they would not see again until October.

What struck me was how temporary everything was, and how carefully it was arranged anyway. A shared kitchen with a rota written on the fridge. A string of lights along a balcony rail. A basil plant on a windowsill that someone had bought in the first week and would give away in the last. Eight weeks is not long, but it is long enough to make a place feel like somewhere, and everyone in that building seemed to know exactly how it is done.

Numbers

Because the foreman writes everything down, I can give some figures. In the three weeks I was there the crew picked just under one hundred and ninety tonnes of tomatoes. The best single day was the second Tuesday, when they filled eight hundred and twelve crates. The worst was the Friday of the third week, when a storm came over the hills at nine and stopped work for the day. Nobody was paid for the storm. Everybody ate figs.

Leaving

I went back in the third week of September for the last clearing. The rows had been stripped, the plants pulled up and piled for burning, the drip lines rolled and stored in the shed. The crew was smaller by then. Some had moved on to the grape harvest further north, others had gone home. Teodora was still there. She said she always stays for the end, because otherwise she does not believe it has finished.

On the last afternoon, after the final crates had gone, the crew walked the length of the field once, together, without anyone suggesting it. I asked Rafael whether this was a tradition. He said no, it was just what people did. At the fig tree they stopped and picked what was left, which was not much, and ate it standing in the dust.

The field will be ploughed in November and left fallow until spring. The renewal letter will come in January. If the lease is renewed, Mateo will plant again in April and hire a crew in July, and many of the same people will come back, and the drip system will be a year further into paying for itself.

If it is not renewed, someone else will farm the field, the crew will find other fields, and the knowledge of which row takes the late sun will go with them. Nobody will write it down. That is what I kept coming back to on the drive to the city: how much a borrowed place can hold, and how little of it is ever recorded by the people who own it.

On the last day Teodora asked me whether this piece would be published. I said it would. She asked whether her name would be in it. I said yes, unless she wanted me to change it. She thought about it for a moment and then said no, leave it. The field knows who I am, she said. The magazine might as well.