Gavin Boothby – SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry
For most of my life I’ve been living in a typical North American suburb in Western New York. The houses are all about 20 feet apart, each with a front yard of freshly cut grass and maybe a flower garden along the path to the front door. My house is a three-minute drive to the nearest Walmart, and five minutes to the closest fast-food restaurant. After being used to this for as long as I can remember, to say that living in a southern Chilean home for a week was different would be an understatement.
I remember the moment I arrived at my home-stay vividly. I was in the back of the van driving on the dirt road. Each house we drove past was further and further apart from each other. We then drove past a long fence that was holding a herd of baby goats inside. While admiring how adorable they were, I realized we had begun to turn into the driveway. I looked out the windshield and saw a family of dogs running happily towards the van, and behind them a woman doing her daily tasks. From the moment I stepped out of the van until the minute I left a week later, I experienced and learned about a completely different way of life than I was used to back home.
My friends Kiera and Margaret and I were introduced to Leo, the woman who’d be taking care of us and sharing her home with us for the next week. We got a tour of her house, which had a cozy kitchen and living room area with a large dining table, a few bedrooms, and a bathroom with a nice shower (which I hadn’t seen in weeks). She then took us back outside and showed us more of her land which had a row of greenhouses, various animal pens, and lots of open space for the animals to roam. It was absolutely beautiful.
We spent the rest of the morning weeding in one of the many greenhouses, then had lunch with the whole family. After lunch, we went to scoop goat poop into buckets and spread them over the area we had just weeded. Leo then showed us how to plant lettuce in staggered rows, which we did until all the soil we weeded was full of small lettuce plants. Then Leo took us to a different greenhouse and let us pick strawberries to snack on. I had been missing fresh berries for some time, so this was a super nice surprise. Leo let us rest until dinner where we talked and got to know each other more, until we went to bed.
Inside one of Leo’s greenhouses, where she grows lettuce, cilantro, and many other vegetables.
This is what most of our days looked like at Leo’s house. Wake up, eat breakfast together, work around the farm until lunch, eat a big lunch, return to work until evening, then rest until dinner. Other tasks we did on the farm besides weeding and planting included milking cows, cleaning greenhouses, feeding chickens, and helping transport firewood for the house.
Photo Credit: Kiera Burke That’s me milking one of Leo’s cows. This was the first time I ever milked a cow! I was only able to get a cup of milk in the same amount of time it took Leo to fill a whole bowl.
Now besides the obvious differences in mine and Leo’s ways of life, I noticed something not as apparent. Everything Leo does in her day-to-day life on the farm is linked with conservation. The way she grows her crops in staggered rows and plants different vegetables in the same area helps them grow better and keeps the soil healthier. Then what she and her family don’t eat themselves, she takes into Cochrane to sell to the community, minimizing waste. All the weeds we took out of the greenhouses were given to the chickens to eat. Then all the eggs were collected and eaten as well. Also, instead of using harsh chemical fertilizers like we would in the United States, Leo exclusively uses goat poop to fertilize her crops.
The greenhouses aren’t the only sustainable things on her farm though. When we collected wood for the house, we drove out to a mountain on her and her husband Modesto’s ranch. Leo went into the forest and carefully chose recently dead trees to cut down and chop into smaller logs that we carried to the truck to bring back. This process isn’t harmful to the forest at all because she only chose dead trees. Then, the logs are used in the wood-burning stove to not only cook food, but to heat the whole house, including the water in the sinks and shower.
Leo’s truck bed filled to the brim with wood we gathered. She told us that chopping and collecting wood is her favorite task she does on the farm.
Seeing all of this was so inspiring to me because I realized that it’s possible to live off the land in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. Leo took resources from the land but always found a way to repay what she took in one way or another. The land helps her live, and she helps the land in return.