My rural roots, and rural upbringing, influenced my early ideas of nature and landscape. More than now, the landscape in my youth was intertwined with agriculture, or rather fields, a rural landscape shaped by Gozo’s rural ethos. It led to my studies in agriculture, first in college and then at university, and that is when my ideas of agriculture and landscape evolved.
I then went into publishing, but my studies served me well in understanding the interaction between people and landscape, and ecology – including, quite distinctly, the ecological impact of agriculture.
In the Maltese Islands, where the landscape is mostly a rural landscape – a landscape of fields, of agriculture on a small scale – people talk of agricultural land as if it is the landscape of nature. People and environmental activists even conflate the two, as thought to protect agricultural land is to protect nature or landscape.
I have always wanted to explore that relationship – between agriculture and nature – found in the Maltese sensibility. It is the spirit I grew up into, and the characteristic of the Maltese landscape itself, largely a rural landscape formed by agricultural practices – Malta only holds small patches of wild landscapes, mostly garigue and patches of woodlands and cliffs and other pockets of habitats. And what we think of landscape is in fact agricultural land, or rural land.
And for many years I have thought about telling the story of nature and agriculture, the conflation between the two, the interaction between agriculture and landscape, or ecosystem, as a I came to know it.
I finally got a chance to explore these themes in three videos I did for the NGO Għawdix. The videos were financed by a grant given to Għawdix by Bank of Valletta.
The videos are solely focused on Gozo, and they have timeliness because of the rapid changes in the landscape in the past two decades or so; the changes are for the worse unfortunately. And, if there is conflation between agriculture and nature, then it is in the fact of the threats to the rural landscape: the impact of climate change, the rampant development, the use of pesticide and fertilizer, and light pollution.
The videos tell the story of two farmers who are trying to reduce their impact, and be stewards of the land, in very different ways.
In the first video I featured the organic farm of a woman and her son in the scenic San Blas Valley. It’s a story of rural living, and a story that is inspirational in the way they manage to produce crops organically. Yet it is only possible to grow crops all year round thanks to a yearlong spring. You can watch this video below.
The second video features full-time professional farmers. It is clear – and a point made in conversations – that they have to run a professional, efficient, and well-planned operation to be able to compete with imported produce. Efficiency extends to every part of their operation, and that means minimising the use of water, fertilizers, pesticides and so on, and they do this with scientific knowhow and controlled operations to reduce the environmental impact as much as possible, something that also ultimately cuts down on costs and increases efficiency.
In this third video I also report on the changing landscape: the impact of development and climate change, and the declining insect population. Watch the video below.
