Greeks Returning To Living Off The Land As Born Again Farmers

"Here you can go a week without spending a single euro over here,” says a man who moved back to Crete two years ago to live in the village of his birth. “You get fresh food from your farm and if you need something extra, like olive oil for example, you can get it from a fellow farmer. You only need money to pay for your gas and bills,” he says.

He is not alone. For the first time in years, Amari Valley in the island’s Rethymno district has turned green again as fields have been cleared and put back to use as farms.

Recent data on farming in Greece show that the number of jobs in the sector has gone up by 38,000 between 2008 and 2010. This increase is in stark contrast to the grim statistics regarding rising unemployment across most other sectors.

However, a closer examination of the data shows that these born-again farmers are for the most part pensioners trying to make some extra money -- particularly by cutting down on their cost of living. Between 22 and 32 percent of those who have taken up farming in the past couple of years are aged between 45 and 64 years old. Some 70 percent of the latecomers in the Epirus region in northern Greece are over 65.

Urban Chickens

Permaculture is a system where everything works in harmony and little is wasted. In the age of “fast, cheap, and easy” and planned obsolescence, it's not surprising that sustainability would be a concept out-of-step with the way our society currently functions. Somewhere along the way, we've become a nation of consumers, not producers.

Thankfully, recent years have provided a counter-trend – a soaring demand for local and regional food and an attempt to rebuild America's food culture.

The idea of sustainability isn't one exclusive to rural areas...it's one that is taking hold in urban settings. Yards are being transformed into edible landscapes - raised beds offer up produce, a small greenhouse supplies cold tolerant crops for the winter, and plants are thrown onto a compost pile which will be added back into the garden to replenish the soil...and keeping chickens is one more step in that sustainability model.

NOTE: Chickens are wonderful, gentle, predictable birds who will improve your soil, fertilize it, remove insects, control flies AND give you delicious, deep yellow yoke eggs. They ask for little in return.

Farm Aid

The warning serves as a wake-up call to Americans to take back their land and begin growing more food on the local and regional scale. According to statistics from Farm Aid, a family farming advocacy group, roughly five million US farms have been lost since the 1930s, and about 330 farmers every week leave their land. If this trend continues, the situation will only worsen.

Factory farming operations have essentially replaced local farming throughout the country. And government policies like subsidization of genetically-modified (GM) crops only continues to drive small-scale farmers off their land and exacerbate the problem.

To learn more about how to support local farming and regain food independence, visit: