A Small Swiss Farm with a Big Lesson
One of Nicole’s closest friends and her husband, Tinu, run a small farm where they’re raising three boys and managing a little patch of land with remarkable versatility. They bulk up cattle for other farmers, fatten a few pigs, grow potatoes, rapeseed, and a variety of vegetables all from the same modest spread. And it doesn’t stop there. Their farm also helps heat the nearby village using a biomass system that burns wood chips collected from local forest maintenance. In their backyard, is an unassuming farm house but inside, a conveyor feeds the chips into a high-pressure burner, generating renewable heat that’s piped directly into homes through an underground network. In Switzerland, it’s common for farms to play multiple roles like this, not just food producers, but land stewards, energy providers, and biodiversity guardians.
And while it may sound like a lot, this mix of responsibilities isn’t unusual here. It’s actually quite common for a Swiss farm to do a bit of everything a sharp contrast to the large, highly specialized farms that dominate much of American agriculture.
Tinu explained to me (via Nicole, since he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak German) that this system is supportive but demanding. Swiss farms must meet strict environmental laws, animal welfare rules, and sustainability benchmarks. GMOs are banned. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are tightly regulated. And if you don’t meet the standards? You lose funding. Some seasons, he added, keeping pests and disease at bay without breaking the rules was impossible.
So while the system encourages better farming, it does so with pressure. It’s a constant balancing act: ethics vs. efficiency, tradition vs. productivity.
Fun fact: the environmental responsibility extends beyond farms, even. Under Swiss law, anyone who cuts down a tree, whether in the countryside or the city, is required to plant another to maintain the country’s forest cover…
Why This Works in Switzerland: Policy > Profit
What allows this kind of farming to thrive in Switzerland comes down to a fundamental difference: government support that values stewardship over volume. It’s literally written into the Swiss federal constitution that farming must be protected — to ensure national food production and preserve land, culture, and biodiversity for future generations.
Farmers don’t just get subsidies for output — they receive incentives for doing things the right way:
Pasture access for cows instead of confinement.
Wildflower meadow preservation to support native pollinators.
Sustainable practices that promote biodiversity and protect the environment.
Unlike in the U.S., where farmers often have to scale up to survive, Swiss farmers are rewarded for slowing down and farming well, not more.
Meanwhile, Back in the U.S…
This couldn’t have felt more different from what I’d heard in the States. I remember listening to an interview with an farmer who described how suffocating his life had become. He said he could no longer afford the land that had been in his family for generations, so he was forced to sell it to a large agricultural corporation just to stay afloat.
The company offered him two options:
A short-term lease that basically came with no guarantees
A long-term contract that offered financial security but came with strings attached embedded conveniently into the fine print of the contract.
He chose the long one, thinking it was the safer bet. But in doing so, he locked himself into a completely different way of life.
Though he farmed the same fields, they were no longer his. The land, once an extension of his identity, was now governed by a corporate playbook. He wasn’t allowed to rotate crops the way he always had or let parts of the land rest to recover. He had to follow strict guidelines from people who’d never touched soil with their own hands, guidelines driven by spreadsheets, not the seasons. They demanded high-yield monocultures, the use of GMOs and synthetic fertilizers for faster turnarounds, methods that clashed with everything he believed in.
So he was still farming, working the long days, battling the moody weather, pesky pests, and market volatility. But now he was locked into doing it under someone else’s thumb and under rules that didn’t care about the land, animals, or even the farmers himself.
The Rise of Corporate Agriculture in the U.S.
Today, over half of all U.S. cropland is farmed by someone other than the landowner. A growing portion of that land belongs to investment firms, pension funds, and billionaires like Bill Gates, who now owns nearly 270,000 acres, making him the largest private farmland owner in America.
The result?
Monocultures for maximum efficiency.
GMOs for predictable output.
Chemical reliance for scale.
Soil, water, and community health pushed to the sidelines.
There’s something deeply unsettling about watching a billionaire in a sweater vest gobble up America’s farmland like it’s Monopoly. And it ain’t for the fresh air. Gates is neck-deep in synthetic meat, patented seeds, and ag-tech ventures. This isn’t farming this is George Orwell meets Aldus Huxley. You control the food, you control the people. We’re all frogs in the pot, wondering why it’s starting to boil…but i digress…
This disconnect, between the farmers and their farms creates a dangerous separation. When the land becomes an asset on a spreadsheet vs a biological living thing, we risk losing something much more than our appetite.
Die Kartoffelernte (The Potato Harvest)
When my alarm rang at 6:47, the world was still cloaked in darkness. A thin layer of frost coated the seat of my moped and my exhales formed a ghostly cloud in front of me. Fall was definitely here. Even a short 15 minute ride had the potential to feel long with a nip in the air like this it. Along the way, a soft golden glow emerged from the east and begin to spread lazily across the sky.
The cool thing about Bern, is within ten minutes, you’re suddenly in farmland. I parked the moped at the edge of Tinu’s field and crunched across the crusty grass towards his potato field. At the end of the row, I watched the tractor make a slow U-turn and begin its crawl back toward me. Hands in my pockets, hood up over a beanie, I stood still for a moment and took it all in.
Behind the tractor, the land rose quickly before being swallowed by a thick forest. To my right, a small fenced orchard of apple trees, shared by a few cows whose bells clanged deeply as they grazed. Behind me, a few traditional Swiss farmhouses and beyond them, rolling green hills gave way to the majestic, snow-tipped Bernese Alps. The air was silent, except for the growing hum of the tractor’s diesel engine and the faint sound of laughter, most likely Tinu’s three boys riding along, helping with the harvest.
Tinu jumped down from the towering potato contraption hitched to the back of the tractor, pulled off his glove and gave me a warm handshake. Quickly, he then ran to his car and returned with a pair of gloves.
“You’re going to need these”
We rode a massive harvesting machine that was slowly being dragged behind a tractor across the fields. It had large metal claws that plunged into the earth, scooping up everything in its path. All of which was heaved up onto a belt which came rattling towards us at waist height. stand on either side of a rattling conveyor belt and remove everything that wasn’t a potato. Five or six of us, spaced evenly. Our job was simple: sort.
Those stationed near the front were hit with the full gambit, clods of soil, plant matter, rocks, whole potato plants tangled in muddy clumps. Their task was to grab as fast as they could, tossing out debris and clearing the way so that those further down the line could focus on finer sorting: catching sneaky stones or pulling out rotten or damaged potatoes before they reached the bins.
The conveyor belt moved at a steady, unrelenting clip. Once a row began, it didn’t stop, unless the sheer volume overwhelmed us. Then someone hit the emergency button and we'd rush to catch up, grabbing and tossing in a flurry of motion, trying to restore order to the chaos. Then, with a mechanical lurch, the belt would roar back to life and we’d resume.
Each row took around ten minutes of full-on, focused effort. When we reached the end of a row, the metal claws would lift from the ground and the belt would roll what last bits it had churned up for a minute or two as the tractor looped around, lining up for the next pass, and then we were off again.
The machine housed two hoppers up front. One collected the good potatoes. The other, fed by a series of side chutes, was the dumping ground for the rejects: rotten, green, or deeply split ones. Some were so soft and decayed that your fingers would sink into them like an over ripe peach, releasing the unmistakable stench of soil rot, a putrid, earthy smell that not stuck on your fingers.
Sorting Spuds
It was exactly the kind of mind-numbing, physical work I’d been craving. There was something deeply satisfying about locking into a rhythm spotting, grabbing, tossing. I imagined myself as a sorting robot, optimizing for accuracy and speed. The background noise also helped: the steady hum of the machinery, the pang of rocks on metal, the soft rumble of potatoes rolling past, and the occasional blast of cold wind across your face. When you hit the groove, time slipped by. Before you knew it, another row was done.
Some days were warm enough for a T-shirt and shorts. Others called for layers of merino wool, a hoodie, and a borrowed pair of rubber-tipped gloves. But regardless of weather, the belt never stopped. By the time the last bin was filled, legs stiff, back sore from leaning over, the tiny muscles in my fingers literally sore, it always felt rewarding. My mind felt clear. It was Tangible. Honest. You could see the bins full of sorted potatoes, feel the dirt that somehow penetrated the thin rubber coating of the gloves and snuck under your fingernails.
There’s something about work like this that separates you from yourself, just enough, that new thoughts seep in. Somewhere between the conveyor belt clatter and the smell of cold soil, i returned to a place that felt real, human.