Day 6: Tilio and the Sheep

When Tilio Gelpke was eight years old he was taken out of school, and a lifetime of working with sheep began. His father, a Swiss architect, bought Corzano e Paterno in the late 1960’s and imported 50 sheep from Sardinia, to clear the land of bushes. Tilio says goats would have been better. Sheep prefer grass, goats like larger vegetation. “Together they make a good team.” He started learning to care for the animals from a Sardinian family that relocated to Tuscany with the initial herd.

We are talking in the middle of a milking parlor. It is loud, aromatic, and a fine balance of order and chaos. After a while it becomes the sensation of watching people get onto subway trains, or file into seats at a large theater. There is bustle, followed by placid moments of chewing, and the methodical attachment of pumps. The sheep file in and jostle for favorite positions: they don’t like wet spots on the floor. I feel the same way. When an animal with four legs slips, limbs go in all directions. Usually its head smacks the concrete. A two-day-old lamb wanders through the milking lines, then down to us in the center of the room. It strikes me as amazing how alert and active this little creature is, in comparison to barely awake 2-day-old humans. They register a comparable level of cuteness, in my opinion.

Tilio attaches pumps and checks microchips in the first stomach (sheep have two) with a handheld device, to verify identities and record production levels. Today he is the angel of death. Animals that are very old (generally over 12 years) have malformed teats, or simply do not produce average levels of milk are marked with a dark green stripe. It is bad to have a green stripe.

“If an old animal dies on the farm I have to pay 50 euros to dispose of it,” he says. “If I only get 10 euros from the butcher… I hate it, I hate dealing with them, I’d rather make illegal sausage on the farm, but the regulations make us do stupid things. People can buy a pig and slaughter it at their property to make sausage, but I cannot do the same with my old animals (without violating EU codes.)

“Fifty years ago there was so much concentration of productive food: it was a garden.” Tilio says everything was grown here, not just olives and grapes. People had to maximize the potential of the land. “Each stone you see, someone has turned it a few times. How far do I have to go back to find an era like this? Probably before the Etruscans.” Across more recent millennia the land had to be intensively farmed, to support the population density of Tuscany. Tilio says that until the last century 20 people would live on the production of 10 hectares of land, while giving 50% of the harvest to their aristocratic masters. “It was slavery,” he says. But it made people wring every ounce of productivity from their territory. Vines were trellised along fruit tress, and vegetables co-planted between the vines, and anywhere else that wasn’t too rocky or steep.  

“Romans had a dependency on grain. Florence could not have had the Renaissance without a greater concentration of crops.”

It is initially unsettling to have a long conversation about the wastefulness of modern Tuscan agriculture surrounded by dairy sheep and pasture land, in a region whose most striking visual characteristics is abundant and often scrupulously cultivated olive groves and vineyards. But Tilio’s point is we must take a longer perspective. “In the 1950’s someone with 50 sheep would have a wealthy family.” His family have 650. His neighbors have productive land planted with olive trees that they do not use anymore, because the labor is too expensive, even to produce valuable Tuscan oil. The way they farmed the land did not support them. So it goes fallow or becomes de facto pasture.

Tilio tells his life story as a struggle to regain productivity for the farm. He built the first stable in 1986. “Corzano e Paterno still has animals because I am stubborn. At first I was also the only salesman for the cheese. The stress and reality of what we were doing came when they (cousin Aljoscha Goldschmidt and his partner Toni) had a ton of cheese.”

“My cousin said we must throw it all to the pigs. I threw none away.”

Tilio learned quickly that his market for their farmstead cheese was not the grocery store. “Fresh cheeses lose weight. Retailers don’t like it, which is why they prefer industrial cheese.” Restaurants in Florence were a much better market, able to sell a selection of diverse pecorinos. The dairy thrived, and today they can barely keep up with demand.

Tilio takes issue with the emergence of industrial cheese that tries to look like small farm cheese. The ubiquity of these products in Italy sounds similar to what you find on a casual grocery store tour in America.

“Cheese makers have no secrets. It’s something we have been making for 10,000 years.” A mistake created their first “signature” cheese, Buccia di Rospo. Instead of tall round pecorinos, the cheese came out as squat bloomy disks. The expression Buccia di Rospo was used by Aljoscha to say the cheese was rotting: literally “It’s toading off.”

Locals complain of the reappearance of the occasional wolf. Tilio thinks this is part of the same larger picture. “We have (problems with) wild animals because agriculture has changed. Wolves follow the wild boar and deer. When I started (working life at Corzano) we had pheasants. Those were the large animals you would see. Now we have wild boar as big as a pig. When you see them on a motorbike I say ‘Please, you go first.’”

Hunters imported larger boar from central Europe. They thrive in the food-rich fields of Chianti, growing fat on the Sangiovese grapes from vines they vandalize. “When I was a child they were hill animals, small, to get between rows. The Hungarian ones give birth twice a year.” And now they become overabundant.

Tilio has lived through boom and bust years in Chianti. “It’s an Italian disease. When something is working well they can spoil it in a very short time.” I hear this kind of shockingly deprecating language from many farmers working in Italy. “1973 was a terrible vintage and they sold it like it was a normal wine, and killed the market. Then it took many years and someone with money, it was Antinori but it could have been anyone, to fix it again.”

He then gets positive “We learn so much out of growing food.” We are outside, sharing stories of trips to Morocco, cheese making friends in New Jersey, details of farm life. A sheep dog wanders between us. “He thinks of himself as equal to us, a peer.” Tilio says. “I call him but he will not come. He has a job to do.” I realize I’ve been here a long time, and it’s not yet 8am. Time to depart. My work day is starting.