AVRI RON

            Yesterday I had the special privilege of spending a couple of hours with the man known as the agrarian patriarch of Israel, Avri Ron.  He’s also the largest organic certified farmer in Israel and perhaps the Middle East.

            I felt like I was talking with Abraham; he’s in his 60s with a deep base voice, flowing beard, and lifetime on the  cutting edge re-establishment of Israel in its homeland.  I will simply share smatterings from our lengthy conversation.

            He said Israel could feed itself without imports.  Complete food self-sufficiency would be possible, but of course the domestic and high quality farmer suffers from cheap foreign imports and a disregard to food quality.  Right now “we’re importing 500,000 sheep and goats primarily from Australia each year that are cheaper and lower quality.”

            He imports his grains for 120,000 hens in 14 houses ranging in size form 7,000 hens to 13,000 hens apiece.  The war in Ukraine has been financially devastating because Russia and Ukraine is where he gets all his grain:  soybeans, sunflower and small grains like barley, wheat, and oats.  Although he sells a branded product (I’ve been chugging his drinkable goat yogurt) he says the high cost of labor, inputs, fuel and grain make it nearly impossible to make a profit.  In the last year, grain tripled in price.

            Turkey, he said, has lots of extra eggs, so they’re dumping them into Israel at one third the price of domestic production.

            I asked him about his view toward farming and life and here are some of his tidbits.

            “A man who does not believe in miracles is not realistic.”  He views all of his success in this hostile land—hostile socially and physically—as a miracle.

            “The soil is to the farmer like a bride to a groom.  Man and land come from the same root word.  Every mountain is my wife and my life.  When you come to the land like you come to your wife, it will respond to you.  You love her; she loves you back. “

            “I don’t make the sun.  I can’t make it rain or control wild pigs.  The only thing I can do is talk to my land and myself, to wake every morning and do what I’m supposed to do—that’s my only problem.”

            Speaking of the 2,000 years the Jews left the land after Roman dispersion, he said “when the man goes away, his wife wears widow’s clothes.  Now that men have come back, the land is wearing her wedding clothes.  Jerusalem is like a widow.  Even when you’re 99 years old, you still plant trees because 1,000 years from now couples will come and eat and kiss under the tree you planted.”

            “Who is a rich man?  A man happy with what he’s got.”

            I was mesmerized; it was like listening to poetry composed on the spot and I realized I was in a miracle moment myself.  I’ve never encountered that level of land-soul understanding and connection and I was both humbled and grateful to be in the presence of such a deep sympathy to creation stewardship in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

            How do you view your relationship to the land?