Recycled water and almonds
On my second day in Israel, my father took me and my brother, Omri, to the fields of the Kibbutzim agricultural co-operative Tzabar Kama, the first place my father worked at in Israel. My father was born in New Brunswick, Canada, and came to Israel in his mid 20s. Like many westerners fascinated by the communal and socialist ethos and lifestyle of the Kibbutzim, he came to volunteer at Kibbutz Ma’ale Hachamisha (’The ascent of the Five’ in Hebrew, named after five Kibbutzniks who were murdered by people from the neighbouring Arab village of Katana while they were paving a road). As a volunteer, he worked at the Falha (’field’ in Arabic). To revisit these innocent days of hard menial labour, he took us to see how things have changed there.
We met with someone who back in the 1970s was my father’s fellow labourer but now runs the show there, katanchik (’little dude’ in Hebrew, though I’d have to say he’d gained some above the waist). Katanchik drove us through fields of corn, cotton, watermelon, hummus (chickpeas), eggplant, squash, and groves of fig, olive, almond, and plum trees. Yes, we’re talking here about thousands of dunams. (Divide by about four for acres, and I think it would still be thousands of acres.) Most of Katanchiks workers are Thai and Arabs. It’s a really interesting pairing of origins, especially when you see an Arab guy wearing a Thai straw hat. (Wasn’t fast enough to take a picture.)
At the end we stopped at an almond grove to see the harvest. The almond harvest is very similar to that of olives. You spread a burlap carpet underneath the tree, shake the tree (nowadays with a machine equipped with a sci-fi arm) while the workers hit the branches to ensure all of the almonds fell to the ground, and the burlap carpet is being rolled back and the almonds fall into the truck. Here’s a video showing the procedure. (That’s Katanchik blabbering in the background with a typical Kibbutznik/Israeli “Let me tell how things should work” tone.)
The almond variety is called Umm el-Fahm, named after an Arab village near Haifa. There were actually three varieties of almond in the grove because, according to Katanchik, they don’t pollinate their own variety. I don’t know how this works in terms of preserving the unique flavour and use of each variety, but I do know that the Umm el-Fahm is better than the Napa variety (named after the famed valley in California) or the third one, whose name consisted of numbers only.
The coolest thing about the whole visit is realizing that all these acres of produce are watered by recycled water. They are fed to a reservoir that has been recently declared a protected area due to the ducks and other birds living around it.
