‘Not Heidi’: the hard work behind the Alpine idyll
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‘Not Heidi’: the hard work behind the Alpine idyll
It’s not the world of Heidi or the one idealised in films and television series. Life on the Alpine pastures is hard: rising at the crack of dawn, with days that never seem to end. But it’s also enriched by unforgettable moments. Swissinfo went to see the cows come home from Hinterfeld in canton Uri.
Evi Rigert looks around her, a bit bereft. Among the crowd of cows she looks for her favourites and draws them to her, hugging and petting them. At the same time, the farmers load their herds onto the trailers to drive them to their barns down in the valley. Rigert is misty-eyed. “Now it’s all done at last,” she says, looking back at the meadow, now deserted, where earlier there had been about 70 cows and calves.
It’s just past noon in Wassen, canton Uri, in central Switzerland. A few hours earlier was the long-awaited climax of the high pasturing season: the march down from the Hinterfeld meadows into the Meiental valley, just below the Susten Pass. Each one of these Alpine summer grazing areas is known as an alp.
While the cars begin to queue up in front of the Gotthard Tunnel as they do every weekend, the streets of the village with its famous church have been taken over by a different sort of parade, colourful and noisy.
Leading the way were the goats, followed by the a herd of cows led by their herdsmen, Adrian Petermann and Tom Zurfluh. After a ten-minute gap came a second group led by cheesemaker Sandra Igl and her assistant Evi Rigert. This procession down the mountain passed through the middle of a crowd of 2,000 onlookers, both tourists and locals. They had come to witness the ancient farewell ritual of a bygone age. They filmed and watched it on mobile phones as if it was an apparition from a different world.
The descent from the alps is a carefully choreographed show put on by the shepherds themselves. To march at the head of a herd fills them with pride. It is a parade of the finest animals, nurtured and cared for throughout the season.
Paul Epp really appreciates all of this. For about 30 years he has been involved in planning the seasonal movement of livestock between their fixed winter and summer pastures on the Hinterfeld alp. “It fills me with joy just to see those cows decorated with flowers and wearing their bells,” he explains.
Epp puts in many a day and night repairing or creating fresh decorations: garlands of flowers that go on the animals’ backs or chests, wreaths and ornaments on their heads, ribbons on their noses. Particular attention is given to the lead cows, which are decorated with the prettiest, most eye-catching designs and with a cowbell that may weigh up to 15 kilograms.
“Like us, the animals await this moment with feelings of nervousness. They would be disappointed if they didn’t get their due in the way of attention,” he explains with a grin.
If we get a mistaken, poetic notion of life on the alp, perhaps it’s because of the spotless white blouses worn for the occasion by the shepherds under their traditional Alpine dress or the bucolic scenes that appear on the television news. The reality is quite different.
“The alarm clock goes off at 3:45, seven days out of seven,” says Sandra Igl, summing up the daily routine at Hinterfeld. “The working day, especially in the initial weeks of the season, doesn’t stop before eight in the evening. So the shifts last about 17 hours.”
Igl grew up in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, and has been answering the call of the high mountains since she was 15. “In springtime I get a sort of hankering to be on the alp,” she says. “It’s a tough job. You’re working for 100 days without a break. Getting along with a whole lot of other people you never laid eyes on before the start of the season is a challenge not to be underestimated either. It’s not all that easy. This isn’t the world of Heidi.”
Yet Igl likes the Alpine life, seeing how the grass each cow digests on the pasture turns to milk and then into a fine cheese that lands on the tourists’ table.
This year at Hinterfeld, Igl spent the summer along with Patricia Forrer, a trained cook, housekeeper and manager of the dairy outlet; Evi Rigert, her assistant cheesemaker; Adrian Petermann, the shepherd in charge of the young heifers; and Tom Zurfluh, the shepherd in charge of the mature cows.
Zurfluh was born and raised in canton Uri, and this is the second summer he has worked on the Susten Pass Alp. “Last year I stepped in to replace someone who had thrown in the towel before the end of the season as shepherd for the heifers,” he explains.
By trade he is a mechanic working on building site machinery. “I liked [being on the alp] so much, this time I’m back as shepherd of the milk cows. Here I can be my own boss and am always out in the fresh air.”
He also points out the hard work involved, but having been born into a farm family, he had a fair idea of what he was letting himself in for. His particular joys were those moments just before dawn when the sun was coming up behind the mountain peaks. “But tending the cows, getting to know them one by one – their temperaments as well as their names – that was the way to look after them as if they were my very own animals.”
Pay rates laid down by canton Graubünden currently serve as the model for other Alpine cantons, but the figures are to be regarded as provisional, rather than hard and fast. In the Graubünden Alps, a cheesemaker makes CHF180-CHF258 ($225-$325) a day, whereas an assistant cheesemaker or a shepherd tending milk cows, suckling mother cows or young animals makes CHF159-CHF242. Pay varies depending on experience and training.
Deductions for bed and board are also stipulated in these pay rates. Accommodation is fixed at CHF11.50 per day; meals are charged for at CHF3.50 per breakfast, CHF10 for lunch and CHF8 for dinner. Full board costs CHF33 per day. Accordingly, monthly deductions may amount to CHF990.
For a cheesemaker with the right combination of experience and training, daily pay may amount to CHF225.20, or CHF6,800 for a month of 30 working days.
Every summer, Hinterfeld Alp welcomes about 100 milk cows and about 50 heifers belonging to 13 farmers in canton Uri. The pastures extend from the village of Färnigen to the foot of the Susten Pass. The chalet and the barn are situated at about 1,700 metres up and can be reached by car.
The Alp is run by a cooperative which every year appoints a managing committee to oversee the pasturing season and the workers. In the three-month season some 115,000 litres of milk are converted into 11 tonnes of Alp cheese and other cheese products such as yogurt, butter and ziger (a kind of ricotta).
“During the summer, the quantity of milk being produced by every cow is measured three times: at the end of June, the end of July and early September,” explains Adrian Arnold, president of the cooperative. “From these figures we can calculate the yield of every animal and thus we can specify the quantity of cheese belonging to each farmer.” This share is crucial, because the sale of the cheese ensures an income to the farmers for the months of Alpine pasturage. Arnold is pleased with the quality of cheese this year, and feels sure that by January he will have sold off the lot.
By that time, the heifer shepherd Adrian Petermann, whose day job is as a baker and pastry chef, will likely have turned out hundreds of bread loaves and thousands of sweet cakes during the Christmas season from the bakery in his home town, Lucerne. At his workbench, hands covered in flour, he will remember all the dawns spent milking his cows, Aita, Alisa, Telegirl or Salina.
“The nice thing on the alp is that the rhythm of daily life is not determined by the clock, but by the animals and nature,” Petermann, in his early twenties, says as he tucks into a dish of cheese, creamy pasta and a sausage served up by Patricia Forrer, who during the summer has been a sort of mother to them. “Now I really am ready to go back to my family and friends,” Petermann continues. “But I’m sure I’ll miss all of this.”
He will miss Evi Rigert with whom he has shared many a carefree moment, like the last evening there when the two of them broke into a dance around the empty barn. For Rigert, with the movement of livestock between pastures, she has realised a dream: spending a summer on the Alp.
“Here you are absorbed into a world that is different, sheltered, with few outside influences,” she explains, adding that she never got used to the early starts. But asked to name her loveliest experience, her eyes light up: “When the cows recognised my voice and followed me on the way to a fresh pasture.”
According to the head of the Swiss Association for High Alpine Pastures, Selina Droz, the main difficulty on the alp is scarcity of personnel. Recruiting the right people is getting to be more and more of a challenge: the work is hard, the working day is long, and the pay rates are not very high.
“The availability of personnel is key to the solution for the other problems that are looming over this industry: climate change, major predatory animals, and the spread of woodland,” Droz says. “For example, due to climate change the forested tracts of land are expanding. To keep them in check, we would need staff with brush cutters and chainsaws. With the big predators it’s the same thing: the comeback of the wolf means more work for us. We need to create protected areas; we need shepherds keeping an eye on the cattle, and someone looking after guard dogs. All told, if we can’t attract more people to work on the high pastures, it will be tough to find solutions to these problems.”
Together with the vocational school of agriculture in Zollikofen, the Swiss Association for High Alpine Pastures has launched a research project called “Motivated and loyal workers for the high pasture season – conditions for successful teamwork on the Alp”. They hope to find out how to make this group of traditional trades more attractive to another generation.
Edited by Daniele Mariani. Adapted from Italian by Terence MacNamee/ts
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