Meet the Farmer: Abu Hassan

Abu Hassan was farming organic before anyone called it that. He's in his seventies now, still working the same six dunams above Salfit his father and grandfather worked before him. He likes to point out that when he was a kid, nobody in the village had a bag of chemical fertilizer anyway — and by the time everyone else started using the stuff, he just never bothered to start.

His land looks nothing like the neat rows you see on bigger farms. He plants beans and lentils between the olive trees so the soil gets nitrogen back naturally, turns his own kitchen scraps and pruning waste into compost by hand, and instead of spraying for pests he plants marigolds that keep most of the bad insects away on their own. "The land isn't a machine, you don't just pour chemicals into it," he told us, standing in his grove with dirt still under his nails. "You look after it, it looks after you. That's it, that's the whole idea."

Somewhere along the way, without ever meaning to, he became a sort of unofficial teacher for younger farmers in the cooperative. People just started showing up at his gate with questions. A few of our newer members say it was talking to him that convinced them to go organic on their own land, and it's not unusual to see him wandering through someone else's grove telling them where to put the compost pile.

He waves it off when you bring this up. "I'm not doing anything special," he says. "I'm just doing what my father showed me, and hoping these kids pass it on to their own." We're just glad he's one of ours — and that after all these years, people are finally paying attention.