For the past few days, I’ve been at war with the enemy. Which enemy, I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s all of them.

The Columba palumbus—the common wood pigeon—a scourge for winemakers on the island. The wasps I regularly find feasting on half-eaten grape clusters. And the ants, which happily move in once the skin has been breached.

As an organic grower, spraying chemicals is out of the question. So every morning I sit there tying little green bags around my grape clusters, hoping to outsmart the enemy.

One morning, my son gave me a hand. Judging by the look on his face, he wasn’t entirely sure what his old dad was doing out there. While we were working together, he asked an interesting question—one I couldn’t answer straight away.
“Why do you actually do this? Is it the craft of farming that attracts you?”

Economically, it makes absolutely no sense.

The wine from my own vineyard probably costs me more than a Grand Cru from Bordeaux. The olive oil from my eight olive trees is more expensive than anything I can buy in the supermarket. And let’s not even talk about the tomatoes—especially if I include the cost of greenhouses, irrigation systems, wine presses, and not even my own labor.

Why do people still spend so much time making things they could simply buy?
Perhaps because we’ve lost something along the way.

Our grandparents baked bread, grew vegetables, repaired their tools, and built their own barns. My generation became increasingly good at outsourcing. First to factories. Then to low-wage countries. And now, more and more, to robots and AI.

We’ve become wealthier.

More comfortable too.

But we’ve drifted farther and farther away from what it truly means to be alive.
I first became interested in permaculture after reading the work of the Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. He argued that good farming doesn’t begin by doing more, but by understanding more. Nature has an intelligence of its own. The better you learn to understand it, the less you need to interfere.

Looking back from the future, I see a world where robots, drones, and AI have taken over the heavy and monotonous work. Precisely because of that, people rediscover the joy of making something with their own hands.

Not because it’s faster or cheaper.

But because craftsmanship produces something no machine can ever create.
The feeling that you don’t merely live on this Earth, but that you are truly part of it.

Back From The Future is an ongoing series exploring how the world of 2125 may have solved the greatest challenges of our time—so we can make better decisions today.