Saying they were once as common as young men on electric scooters are today, wildlife officials have announced they are going to reintroduce wild farmers to Luxembourg City.
“For millennia, farmers could be found everywhere, from the area that is now called Cloche d’Or all the way to the Kirchberg plateau,” said biologist Penelope Bambridge. “Sadly, these populations have been replaced by bankers, accountants, and IT guys who are not even native to the region.”
Bambridge says that when she was growing up in Merl, she remembers looking out her window and sometimes seeing a whole family of farmers in a field across the street.
“If we were good and did all our homework, my parents would let us go outside and watch the farmers plow the land, feed chickens, and do other farmerly things like take a handful of soil in their hands, smell it, and say, yup, yup, yup.”
While newly arrived residents may find stories about peasants in the city hard to believe, those who have lived there for a decade or more probably remember seeing a farmer or two in Limpertsberg.
“Right there in between new two-million-euro houses was a corn field, and sometimes you’d see a woman there picking corn,” said Limpertsberg resident Ivan Lopez. “If you smiled and said moien, she’d give you a cob.”
Bambrige says that in addition to restoring ecological balance, reintroducing farmers to Luxembourg City will make it more attractive for tourists.
“Who doesn’t want to see a farmer transporting bales of hay on the Grand-Rue, or a woman milking cows in front of a Big Four office on Avenue JFK?” Bambridge said. “Imagine how Instagrammable it will be when a farmer helps a horse give birth to a foal in Place d’Armes.”
However, she does remind residents that they will need to give the farmers space and resist the urge to pet them no matter how soft their flannel shirts look.
“And under no circumstances should you try to feed them modern food like McDonald’s hamburgers or chili-flavored tortilla chips,” she said. “Not only is it unhealthy, but they’ll probably take it as an aggressive gesture, feel threatened, and bite you.”
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Originally published by RTL Today on June 24, 2022
