In a return to forgotten lands, young farmers go small, demand less

For Rute Gabriel and Pipo Vieira, it was the tomato plant on their 25th-floor balcony in Toronto that convinced them to return home. 

The couple, sweethearts ever since high school in this Portuguese region of stone-fenced fields and olive groves, were sharing an apartment with Ms. Gabriel’s grandmother. Their friends back home thought they had hit the jackpot. They had managed to move from the country to the city. They had immigrated to a higher-income country. And in the middle of the 2010s, they had jobs at a time when the global financial crisis – known here simply as “the austerity” – was still hitting Portugal hard. 

But the couple had a sense that something was wrong. They were in their 20s and working constantly in jobs they did not love. They missed the bright sunlight and rosemary-fresh scent of home, and had a growing unease about what felt like an unsustainable lifestyle – not only in their balance of life and work, but also in their lives and the
environment. 

They say it was all anxiety-producing – spending days working for the next paycheck, running on a consumer treadmill, knowing the world was heating but feeling there was nothing they could do about it. 

Then one day, browsing the internet, Ms. Gabriel came across a YouTube video about “permaculture.” An increasingly popular term in environmental, landscape, and agricultural circles, permaculture is a philosophy that focuses on re-integrating humans into their habitats in a way that’s mutually beneficial for people, the land, and animals.

Ms. Gabriel was fascinated, she recalls. This was the sort of lifestyle she and Mr. Vieira were craving. 

They tried to implement bits and pieces of permaculture at their high-rise apartment, putting a little tomato plant on their balcony, and then trying out “companion planting,” in which they added peppers and carrots to the same container.  

That little plant, they say, was a glimpse of what could be. 

“We take ourselves out of our habitat, and we wonder why we are struggling so