by For centuries, Swiss farmers have sent their cows, goats and sheep to graze in the mountains during the warmer months before bringing them down in early autumn. Devised in the Middle Ages to preserve the precious grass of the valleys for the winter, the tradition of “summering” has so transformed the countryside into a mosaic of forests and pastures that maintaining its appearance was included in the Swiss Constitution as an essential function of the Agriculture. .
It has also woven essential threads of the country’s modern identity: Alpine cheeses, hiking trails through summer pastures, cowbells ringing on mountain slopes.
In December, the United Nations heritage agency, UNESCO added Swiss tradition to its exalted list of “intangible cultural heritage”.
But climate change threatens to upend those traditions. Rising temperatures, loss of glaciers, less snow and earlier melting are forcing farmers across Switzerland to adapt.
Not everyone feels the changes in the same way in a country where the Alps create many microclimates. Some enjoy higher yields on summer pastures, allowing them to extend their alpine seasons. Others are forced by more frequent and intense droughts to descend earlier with their flocks.
The more obvious the effect on the Swiss, the more potential problems it will mean for all of Europe.
Switzerland has long been considered the water tower of Europe, the place where deep winter snows accumulated and gently melted during the warmer months, increasing runoff from the thick glaciers that helped sustain many of Europe’s rivers. and their ways of life for centuries.
Since he began studying the Rhône glacier in 2007, Daniel Farinotti, one of Europe’s leading glacier scientists, has seen it retreat about half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, and thin, forming a large glacial pond in its base.
It has also seen the glacier, which extends about nine kilometers, or about five and a half miles, in the Alps near Realp, turn black as winter’s protective snow melts to reveal previous years of pollution in a cycle. harmful feedback.
“The darker the surface, the more sunlight it absorbs and the more melting is generated,” said Farinotti, who teaches at ETH Zurich and leads a summer field course on the glacier.
To reach the glacier from the road, his students walk over mounds of white tarps, spread around an ice cave dug for tourists. Tarps can reduce annual snowmelt up to 60 percentbut they cover only a tiny portion of the glaciers and in places like ski slopes, where there is a private financial motivation.
“You can’t cover an entire glacier with that,” said Farinotti, who also works for the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research.
The government is trying to address the changes and preserve Swiss alpine traditions, including with major infrastructure projects to bring water to the top of the mountains for animals that graze in the summer months.
For now, traditions, though strained in some places, continue. After three days of scrambling up rocky slopes and zigzagging stone steps, the first sheep of a giant flock of nearly 700 came into view at the end of their “summer” last fall.
As a crowd of spectators cheered, some of the sheep pranced. Others stopped short and had to be coaxed by shepherds wearing plaid shirts and leather cowboy hats, adorned with wildflowers and feathers.
The sheep had been living in the wild for more than three months, wandering across a vast, high desert enclosed by glaciers. Their only contact with humanity was the visits of a single shepherd, Fabrice Gex, who says he loses more than 30 pounds a season walking through the territory to control them.
“I bring them salt, cookies and love,” said Gex, 49.
To bring them back to their owners, who are mostly hobby farmers, he is joined by a group of shepherds, known locally as “sanner” from the Middle High German samnen, “gather”, who arrive by helicopter.
The work is hard and paid modestly, but locally it is considered an honor to participate in a tradition first recorded in 1830, but which many believe began centuries earlier.
“Being saner gives you roots,” said Charly Jossen, 45, while enjoying a beer with many of the viewers after completing its 11th season in the fall. “You know where you belong.” He had brought his 10-year-old son Michael for the first time.
Historically, the sensible ones led the sheep across the tongue of the Oberaletsch glacier. But the retreat of the glacier has long made that route too unstable and dangerous. In 1972, the community of Naters cut a path up a steep rock face to offer shepherds and sheep an alternative route home.
This season, the shepherds intend to delay their return by two weeks, said their leader, André Summermatter, 36.
“With climate change, our vegetation period is longer,” he said, standing in the old stone corral where sheep are corralled at the end of their journey. “So the sheep can stay longer.”
The tradition of alpine herding, or “transhumance,” extends throughout the Alps, including Austria, Italy, and Germany.
Almost half of Switzerland’s livestock farms send their goats, sheep and cows to summer pastures, according to the latest comprehensive study by government scientists in 2014.
More than 80 percent of alpine farms’ income comes from government subsidies, many of them to keep grasslands free of invasive trees, which are Pushing uphill with warmer temperatures.
That makes Switzerland a rare country that does not embrace tree cover as a solution to climate change.
“It would be all bush and forest if we weren’t here,” said Andrea Herger, herding cows past a hiker’s inn and toward her family’s milking barn in the middle of a mountain near Isenthal. “They wouldn’t be such open, beautiful landscapes for hiking.”
Her husband, Josef Herger, is the third generation of their family to run their alpine summer farm, which is reached by a private cable car. They raise seven cows from their own farm and 33 from the neighbors, who pay them with cow’s milk that the couple uses to make cheese.
Farther west, near L’Etivaz, the Mottier family pushes 45 cows along what they call a “mountain train,” following newly sprouted grass to a summit of 2,030 meters, or more than 6,600 feet, and then they return to nibble on the second growth of grasses. Starting in May, they make five trips, stopping at three levels.
Near the summit, Benoît Mottier, 24, climbed a limestone outcropping, decorated with the initials of idle shepherds and the years in which they carved them. The oldest one he could find was left in the 18th century by someone with his initials: BM.
He is the fifth generation of his family to run cows there.
The Mottiers are one of 70 families in the area that make a traditional Swiss cheese called L’Etivaz. They follow strict rules and slowly heat fresh milk in a giant copper cauldron over a spruce wood fire. Once the cheese is pressed, they take it to a local cooperative, where it is aged and sold.
L’Etivaz can only be performed on the local mountain slopes for six months of the year. The tradition is so important that children from local farming families can leave school during the summer holidays weeks early to help.
“We are happy to start the season,” said Isabelle Mottier, Benoît’s mother. “At the end of the season, we’re happy it’s over.”
“For us, it’s a life of cycles,” he said.
The Mottier summer farm gets its water from a spring. The droughts of recent years have forced the family to adapt.
“A cow drinks between 80 and 100 liters of water a day,” Mottier explained. “We have more than 40 cows. “We need a huge amount of water.”
In 2015, during a heat wave, the spring dried out. Three years later, another wave of heat and drought arrived. And then again in 2022.
During droughts, the Swiss army transported water to alpine pastures using helicopters. The Mottiers, however, did not have tanks to store it.
So they installed a solar-powered pump to draw water from a lower spring and bought a large water bag to store melted snow early in the season.
The situation is expected to worsen as the glaciers retreat. The country’s largest glaciers, including the Aletsch and the Rhône, are projected be reduced by at least 68 percent by the end of the century.
In anticipation, the Swiss government has quadrupled funding for alpine water projects. In 2022 it approved 40.
Near the town of Jaun, a construction team was laying pipes to bring electricity and water from a new cistern to six local farms. In 2022, some families brought their cow herds down from the mountains a month early due to drought and heat.
In other regions, warmer temperatures are making fields more productive, said Manuel Schneider, a scientist at Agroscope, the Swiss government’s national research institute, who is leading a five-year study on the biodiversity and performance of alpine pastures.
However, that variability can occur even on a single mountain, he said. Farmers with mobile milking stations can take advantage of this “small-scale heterogeneity” by moving their cows (and their milking machines) to less dry areas.
“When the climate changes, you need flexibility,” Schneider said.
In the Italian Alps, near Sankt Ulrich, Thomas Comploi’s family won the climate change lottery.
Like many Alpine farmers, he uses part of his land to produce hay only; It is too steep for cattle to graze. Today, twice as much grass is produced in its fields as it was about 15 years ago.
The provincial government of Bolzano-South Tyrol grants him subsidies for avalanche prevention and territory management, he said.
“All this would disappear without the farmers; it would be covered in forests,” said Comploi, 48, who works at the local cable car company during the winter.
He added: “We maintain the tradition: the passion and the way of life.”
In Swiss alpine communities, the final descent at the end of summer is a celebration of that centuries-old way of life. Families replace their small cow bells with giant traditional ones to announce the event.
“When you put the big bells on them, they know they are going to go down,” says Eliane Maurer, chasing a young cow as it wanders away from the narrow path and down the slope of Engstligenalp.
His family is one of a dozen that herds about 450 animals to pasture during the season. They stagger their descent in turns, so as not to cause bottlenecks.
Mrs. Maurer and her family were the second to leave, before dawn.
They walked under the full moon. The sound of cowbells echoing in the surrounding mountains was thunderous.
Paula Haase contributed reporting from Hamburg, Germany; Elise Boehm of Bologna, Italy; and Leah Süss from Zurich and Belalp.
