Bruno's Farming Business Goes Bankrupt

Bruno's Farming Business Goes Bankrupt marks the collapse of Bruno's attempt to make a life and livelihood on the mountain. The farm fails under debts that the cheese business cannot repay, but its end is also a rupture in Bruno and Lara's partnership: she sees practical alternatives, while he cannot imagine a life away from the mountain. When the enterprise closes, Bruno loses the farm and the herd; Lara leaves with Anita, and Bruno turns to Pietro and Barma.

From mountain inheritance to working farm

Bruno's venture grows out of a landscape already marked by abandonment. As children, Bruno and Pietro explored unused stables, haylofts, granaries, and other empty buildings in Grana. In 1984, only fourteen people lived in the village, though it had once held as many as one hundred. The derelict places suggested not a simple escape from urban life but communities that had dwindled and homes left to decay. Bruno's later decision to build a farm there answers that decline with a concrete project, but it also places his hopes in an economy that the mountain's history offers little reason to trust.

The warning had been audible years earlier. Bruno's father described the diminishing viability of small Alpine farms: cattle prices and regulations made the work economically irrational, and he continued largely from passion. He predicted that within ten years of his death the land would revert to forest. Bruno nevertheless saved for a down payment on his uncle's farmstead, using the months at Barma as a trial of whether he could manage mountain work. His plan was to rebuild the huts, buy cattle, and have a working farm within a few years. The plan became more than a private dream when he and Lara restored the stone house, stable, and storeroom and began a modern agricultural enterprise in the old buildings.

Labor, production, and debt

The work was exacting and continuous. Bruno insisted on milking by hand, believing it suited the nervous cows; milking the herd took about two and a half hours. Lara brought him coffee and biscuits at seven and took the cows to pasture twice a day. Bruno combined the morning's 150 liters of milk with the previous evening's milk, added rennet, and pressed the curds into molds. Roughly 300 liters produced no more than thirty kilos of toma. He made butter from the cream and cleaned the equipment and stable before turning to other farm tasks. The rhythm gave the enterprise its intimate, skilled character, but the care invested in each animal and each stage of production did not make the figures work.

The first delivery showed both the achievement and the narrowness of the business. Bruno built a wooden packsaddle for a mule, and Lara took twelve loaves, weighing sixty kilos in total, down to the valley. A buyer examined the cheeses, weighed them, entered the figures in a ledger, and gave Lara a receipt recording their first earnings. Bruno stayed behind to clean the stable; he had decided that transport was not his work, and that the mountain man remained in the mountains while his partner carried goods up and down. The first sale made the farm's produce real as a market commodity, but the labor and distance involved in getting it to the buyer were part of its cost.

By the summer Pietro spent with the couple, the proceeds from cheesemaking did not cover the mortgage. Money passed through their hands without reducing their bank debt, and winter brought further expenses, including rent for the stables. They had borrowed again to meet existing obligations. Lara tried to improve the arrangement by bypassing the distributor and selling directly to shopkeepers. Twice each week she left Anita with Pietro's mother in Grana and made deliveries by car while Bruno managed the farm alone. Hiring help would have increased costs enough to undo the purpose of the change. The attempt to cut out a middleman therefore shifted more work onto Lara without solving the underlying financial problem.

Financial crisis and separation

The debts altered the atmosphere of the farm. In Pietro's absence, the place could change from a happy homestead into a business in the red, and Bruno and Lara from partners in a shared undertaking into quarrelling financial partners. Lara spoke repeatedly about the sums, while Bruno bristled at discussions of money and resented that they dominated the time with Pietro. Their conflict exposed a basic disagreement about what counted as a possible future. Lara was willing to sell the cows, rent out the farmstead, and find ordinary jobs until their position improved. She believed Bruno could find work at a construction site, a dairy processing unit, or on the ski slopes, and that she could work in a shop or as a waitress.

Bruno would not consider those alternatives. Lara came to understand that he placed the mountain above her, Anita, and what she thought they had been building together. She began imagining a future with her daughter but without him. In her account, the relationship ended when she recognized that Bruno would not choose another way of living, even temporarily; the practical question of how to keep the farm afloat had become a question about whether their partnership had any future. The mounting debt and the emotional separation thus developed together, each making the other harder to reverse.

In autumn 2013, Bruno declared himself bankrupt, shut down the agricultural business, and handed the farm keys to the bailiff. Lara went to live with her parents with Anita. Pietro's mother described the sequence differently, saying Lara had decided to leave and Bruno had then given up. The account preserves that difference rather than resolving it: the closure and separation were entangled, and from either perspective the shared farm life was over. Pietro's mother was not only sad but alarmed for Bruno, whom she believed had lost everything and was alone.

After the farm

The news reached Pietro in Nepal, where he broke his established pattern and telephoned Bruno from Kathmandu. Bruno did not want to discuss what had happened with Lara. He said he was tired, confirmed that the farm had been taken, and told Pietro that he had given away the cows. Anita was with Lara and her parents, who had room for her. The herd, the daily work, and the family arrangement that had organized life at the farmstead had all been dispersed.

Bruno's immediate request was to use the house at Barma because he did not know where else to go. He said he did not want to see anyone and would spend some time in the mountains. Pietro agreed that he could stay as long as he wanted. The appeal to Barma returns Bruno to a mountain dwelling associated with rebuilding and friendship, but now as a place of withdrawal after the enterprise built around it has failed.

The bankruptcy resists a simple pastoral reading of the farm as a self-sufficient refuge. Bruno's attachment to the mountain is sustained by real knowledge, repetitive labor, animal care, and a craft process whose outcome he cannot fully control; it is also constrained by loans, winter costs, production limits, and the work of transporting and selling cheese. The farm's collapse does not erase the value Bruno found in that life, but it reveals the difference between loving mountain work and making it economically sustainable. His retreat to Barma leaves that tension unresolved: the mountain remains where he chooses to go, even after the farm that was meant to secure his future there has been lost.