After decades working the soil from dawn until dusk, Carmel Busuttil has turned his hands to preserving the past. His new museum in Rabat showcases the tools, traditions and toil of Malta’s fading agricultural heritage.

The 59-year-old, born into a family of farmers, recalls his father lowering a tank of water into the surrounding soil so the young boy could reach into it with his bucket to irrigate the land. He has since dedicated his life to working on his 15 tumoli of fields, finding any spare time at night to realise his dream of opening a museum of old tools.

Opened two months ago, Tax-Xierfa, located at the start of Sta Katerina Street, is the result of a 20-year dream. He always wanted to turn part of the garden behind Palazz Tax-Xierfa, which belonged to his grandfather, into a heritage museum.

Carmel Busuttil hopes his museum could become a tourist attraction.

It took him eight years to get a permit and lots of sweat to build it, stone by thick, old stone with his bare and battered hands. They are testimony to the manual toil of farmers, which he is aiming to preserve through the display of the old tools and machinery that he has been buying for 15 years from others in the field and car boot sales.

Now, they are meticulously hanging on the walls, complete with QR codes that, once scanned, give visitors all the information they may need “at their own pace” and accompanied by background folk music.

The tools chronicle the hardships Maltese farmers have endured. Some of them are so worn out; they are evidence of how much they have been used. The metal part of a heavy sledgehammer used in construction, impossible for the average person to carry, is bent with the beating.

From wooden spirit levels to old jackhammers, hoes and wedges, these tools reflect the hands-on construction techniques of the past. A sickle without a handle isn’t necessarily broken. It would have been hung on a hook on the wall and used to cut hay, Busuttil demonstrates, recounting the many times he cut his hands on it before school.

The museum is full of tools and artefacts. Photos: Chris Goa Farrugia

Weighing scales for newborn babies, his own great grandfather’s sandals, made from car tyres, and the pitchforks he used as a child to pull out potatoes transport visitors to a rural life of the past.

Local farming has only “a few years left’

Visitors step inside a fully equipped kitchen for a taste of old coffee grinders, meat mincers and a ‘cauldron’ his mother used to boil clothes, while a wheat grinder shows the little pinch of flour that would come out of so much hard work, again highlighting the “suffering of the past”. The museum also includes a tomb, dug out by Busuttil to represent the many found under properties in Rabat.

Fearing local farming has only “a few years left”, he believes that today’s youths do not want to suffer as their forefathers did. “My son tells me: Go to the fields, baħnan (idiot)’,” Busuttil says with a smile. “They know they can get an easier job earning more, while the farmer, on the other hand, is always robbed. The minute he plants something, if he does not water it, it will be stolen by the ants the very next day!”

But nothing beats fresh, local produce, he believes, singing the praises of the local bambinella he has just sowed and wondering what would happen if ever fruit and vegetable supplies did not make it to Malta for a couple of weeks. “We have nothing in store!”

Landowners are choosing to take back their fields and sell them at astronomical costs for recreational purposes, pricing out potential young farmers, who could never afford a tumolo at €100,000, Busuttil says. “Today, the wealthy buy a field, build a room and have a barbecue.”

Busuttil owns his own field, but he is well aware of the threats to this dying industry, which explains his efforts to preserve it through the museum. Looking around, he is most proud of the arches he built by hand, as well as the tunnel of water he dug out, pointing to the channel hewn in the rocks, which flows through to a reservoir. The centrepiece, however, is a 150-year-old water mill, fully restored and operational. Powered by a mule, it draws water from a borehole to irrigate the surrounding fields.

The museum includes a functional 150-year-old mill powered by a mule.

Tax-Xierfa, a labour of love and a “hobby” – Busuttil found working on it at night, after a day’s work, relaxing – opened just over two months ago and, finally, he can say he is fully satisfied. “Whenever he wants, he can take me.”

But not quite… The farmer has plenty of plans in the pipeline for the museum. Among his ideas are a recreation area next door for students to be able to enjoy hands-on agricultural activities once it joins the government education programme, Let’s Talk Farming, in October, which will see schools visiting regularly.

“Children know nothing about local farming,” he said about Tax-Xierfa’s educational aims.

So far, local councils are bringing over groups, while elderly from day care centres are also visiting, although it is early days to be flooded by tourists.

But Busuttil is gearing up for that too. He is also planning on buying a wartime Jeep to take visitors on a tour of his fields in Wied Liemu, where they can stop for a glass of his homemade Ġellewża wine, produced using old grape-crushing machinery by manually turning a wheel, the likes of which are also on display – 100 years later.

A cave-like ambience in part of the museum.

“These are luxuries compared to the time we would crush the grapes with our feet,” he recalls, looking at his large glass containers of the semi-rosé, sitting in a cave-like ambience.

The farmer will also break open a piece of piping-hot Maltese bread, scoop it out and stuff it with ġbejniet and whatever has been made under the sun. “This is, after all, what tourists want to experience,” he says about the authenticity of the tour. “Not the skyscrapers that now block it out!”