Return to rural life

Mo­ti­va­tions

Nev­er­the­less, it can­not be de­nied that for decades the coun­try­side has been sub­ject to a con­tin­u­ous rural ex­o­dus. In the pro­logue of his 1902 book, La vida al camp (Coun­try Life), the il­lus­tri­ous writer, Jacint Verda­guer, com­plained about the rivers of peo­ple com­ing down from the moun­tains and crowd­ing into the cities. Those rivers of peo­ple that Verda­guer de­scribed did not stop, quite the op­po­site. In a mat­ter of decades whole vil­lages had been left de­serted and farms aban­doned, so that the pri­mary sec­tor came to ac­count for just 1% of the coun­try’s work­force. In the mean­time, there have been sev­eral at­tempts to get peo­ple to re­turn to the coun­try­side, al­though more often than not they have been more sym­bolic than ef­fec­tive.

How­ever, today a new con­cept has emerged, that of the neo-farmer, a term that de­fines a per­son who de­cides to give up their oc­cu­pa­tion to go and earn a liv­ing in the coun­try­side, often with­out any fam­ily tra­di­tions to draw on. Many of these new farm­ers, like Anna and Uri, do it out of a de­sire to im­prove their qual­ity of life, while in other cases they are peo­ple are guided by an idea of re­turn­ing to na­ture to carry out a pro­ject linked to re­spect for the en­vi­ron­ment and with a vo­ca­tion to in­no­vate.

Pol, who left Barcelona to move to the re­gion of Pri­o­rat, talks about the sat­is­fac­tion of hav­ing “detox­i­fied my­self from the rhythms of the urban sys­tem”. “Per­haps it took me four years to re­con­nect with the essence of liv­ing. Here it doesn’t mat­ter if it’s Mon­day, Fri­day or Sun­day. We work hard, but we do it at the rhythm of na­ture. This is the great par­a­digm shift,” he says, adding: “It is a feel­ing of being re­born and re­dis­cov­er­ing the feel­ing of liv­ing.”

Laura, Jordi, Erik and his mother all wanted to get in­volved in the so­cial and sol­i­dar­ity econ­omy and to make a change in their lives, and so they set up La Tomak­era com­pany. The first was a den­tist, the sec­ond was a chemist, the third was an en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist, and the last was an un­em­ployed su­per­mar­ket man­ager. Now, the four of them to­gether man­age a 2.5-hectare farm, which in­cludes a hectare of arable land and a small farm of 34 geese. Erik stresses that he sees a fu­ture in the or­ganic sec­tor: “I want to fight for this life, both for the bu­colic side of it and be­cause of po­lit­i­cal, per­sonal and socio-eco­nomic con­vic­tions,” and he adds that “we need to re­pop­u­late the vil­lages as the cities will be­come more and more dif­fi­cult to live in”. What­ever their mo­ti­va­tions, all the peo­ple we spoke to in­sist that they are sat­is­fied with the change they made and that they would never con­sider going back to their for­mer lives.

Re­newed tra­di­tions

Some­times, this new gen­er­a­tion of farm­ers are re­cov­er­ing a fam­ily legacy, as in the cases of Julià or Pol. For oth­ers, the new ex­pe­ri­ences mean more or less start­ing from scratch, as in the case of Anna and Uri, who merely had the fam­ily gar­den and the mem­ory of grand­par­ents who many years ago had man­aged a farm­house. Nev­er­the­less, Pino points out: “Most of so­ci­ety has an­tecedents in the pri­mary sec­tor. Not so long ago, the pri­mary sec­tor was one of the most rel­e­vant in the econ­omy.”

In the case of Pol and his part­ner, their ex­pe­ri­ence has been about re­cov­er­ing the fam­ily vine­yard that their grand­par­ents had to aban­don many years ago. Pol had never com­pletely lost con­tact with the fam­ily vine­yards, even if at har­vest time it just meant “pick­ing a few box­fuls of grapes,” he says. To this can be added an­other mo­ti­va­tion that is gen­er­ally shared by all of those who de­cide to move into the pri­mary sec­tor: “My part­ner and I have al­ways been very fond of na­ture and work­ing in an of­fice in Barcelona and the pace of city life just didn’t suit me.” Fi­nally they re­alised that the best thing would be to try and renew the fam­ily tra­di­tion: “The an­swer was in front of us but we didn’t see it be­cause I grew up under the gen­er­a­tional par­a­digm that the coun­try­side equals poverty, that you can’t make a good liv­ing there, and that the best life de­pended on study­ing and train­ing and then liv­ing in the city. But that’s false; there is no real qual­ity of life in the city.”

Pol is pleased with how the fam­ily re­acted, es­pe­cially his grand­fa­ther: “It’s changed his old age to see that his grand­son, out of nowhere, is run­ning the fam­ily vine­yards, buy­ing land and earn­ing the recog­ni­tion of the lo­cals. It has given him a new lease of life!” He speaks with sat­is­fac­tion about how the towns­peo­ple began to see them as “the only young peo­ple” con­tin­u­ing the local legacy, “be­cause so many young peo­ple from here don’t want to know any­thing about the coun­try­side.” Their ef­forts also en­cour­aged the older gen­er­a­tion in the vil­lage to start leas­ing vine­yards to them, and they so far have leased 15 hectares. They also began to buy the plots around the fam­ily es­tate so that they now own 35 hectares. The goal is “to re­cover tra­di­tional agri­cul­ture, along with the paths, the verges, dry stone walls and na­tive plant species. We are the gen­er­a­tion that is think­ing about going back to our roots and re-es­tab­lish­ing a model of how a dry­land Mediter­ranean vine­yard should be planted while re­spect­ing the cul­tural her­itage,” he ex­plains.

Pino, to­gether with a busi­ness part­ner, launched Lla­vora, a com­pany mak­ing or­ganic pork prod­ucts. He says he did so as “a com­mer­cial al­ter­na­tive for small farm­ers, who were being dri­ven to ex­tinc­tion by the process of in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion of the sec­tor,” and as a way of re­duc­ing the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact of pig farm­ing at a time when the sec­tor needs to adapt to the scarcity of re­sources and cli­mate change. The farm where they set up went from hav­ing about 2,000 pigs to man­ag­ing 40 or 50 sows in closed cycle and about 600 pigs a year. Pino is sat­is­fied with the reper­cus­sions of the pro­ject: “We have re­duced the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact, but at the same time we have in­creased the local eco­nomic im­pact be­cause we have mul­ti­plied di­rect jobs ten­fold. And also in­di­rect jobs, be­cause we buy local prod­ucts, work with local pro­fes­sion­als and have even re­cov­ered a dis­used feed mill.”

De­spite the sat­is­fac­tion, the tran­si­tion from one way of life to an­other is not sim­ple, which both Anna and Uri ac­knowl­edge: “The first year was the hard­est, es­pe­cially be­cause while the al­lot­ment was work­ing and we were sell­ing bas­kets, we still had one foot in our for­mer lives.”

Mireia Masalies also found it tough at first, es­pe­cially as she be­came a mother at the same time as she began to de­vote her­self to keep­ing sheep. “My son and my pro­ject are the same age,” she says. Is­rael Rodríguez, who started work­ing as a shep­herd six years ago, re­mem­bers that the first few weeks were very hard, “be­cause you feel like you’re a slave”, but he adds that he sees him­self con­tin­u­ing with the job as long as he can find some­one to re­lieve him so that he can have some free week­ends. Cur­rently, he lives off the lambs he sells, the sub­si­dies he re­ceives and a con­tract with the Coll­bató local coun­cil to main­tain perime­ter strips of for­est and un­der­growth. Al­though his fam­ily works in the pri­mary sec­tor, Julià openly ad­mits that “the change has been tremen­dous”: “Be­fore I was in charge of about 20 con­struc­tion work­ers and I had a fixed timetable. I now spend more hours work­ing and I’m often more phys­i­cally tired, but psy­cho­log­i­cally I feel much bet­ter.”

Bu­reau­cratic spi­der’s web

Peo­ple who want to get into the pri­mary sec­tor can apply for help from the De­part­ment of Cli­mate Ac­tion. How­ever, the ben­e­fi­cia­ries com­plain about the amount of bu­reau­cracy that must be over­come to get this aid, de­spite hav­ing the sup­port of the sec­tor’s unions. Pol de­scribes spend­ing hours on the com­puter and doing tons of pa­per­work and he says that “the aid issue is a big mess with so many clauses and re­quire­ments that it makes it very com­pli­cated, and even un­fea­si­ble, for just about any­one.” They also com­plain that the fi­nan­cial sup­port ar­rives late, when the pro­ject is al­ready un­der­way, which forces them to re­sort to loans or help from the fam­ily. Julià ex­plains that with­out the sup­port of his fam­ily it would have been al­most im­pos­si­ble for him to get started, and Mireia also points out that “right now my par­ents are sup­port­ing me”.

Apart from the bu­reau­cratic dif­fi­cul­ties, Pino, who used to work for the Small Farm­ers Union and who is now just a mem­ber, points out that “the fi­nan­cial sup­port from the au­thor­i­ties is poorly de­signed” be­cause it does not re­spond to the needs of new farm­ers. In high­light­ing the deficits, he also points out that “it lacks con­ti­nu­ity, the sub­si­dies do not ar­rive until many months after they are sup­posed to, and the train­ing courses do not al­ways re­spond to the needs of the pro­ducer”.