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Features
7 May 2023 2.00 h

Christian Buono and Adrià Ramon

COOP-ERA PROJECT coordinators

“If there are no people left in the countryside, we’ll have sold out”

Coop-era is an award-win­ning pro­ject that links the labour in­ser­tion of vul­ner­a­ble groups and the gen­er­a­tional shift in the coun­try­side by adding value in rural en­vi­ron­ments and giv­ing di­rect job op­por­tu­ni­ties to spe­cific groups, es­pe­cially mi­grants and young peo­ple from youth cen­tres or shel­tered hous­ing. Chris­t­ian Buono and Adrià Ramon are the pro­ject co­or­di­na­tors.

What ser­vices does Coop-era offer?
C.B. A wide range: from spe­cific agri­cul­tural ser­vices, such as the olive har­vest, to forestry work, through the in­te­gral man­age­ment of farms and the sale of prod­ucts. This is the case, for ex­am­ple, with the Ca la Ma­ri­eta es­tate, in Sant Pau d’Ordal, in Alt Penedès. Two years ago, the owner was going to aban­don it be­cause he had no one to take over, but the pro­ject stepped in and, since then, we’ve worked the land, taken care of the veg­eta­bles and peach trees and, later, sold the fruit at the Ordal peach mar­ket. We’ve also pro­duced jam with the sur­plus.
How did the idea come about?
C.B. There’s a grow­ing prob­lem of farm­ers with­out heirs or whose heirs do not want to work the fields. A.R. We offer ex­ter­nal agri­cul­tural ser­vices such as prun­ing, har­vest­ing, sporing... and we also find dif­fer­ent types of crops that need to be worked all year round. C.B. The aim is not to de­pend on the sea­son­al­ity of the crops.
You work the land of farm­ers who have no work­ers.
A.R. We take care of the di­rect man­age­ment of prop­er­ties that are at risk of being aban­doned and that can con­tinue to be pro­duc­tive. We’ve leased land and done dif­fer­ent types of deals with the own­ers. With olive farms, the com­mon arrange­ment is that we give them 10% of the oil pro­duced in ex­change for man­ag­ing the land. With wine-mak­ing, it’s around 20%. C.B. Some don’t charge us any­thing. For ex­am­ple, we have one farmer who has up­rooted his vines and wants to plant olive trees there, and to renew the or­ganic mat­ter he’s let us use the or­chard land for free for a while. In other cases, we pay rent, al­ways a sym­bolic amount though... We’re now look­ing at how we can trans­form other sur­pluses.
Do you sell with your own brand?
C.B. Yes, we have olive oil and also Ordal peach jam... We’re now look­ing at how we can trans­form other sur­pluses.
And where do you sell?
C.B. Ordal mar­ket is a good place and we have some restau­rants that buy from us. A.R. The restau­rants around Sant Pau d’Ordal know us well. Peo­ple al­ways say that local veg­eta­bles are very ex­pen­sive, but if we end up with no peo­ple in the coun­try­side and have to buy every­thing from abroad, then we’ll have sold out.

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