Cambios

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=== Contents of the book ===

The workforce is also analysed, along with the importance of all the members of the family being involved in the agricultural work, regardless of their age or sex and neighbours working together. As regards the Mediterranean-facing side, the contracting of day workers is covered, particularly at harvest time, given the area involved and the speed at which the crops had to be gathered. The importance of animal power is also described, particularly at a time when the machinery as we know it today had still not appeared.

There is a chapter on animal transport, particularly the ox cart given the key role it played, along with the yoke and all the accessories needed to harness the pair of cattle. The last chapter in this block addresses the mechanisation of agriculture and the changes that modern machinery have meant to farming.

Given the age of the informants and that part of the information was gathered decades ago, we have focused on farming from the end of the 19th to the mid-20th century.

That farming was family-run, involved all members of the homestead regardless of their age or sex and focused on self-sufficiency or at least as far as it could.

That knowledge was not a rigid, but rather a permeable body of expertise, as the person who cultivated the land was always open to trying new seeds and even techniques, but from empiricism that meant checking that it worked. Despite the disdain shown by modern society, that knowledge was scientific to a certain extent as it was based on the technique of trial and error. Furthermore, it was accumulative as the knowledge gained by each generation was added to the received expertise and passed on to the following one. Thanks to this accumulated knowledge, each family also knew which part of its land was best for each type of crop.

This know-how came from the deep-rooted link that was established with the land. In the case of an economy based on self-sufficiency, there was no other option than to respect the land, as their very livelihood depended on it. In fact, unlike what happens today with agricultural fields, exposed to erosion and to the buildup of chemical waste, arable land in the past gradually improved with years of work and the best land was considered to be that which had been ploughed for generations.

Many of the holdings, particularly those that have to pay rent to lease land, would run at a loss without the CAP grants and a previously unknown situation of dependency has thus been created. The downside is the strict control of the farmer who has to comply with all the administrative red-tape or facing paying a fine. There is a huge difference between the relative freedom that farmers enjoyed in previous decades and the crop control of today, as practically all their activity is regulated.

For example, farmers are currently required to leave part of their holding to fallow land or to use protein crops that add nitrogen to the ground, such as legumes, for which they receive a specific agri-environmental grant, on top of the general one for all crops. All the holdings of over 15 hectares have to earmark at least 5 % of the total to ecological focus areas: fallow, nitrogen-fixing crops, wooded areas and/or agroforestry. Furthermore, in order to diversify the crops, the CAP requires holdings under 30 hectares to plant at least two different crops, with the main crop occupying less than 75 % of the total; and holdings larger than three different crops with the two main ones occupying less than 95 % and the largest of them less than 75 % of the total.

In turn, the degree of complexity being achieved by the different authorities is reflected in the extensive legislation being enacted and in the complicated jargon that the farmers have to deal with. One example is the following paragraph which explains how to implement what is technically known as the “convergence” of the latest CAP reform, which covers the second half of the present decade:

“Furthermore, it should be noted that the provisional values of the entitlements hereby notified are affected by convergence, in other words, a phased approach is calculated of the initial unit value to the regional average value in 5 identical phases from 2015 to 2015. Should the value of your entitlements be under 90 % of the average value for your region, they shall be progressively increased in order to reach in 2019 the increment standing at a third of the difference between your average and 90 % of the average for the region. However, should the value of your entitlements be under the average for the region, this convergence shall be funded by reducing the value of the payment entitlements whose value is over the average in 2019, with the maximum reduction being set at 30 % of the nominal value. If, after calculating the upward convergence, your payment entitlements are still under 60 % of the average for the region in 2019, they shall be raised to that 60 % of the average in 2019, unless that means the donors suffering losses over 30 %, in which case they shall be shifted towards 60 % even if they do not reach it. Finally, if the value of your entitlements is between 90 % and the average of the region, they will not be affected by this convergence process”<ref>Paragraph taken from a notification sent to all producers of the Basque Autonomous Community by the Agriculture and Livestock Directorate of the Basque Government’s Ministry of Economic Development and Competitiveness in 2015.</ref>.

It should also be noted that in tandem to the decrease in the number of people working in agriculture, groups of producers of all type have flourished and have resulted in the organisational structures of the authorities related to this activity becoming more complex.

Food self-sufficiency has decreased in rural areas to such an extent that the percentage of food bought from the agri-food industry is increasingly greater even in the homes of farm food producers. The weight that local produce has in the food of urban areas is practically nonexistent. A widening gap with the origin of the food consumed has also been observed. The response has been to run awareness-raising campaigns among consumers to highlight the importance of locally-sourced produce and some agricultural organisations defend concepts such as the so-called “food sovereignty”.

Allotments, ready to grow crops and which are allocated to the people signing up for the scheme, have been set up on the outskirts of some towns. They are the organised and controlled version of a trend that has always existed around the cities and large towns where vegetables were grown on abandoned plots of land, usually by people who had migrated to the urban areas from the country. In the past, towns, and even large ones, had market garden where produce was cultivated for their own consumption and that is still reflected in place and street names.

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