I love visiting Paco Bedoya’s farm for two reasons. The farm itself is wonderful, a kind of jungle of citrus trees, fruit hanging everywhere, birds chirping, a luxurious green ground cover, it always feels to me a bit like a garden of Eden. The second reason is Paco himself. He is a real character, still […]
Driving around Andalusia visiting the farmers of Tierra y Libertad I am constantly struck by the diverse landscapes. It’s true that Andalusia is big – at 87 268 km² it is bigger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined – but when you add that size to the wide ranging differences in elevation, rainfall and the
Pedro Castellar de la Frontera
Transcript When we came here we said… we have to conserve the old varieties and the old forms of making wine. So we started looking in the old bodegas and at every site we found… for example, you remember that man in Blanco-Morenos? We asked this man: “Do you have amphoras like this?” “Yes.” “How
Here is Paco Gonzalez telling a nice story about his granddaughter and the Guadalhorce river.
Paco Gonzalez takes his granddaughter fishing
Visiting Carlos Márquez’s farm last week, is nestled deep in a valley just a few kilometres from the Mediterranean coast East of Malaga, I was struck by the abundance of the land despite the incredibly dry season they are having here. While Carlos and all the farmers around have been forced to occasionally irrigate their
Carlos shows us how he uses vetiver grass to mulch his avocado trees.
Vetiver grass with Carlos Márquez
A living countryside. A vibrant rural culture. A beautiful agro-ecological landscape. All good things that most people, whether urban, suburban or rural, would like to see. Yet, almost everywhere we look in Europe, the opposite is happening: as the young leave, the life of the countryside is not able to regenerate itself, the rural culture
The key to reversing rural depopulation
Mark Twain called it ‘the most delicious fruit known to men’, C.R.Markam asserted that ‘he who has not tasted this fruit does not know what fruit is’ and Haenke crowned it the ‘masterpiece of nature’. Unlike its better known tropical brethren such as the pineapple, mango and avocado, and in spite of these glowing references,
The most delicious fruit known to men
Story told by Jose González in Spanish on 14/12/2021. Simon Clissold edited and translated from the Spanish original Jose: My paternal grandfather, when he was a kid, he would come with his father on a mule to cultivate the land. The land was cultivated from top to bottom with sugar cane. The land wasn’t owned
The shade of the ancient custard apple tree
I am lucky enough to live in Andalusia, in Southern Spain, where I work with an amazing group of small farmers with whom I founded a cooperative, Tierra y Libertad. Our aim is not just to support small scale organic farmers financially, by selling their products at a fair price, but to support the whole
Jose Gonzalez of Tropicultura in Motril, Granada, Spain, talks about fruit prices now compared to the 1980s when his grandfather was a farmer.
Fruit prices now compared to the 1980s
