Honoring the name of their village, Sergi Ruiz and Tatiana Segura have opted for the cultivation of asparagus in Esparreguera, in the Baix Llobregat. The couple has recovered old abandoned properties thanks to the mediation of the Montserrat Rural Park land bank. If everything goes according to plan, from 2025 they will harvest up to 12 tons for each irrigated hectare. Ruiz and Segura do their bit to produce local food. A recent study by the Diputació de Barcelona quantifies at 55,054 hectares the area that can be recovered for agricultural uses in the province, in areas where in the past, during the decade of the fifties of the last century, fruit trees, cereals and vegetables grew.
Every meter gained for replanting is very valuable, since currently the districts of Barcelona only have the capacity to feed 10% of their population with local products. In Catalonia as a whole, this figure rises to 44%. The consumption of zero kilometers is a chimera until the work of the farmer is revalued and the recovery of fields is encouraged.
Along these lines of promoting agricultural development in Barcelona are the initiatives designed by the BCN Smart Rural project, promoted by the council with European funds. Its coordinator, Sònia Callau, indicates that for the past three years they have been promoting land banks, a tool to promote intermediation between owners with uncultivated farms and young farmers or ranchers who want to dedicate themselves to this world but who do not have the fields or pastures to begin with.
“The first objective is to fight fires, there is a lot of continuous forest mass that poses a great risk, so we need to recover the mosaic landscape with pastures and agriculture, and at the same time increase our capacity for food self-sufficiency”, explains Callau.
Between 1956 and 2018, the province of Barcelona reduced its arable area by 120,500 hectares, at the rate of almost 2,000 per year, the aforementioned study states. Most of the 55,054 hectares potentially recoverable for agricultural use are now listed as grassland (30,203) and forest (16,225). The remaining 8,626 are suitable for producing food again. Bages, Anoia and Alt Penedès are the counties with the most land that could be used for farming again.
“The objective was to identify the problem, put numbers on it, to decide the actions we will take. We now have six land banks integrated into the Catalan network. There are many people who do not come from a farming family, do not have fields and want to rent them, we put them in contact with the owners of abandoned farms”, adds Callau.
This is the case of Sergi Ruiz, 40, and Tatiana Segura, 37, who have promoted two different projects in Esparreguera thanks to the mediation of the Montserrat Rural Park land bank. In the Ocata estate, there are three and a half hectares dedicated mainly to asparagus and olive trees. “When we arrived, in 2022, the fruit trees that were there were destroyed by the actions of wild boars and because they were not taken care of; we uprooted them and planted 5,000 asparagus plants, on land with water next to the Llobregat. In another space we have olive trees and will grow more asparagus. We practice regenerative agriculture and permaculture”, emphasizes Ruiz, who currently combines his work as an audiovisual producer with the countryside. “We want to promote the culture of asparagus in Esparreguera”, he points out. Not surprisingly, the town’s coat of arms features five green asparagus. In addition to the sale of fresh produce, they will make preserves in a workshop in Abrera. The rental agreement with the owners is for ten years.
For his part, Segura is also at the head of another project on the estate that he has named Can Rasca Orella, with whose owners they have signed a purchase option that would materialize in 2024. “It was abandoned since it was at least 20 years ago. Here we will cultivate medicinal plants and vegetable gardens, not to sell but to train on the practices of regenerative agriculture and permaculture”, explains Segura, who used to be an auditor but who in recent years has been trained in ethnobotany, phytotherapy and agricultural practices respectful of the earth.
To avoid the loss of more fields, Callau indicates that they are analyzing how to create a database of farms of farmers who are about to retire.
