Laia Angrill Perelló is 24 years old. She is a graduate in Global Studies and a livestock farmer on her family dairy farm, Cal Rosill, in Peramola (Lleida). She has actively participated in the recent protests against the agrarian crisis that have brought farmers and ranchers from several European countries onto the roads.
Affiliated with Unió de Pagesos and member of the Payesa Platform (formerly 6F Platform), she has a long list of reasons to mobilize. Most of them are behind the lack of young people in their profession, in which generational change is already in danger.
“Despite specific financial aid so that young people can access work in the countryside, the numbers of generational change are worsening for several reasons. One is the price crisis that has occurred and that has made many families tell their children: “Hey, don’t dedicate yourself to this, you’re not going to make a living.” “And there are other more social reasons. “The work of a farmer is not valued.” People – he adds – prefer that their children have a recognized role in society, that they be lawyers, doctors or architects. He argues that “the fact that society has this very urban vision makes people a little repudiate the countryside, seeing it from a distance. “There are many stereotypes, prejudices.”
She is convinced that families do not encourage their children to be farmers and ranchers because of what they have suffered and that without incorporating young people, production stagnates. For her it is a contradiction that at the family level continuity makes sense and that at the collective level it does not. “Livestock farmers and industry – she insists – complain that there is no relief, but on a personal level, no one is willing to be a martyr and die for the cause. “Everyone likes there to be people in the field but no one wants to stick their necks out for the cause.”
Their first reason for mobilizing is to demand that family livestock farming be prioritized over industrial farming. Although she knows that it is not the demand that generates the most consensus in the sector, she is convinced that it is the one that could have the most impact.
Bureaucracy is another. She’s tired of playing roles. “The Administration – she argues – is very demanding regarding deadlines. When they need something you have to run to give it to them, but when you need something from them you can wait, things in the palace go slowly.”
Among the specific issues, he cites improving aid for mountain agriculture due to its added difficulties due to climate and geography and in the management of wild fauna: “That the Government increases compensation for the damage caused by the species that have been imposed on us, like the bear.” Their cows are usually locked up on the farm. “Sometimes when I take them out to pasture, it scares me,” he says.
After graduating in Global Studies in Barcelona and completing a master’s degree in editing, she was going to become a book editor. She saw that the ones she liked the most were those from her area, those from the mountains, those who defended the agriculture and culture of the Pyrenees. And the covid arrived. Her grandfather became ill and died and her father was confined. She didn’t think twice when she was called upon to lend a hand.
The pandemic passed and he decided to stay in the town. His mother, born in Barcelona, ??was reluctant at first. “I didn’t want to because she has seen everything my father and grandfather have suffered. He is one of the people who thought that I was prepared to do something more in life. It seems to me a tremendous mistake that what I want to do in life is not everything.”
Her father was happy with her interest in the farm, he always told her that if anyone could run the farm it would be her. “I am very lucky that many girls in livestock farming have not had. My father, although he does not call himself a feminist, is a feminist person,” says Laia. “He believes that I can do this job and since I was little he has prepared me. For me it is much easier than for many girls who have not been taught how to drive the tractor and have been told that it would be better to be a teacher or nurse,” she says.
He has always collaborated with his father. “I was very embarrassed that the family business and the efforts of more than four generations were lost.” “In general,” she explains, “we go early in the morning, my father and I share the work with a couple of workers. “I take care of the cows and the paperwork and my father takes care of the land and the maintenance of the tractors.”
This is how he sees himself in 10 years: “I imagine myself on my farm, I hope with a daughter or a son, teaching them why we do this work, why we love the land and with my father.” And within a few days or weeks she sees herself again in a tractor unit. “It’s going to be a long-distance, endurance race. We are not a group like taxi drivers, who can sit until they solve it, we cannot take a week’s break because the animals have to eat every day. But we will repeat what we have seen in recent days,” he advances.
