Joan Corcoy and Georgina Mestre have spent a lifetime dedicated to milk. Now the time has come for retirement and it has been a few days since there are no cows left on the Ca L’Esteve farm (Ribes de Freser). Corcoy explains that they had come to be in their sixties, but the fact that the industry stopped collecting their milk, the low price, the increase in the cost of raw materials or the lack of generational relief has made continuity unfeasible.
Without Can L’Esteve, there is no longer any dairy farm in the Ribes Valley. Alba, one of the daughters of Joan and Georgina, has decided to keep the workshop they have had for years to continue making matons and yoghurts with the milk she buys from one of the three farms that remain in Ripollès.
“When they said they wanted to retire, I told them to go ahead, because now is their time to live, but I didn’t want to be tied to the issue of the cows,” explains Alba Corcoy, daughter of Joan Corcoy and Georgina Mestre, the two ranchers who had run the farm until now. “They have never been able to enjoy a weekend, or a day, or anything,” laments the daughter. “This is not what I wanted for myself. I have two small children, my husband works and I like it, even if it is going out on the weekend and being able to enjoy with them,” she explains.
“One only to take the cows and milk them is unfeasible,” he explains. For 30 years, apart from the cows, they have dedicated themselves to the manual elaboration of almost all dairy products such as yogurts of different tastes, flans or cottage cheese, one of the varieties most valued by consumers. They also sell raw milk in one-litre bags, which they distributed at the Ripollès shops at the time. Alba decided to bet on following this path. For the elaboration of the products he now needs between 500 and 700 liters a week that he buys in one of the three dairy farms that still remain in the region.
The risk that the usual consumer can say that the products do not have the same taste “is”, he admits. But he has chosen to choose a farm that feeds the cows in a similar way to what they did, “so that there is not so much variation in flavor and people cannot say that the products have changed so much.”
The closure of Ca L’Esteve is one more episode of the progressive paradigm shift that the milk industry has brought about in recent years. His commitment to reduce the costs involved in the collection and transport of milk have been concentrating the farms near the packaging plants. In this way, small farms, which formed a rich mosaic in regions such as Ripollès, have been doomed to disappear. The vast majority have been converted into farms with cows to sell their meat, and the few that remain endure to supply themselves with the milk they later need to make the dairy products they sell.
For Joan Corcoy, the administration should have had “more territorial awareness” years ago to ensure the sustainability of the territory. “Now this would be very useful,” he explains. And he adds that, ultimately, what small farms are doing is “gardening” the territory and nature. The territory has been filling up with meat cows, “but this does not maintain the territory in the same way that milk cows do.”
For him, making the switch to beef cows was never an option. “I liked the dairy cow. I liked milking and then transforming the milk into a dairy product,” he defends. When the industry finally told them in 2020 that it would stop going up to get their milk permanently, they had to resize the farm of about sixty cows they had. They went from producing milk and then processing the products to carrying out a more detailed calculation of the milk they needed so that they did not have to throw it away.
Having to close the farm to which they had dedicated their lifetime efforts felt bad, Corcoy explains. “But it’s a change we have to live with,” he says. Neither he nor his wife now plan to give the stables a second life. “It is an installation that has already done the service that it was going to do,” he stresses.
