The milkmaid walked happily with her jug ??of freshly milked milk on her head, imagining entrepreneurial projects. It seems as if she had just attended a motivational event where a popular online entrepreneurship guru had encouraged her with a brilliant presentation full of examples of young people from Silicon Valley or Yvy Plus students setting up successful disruptive start-ups. Likewise, surely she could also scale her B2C business into a global dairy unicorn.
In reality, the small family farm where he lived was not exactly new, his family had been raising cows there for who knows when, and although no one had to teach them anything about managing the herd that they loved and cared for so much, even though were up to date with the latest technologies and knowledge, the profitability of their way of life was increasingly compromised. Her grandmother told her that the problems came from afar. Since she was a girl, in addition to herding, she was in charge of distributing fresh milk every morning to the residents of the town. She also made fresh cheeses if she had leftover milk, and sold them at the market. Later came industrialization and trucks from a cooperative in the region that set up a bottling plant came to get the milk.
His father, who already studied agri-food engineering before returning to the farm, remembered Spain’s entry into the common market and the dairy quotas imposed by the European Community. The cooperative went into crisis and the plant ended up in the hands of a company, later acquired by a multinational that soon closed it. In the face of protests, the multinational promised to continue buying milk from farms in the region, but the day came when it began to pay prices that did not cover increasingly skyrocketing expenses. Those responsible alluded to different causes: cheaper milk arrived from abroad, distribution was actually the one who set the price, consumers were shifting their habits towards vegetable smoothies that they perceived as substitutes due to some defamatory campaign about the healthy characteristics of the milk that had been achieved a tremendous impact…
Many colleagues decided to throw in the towel, and the closure of so many small farms ended up being a certain relief in profitability for the few survivors, although it would surely be temporary. In fact, our dairymaid’s family had already been told by the big company that it was not worth spending diesel to get to their farm to look for a production as small as theirs, even if it was excellent. Therefore, after filling out the forms and other required bureaucratic equipment, our brave young dairy farmer was able to transport her own production, trying again to sell directly as in her grandmother’s time, but with the assistance of all the information technologies that She dominated perfectly.
Along the way, in reality, rather than dreaming of impossible unicorns, I imagined value-added proposals and innovative logistics strategies based on artificial intelligence that would allow connecting every corner of the territory where healthy, sustainable and gastronomically excellent food is produced with the citizens who depend on it. of a functional and competitive nearby food system.
We could leave it here, it would be an open ending. Or end up like the classic one, with the broken jug, a deserted rural world and hungry cities at the mercy of chance or interests too large and distant to act with sensitivity towards what, due to distance and scale, they are not able to perceive… or of simple and dirty opportunistic speculation.
But this story of the milkmaid, the story of any small representative of the country’s primary sector, works like those interactive works in which the public can decide the ending.
And to do so, if we want a happy ending, we already know what to put in our shopping basket.
