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company looking to the sky, just in case, most farmers usually have some money saved in case they lose the crop. "After three or four good years, the last campaign was the second in which we didn't get anything, last year was dry and we didn't even manage to harvest. There are people who no longer tan”. This is how Joan Piera Mota explains it, a 37-year-old farmer from Preixana, a town of 400 inhabitants in the Urgell region.
He cultivates about 400 hectares of dry land and around 100 of irrigated land in his town and also in Verdú. When there was no shortage of water, corn, barley, oats, rapeseed and wheat were sown. Now you can no longer risk planting corn, it needs more water. The closure, last year, of the Urgell canal, left it without irrigation, the water was reserved to save the trees
"We had been defending ourselves for three or four campaigns. The one in 2023 was the second in a row without taking anything. The average yield per hectare reached 200 kilos of cereals, when on average it exceeds 3,000", he says from his tractor while sulphating.
In irrigated areas, farmers have harvested a third of what they usually get. "They closed our canal on April 25, we were very behind in watering because we had little water, but from that date we didn't water anything else, a disaster," he says.
Until a few weeks ago I was convinced that 2024 would be another horrible year, the recent rains have been hopeful, for now the sky is giving it a break.
To the question of how he endures two disastrous seasons in the countryside, he answers by explaining that farmers save money. They have in their memory evenings of hailstorms in which the farms are destroyed in a few hours, or frosty nights in which everything is lost.
The drought has eaten up the savings from the previous campaigns, to tighten the belt they are starting to save on fertilisers.
"Living exclusively on cereal is impossible, one has a farm, the other has fruit trees, the other has almond and olive or pistachio trees," he explains. He owns a pig farm and has always combined this work with the tasks on his farms and also going to harvest grain and collect straw from other farmers. Saving the farm, everything else has had to be reinvented.
Joan has traveled all over Spain farming. It is also a haymaker. He is dedicated to collecting straw for dry Spain. It's another business to fill the pocketbook and have extra money to get through a year like this. "I always go with trailers and make the huge piles of straw that you see when we travel by road", he says
It usually starts packing on May 25 in the Lleida area and ends in September. At the end of the month it is usually in the upper area of Burgos.
"This year, on August 24th I was already at home and we had finished. Here in the Lleida area we did not collect anything. We were unemployed, we worked for about three weeks in Burgos and we didn't work any more because there was no harvest in Huesca or Lleida".
To the difficulties of the drought, in recent years the plagues of rabbits have been added to his town, which are causing great damage. He is part of a platform that fights the plague. Last week he participated in the rally in support of the union leaders who Pacma denounced for animal abuse in a protest in Lleida.
"We have meetings almost every week with officials from the Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda, who have killed 437,000 rabbits. Their reports already recognize that there are many more rabbits than last year, every year there are more," he says.
"Two years ago, when we were left without a store due to retirement, the City Council opened a store." The City Council inherited a house. In the upper part there are rural accommodations, and below, the establishment. There is a worker and she is open six days a week. The elderly can now go shopping every day.
As a child, Joan always said that he wanted to be a farmer. He is considered a "vocational" farmer. "When we left school, I went with my father or my uncle with the tractors, with the crops or whatever".
When he thought about his future he saw the Segarra-Garrigues canal, the biggest Catalan hydraulic infrastructure, a great hope for his people. Just when he decided to stay on the family farm, Preixana was included in the Special Protection Zones for Birds (ZEPA) of the Grand Canal.
"If I had known that my town would be declared a ZEPA, and that we wouldn't be able to irrigate, I certainly wouldn't have stayed there. I stayed at home in 2009. That year in my town there was a plot concentration to irrigate the Segarra-Garrigues canal", he underlines
Yes, he can irrigate his village on the Canal d'Urgell, which has just started the irrigation campaign.
Pending the modernization of the channel, for him, the call for elections to the Generalitat for May 12 has not been good news. "The Generalitat's budget project provided aid for the modernization of the Urgell canal, now we will have to wait another year, and we will be watered down", he regrets.
JOAN PIERA MOTA
Grow cereals
