Last week I reported on the visits we made during the ITLUS tour to farms in the northern coastal region of Cantabria in Spain. A few days later we moved south into Castile y León, the largest autonomous community in Spain. It covers an area of 94,223km2, which is larger than the area of Ireland at 84,421 km2.

This region has a very broad range of agricultural activity at altitudes that range from around 400m to 1,400m, but the latter areas tend to be non-agricultural hills in the plateau region. In this region we were based in the north eastern city of Burgos. Most of the land in this area is involved in crop production.

On our way to Burgos we stopped off to visit a number of co-operatives in Aguilar de Campoó. While these were farmer-owned, their general layout was different to what we would have envisaged. We visited a number of facilities where two different co-ops had offices and intakes in the same yard.

Later in the tour we headed south to Andalusia to visit the olive, rice and citrus regions.

Co-op GARU

During our tour we visited a number of co-ops involved in a range of enterprises. Some were quite specific, with involvement in potatoes or carrots or both. Another was involved exclusively with oilseed rape crushing. Co-op GARU had a broader range of crops – from cereals to peas, beans and even vines.

The co-op structure is broadly similar to Ireland, but most co-ops do not pay dividends. Their stated objective is to provide the facilities to enable enterprises to establish and then to enable businesses to function.

Once facilities and structures are in place, the trading objective is to buy inputs as keenly as possible and sell them at value to its members. Coupled with this is the need to buy and trade farm produce as keenly as possible to enable the co-op to pay good prices to members. “Buy cheap, sell cheap and pay more,” seemed to be their motto. But the trading profit remains in the co-op for future investment.

The presence of two different co-ops in the same yard took a bit of unriddling. Both co-ops could even be in the very same business – Co-op Santa Isabel and Co-op Culpaval in Aguilar de Campoó were both involved in seed potatoes at the same site. Also Co-op GARU and Co-op Rioja Alta in Santo Domingo de la Caldaza were located in the same yard.

The explanation is that individual co-ops service specific regions and that only the premises tended to be side by side in the boundary of the two regions.

Co-op GARU, founded in 1982, provided a very interesting visit. Manager José Andrés Moneo explained that the co-op is involved in both input and output businesses. It supplies and applies fertilizers. There was a fleet of bulk trailed spreaders in the yard and there was also a blending and mixing plant which could make a specific blend for every farmer or every field.

This co-op also supplies agrochemicals to growers, along with an application service via a self-propelled high-clearance Technoma sprayer. It also supplies fuel to farmers. The annual turnover is around €36m, almost half of which is from cereals.

The major crops in the regions are cereals (barley and wheat), green beans and peas, vineyards, sugar beet and fruit crops. Co-op members produce around 70,000t of cereals and around 15,000t of beans.

Peas and beans

GARU operates a pea and bean production business. It has eight green bean harvesters and four pea viners to harvest around 1,000ha of green peas and 600ha of beans. The produce is frozen immediately post-harvest and this is done in cooperation with a frozen vegetable company, which is located a short distance away.

Planting of peas begins in February, with harvest in late June. Beans are more prone to frost, so they are planted from May onwards and have a later harvest date.

The main limitation to members getting involved in pea and bean production was the ability to harvest. For this reason the co-op purchased the harvesters for the two different crops.

During our visit we went to see pea harvesting in some local fields. The peas are purchased on a 90-150 tenderometer reading. The price for 150 grade was €190/t but 90 grade fetched €310/t. As indicated previously, the objective of the co-op is to pay better prices to members rather than pay a dividend.

Some people may be interested to know that one of the Camino routes passed through these fields.

Irrigation was provided in the pea fields. This meant that the pipes had to be moved during harvest and then taken up post-harvest to facilitate planting of the next crop.

Facilities

Because the co-op has a fleet of harvesters and fertilizer spreaders, it is not surprising that it also has its own workshop for machinery repairs. This also provides a machinery repair service to its members. Farmers have their own combines or use contractors to harvest their grain crops.

Members can opt to use contract storage from the co-op (€0.30/t/month) and sell when they choose. The option to store only applies to grain at 13.5% moisture or lower. Higher moistures must be sold at harvest because the co-op does not have a dryer. José told us that 10% VAT applies on seed and fertilizer in Spain.

In that area about 70% of the wheat would normally go for milling and 30% of the barley for malting. Wheat and barley yields tend to be similar at 4.5-5.0 t/ha. The ability to irrigate governs the system of farming, with more break crops used where crops can be irrigated.

Oilseed rape

While oilseed rape did not appear to be a very prominent crop as we travelled about (it may have been harvested at that time), a visit to ACOR Co-op indicated that oilseeds were a substantial crop somewhere in the region. ACOR is a cooperative of growers who built a big assembly, storage, crushing and processing facility beside its existing sugar beet processing factory in Olmedo, just south of Valladolid.

The decision to invest in oilseed rape crushing and processing facilities was made at a time when the EU seemed interested in promoting renewable energy and specifically renewable fuels. The result was considerable investment in biodiesel processing capacity throughout Spain. ACOR manager Javier Areños told us that industry erected enough oilseed processing capacity in Spain to supply 260% of its internal biodiesel requirement.

The ACOR site is predominantly a sugar beet processing facility but when the EU sugar policy was changed to facilitate increased imports, the members made the decision to invest in biodiesel production as a land-use alternative. ACOR now has about 5,000 members and the co-op contracts four crops – oilseed rape, sunflower, sugar beet and wheat. The co-op sets a minimum price for all products early in the growing season and these can be adjusted post-harvest, if appropriate.

We visited the oilseed crushing facility where rape and sunflowers are crushed and oil and cake are the main products produced.

They have the capacity to produce three different oil products – raw vegetable oil, refined vegetable oil and biodiesel. But the biodiesel facility is effectively moth-balled.

The co-op invested €65m in this oilseed crushing and processing facility and received grants to the value of 10% or 15% depending on the components. This is one of 46 plants that were constructed in Spain but now only two are actually working. This plant has 49 people employed and it works 330 days with three shifts.

Biodiesel

Biodiesel production was subsidised using public funds but this ceased two years ago. Many other plants used cheaper, imported raw materials for their biodiesel production and so this element of the plant is currently uneconomical and closed. Both oilseed rape and sunflower are crushed at the ACOR plant, which uses both physical and chemical extraction. The dual extraction process leaves less than 1% oil in the cake.

The plant has an annual processing capacity of 165,000t, with storage on site for all of this capacity. Crush capacity is 500t/day. When we visited there in late June the vegetable oil price was €700/t and the price of biodiesel was €780/t. The problem was that the cost of transformation was €120/t, so biodiesel production was just not economical.

They operate a bonus and penalty system for rape payment. Javier said that rape is more profitable but farmers are not yet used to growing it so the area is only increasing. Rape also needs more husbandry and inputs. Yields are heavily impacted by water availability and this is also a factor in the choice of crop. On dry land rape might only yield 2-3t/ha but this could rise to 5 t/ha on irrigated land. And with rape costing more to grow, sunflower is favoured for dry land situations.

Biodiesel is included in fuel in Spain at 5-7% by volume. But this costs 5-6c/litre more than straight diesel. The price for rapeseed is based on international markets but the co-op sets a minimum price before planting and this can then be topped up if the price subsequently rises for two consecutive months. The pricing structure includes a 1.5% bonus for every additional 1% oil above 40%.

Post-crushing, the plant has storage capacity for one month’s oil production and the same for cake – approximately 6,000-8,000t. The cake is a maximum of 12.5% moisture post-crushing and last June the rapeseed cake (32% protein) was making €220/t while sunflower cake (27% protein) made €185/t.

55,000ha of rice

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises our travelling group encountered was the very significant area of rice grown at the delta of the Guadalquivir, near Isla Mayor, just north west of Cádiz and not far south of Seville.

It was a fantastic sight to see so much of a uniform crop in a relatively big area. There was only rice – that’s all there could be. Three-crop rules cannot apply here. Nothing else will grow other than marsh grasses.

The only other rice production region I visited was in the Po Delta in northern Italy (also with ITLUS), and both deltas shared a similar trait. Both rivers provided a constant flow of fresh water to continuously flood the rice fields.

Water levels across the rice fields were carefully controlled by a series of sluice gates. Water was continuously flowing in and being pumped out.

One of the functions of water for rice production is to reduce day/night temperature fluctuations to protect the plants. Rice needs heat but it has difficulty coping with big diurnal temperature fluctuations. The water cover tends to minimise this variation.

A second important function of the fresh water loading in this area of Spain is to prevent the underlying salt water from percolating back up through the subsoil into the growing crop. If this happened, the salt would kill the plants.

Planting and spraying

Another interesting feature of this area was that it was all planted by plane – 55,000ha in two days. And rain does not stop play, even if it should rain. The land is flooded at the time of planting and the seeds are broadcast over the top, from field to field. The seeds are pre-germinated to make them wet and heavy so that they will sink to the bottom to establish.

If they would not sink the seeds could float off the field surface in the constantly moving water.

Rice needs significant management and it must be sprayed quite often.

Spraying can be done by plane but most is done by tractor and mounted boom sprayer.

There are no tramlines but then the spraying tractors do not have tyres. The soil is obviously very tight and stony so tractors are fitted with steel wheels, duals on the rear and a single up front. And each of the ‘wheels’ is only about 10cm wide with a sprocket-like perimeter for grip.

A stork’s feast

One other interesting fact about this region was that the fields had a lot of storks present. These are big birds so they attracted inevitable curiosity. There were numerous storks in some fields with none in others.

Our host, Gonzalo Guillén, said that they were actually fishing in the water-filled rice fields. There tended to be more in the fields that were closest to the inlets from the river as this is where they got access to more crabs in particular. These came in with the flow of water from the river and they obviously made a tasty meal for the storks.