This film is not set in Segrià, but in Baix Llobregat, where the skies are not so clear and the view runs into motorways, high-voltage lines, industrial estates and blocks of flats. Nor does it explain – fortunately – the last harvest of a lineage of farmers. But it contains the epic tints that make ‘Alcarràs’, the film by Carla Simón, into a box office phenomenon: three generations that bend the backbone, the rigor in the harvest, the anguish of ‘placing’ the product, the African seasonal workers, the plague of rabbits and the pressure of capital in the name of progress. “It’s just like that,” he confirms. German Dominguez –the equivalent of the fictional Roger–, the ‘nano’ of Cal Farinetes.
German, 26, is a rarity among metropolitan farmers. 65% do not drop below 55 and await retirement to ‘close’ the field. So the announcement to continue in the job of the great-great-grandparents had overtones of family drama. The patriarch was upset Baldiri Farres (1941), one of the founders of the Unió de Pagesos in Franco’s time, a real tough guy who at the age of 22, when a heart attack took his father, had to take care of the land.
And the mother was upset, Mercè Farres (1965), that as a child, she confesses, she was embarrassed to be taken to school on a tractor – “the peasant was second class, then” –, and the lack of availability of the father, the impossibility of a vacation as God intended and the imperative to sell the product at his mother’s market stall. “When Germán told me, the world fell on me.”
The price of globalization
Why so upset? “Do you see those artichokes? – Baldiri points to the west – So much money and effort invested and they no longer want them in the market, in the garbage”. Once, he continues, with what was sown about to be harvested, he fell into a hail and lost everything. “Not even a pair of glasses for the son could we afford.” And so, over and over and over again.
“There’s nothing positive about this life,” grumbles the grandfather, although he bursts with pride. “There’s a lot of blah blah about peasantry, but you go to buy an onion, they tell you it’s worth 1 euro and you want it at 0.80, well! you plant it!” In a jiffy a family sanhedrin is set up about who is to blame. He wins “globalization”.
the fertile land
Those from Cal Farinetes – the farmhouse is so named because the great-great-grandfather prepared popular porridge for the hungry – work 9 of the 3,473 hectares of the Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park. Three are owned by Baldiri and another six are rented. In the Baix it runs that this land is more fertile than that of the Nile, due to the mud from the floods of the Llobregat (the last one, in September 1971).
Germán uprooted his grandfather’s slow-growing fruit trees and planted artichokes and broad beans, cabbage and broccoli, and last year he dared with the ‘calçot’ (“about 7,000 kilos we will be planting”). Half of the production goes to Mercabarna, and the other is sold on Saturdays, together with his parents and his sister, Laura, at a street stall in Sant Boi.
Forgetting the ‘essentials’
During the state of alarm, when the street markets closed and the genre was stopped, Germán desperately called TV-3 and said over the air that he could make baskets for the confined. “That was a Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday I was already distributing 80; WhatsApp collapsed.” The whole family and the temps worked piecemeal in the garage. Between 100 and 150 baskets each week they distributed. They played in the ‘essential’ league.
“A bag of fertilizer that cost 8 euros before the pandemic and today exceeds 20, but the product is the same!”
With the running of the bulls over, not only did they stop hearing the applause, but they have seen how the price of diesel went from 0.7 euros per liter to 1.42 in a year. “A sack of fertilizer that cost 8 euros before the pandemic today exceeds 20,” laments Germán, “but the product is the same!”
He took the tractor and joined the protest and even read the manifesto in Plaza de Espanya, because he is the communication spokesperson for the Unió de Pagesos in the region. But he has no choice but, after finishing his work, to make wages with the tractor for third parties. “He Sometimes he calls me at night – Mercè is anguished – and he tells me not to worry, that he has a light and he can see well”.
The temptations of capital
In ‘Alcarràs’, the siege of modernity is symbolized by the landing of solar panels to set up a photovoltaic park managed by the wealthy of the area. Cal Farinetes has experienced other pressures. The one of the ‘tocho’, without a doubt. But there have been other more striking ones, such as the attempt to install Eurovegas, Sheldon Adelson’s entertainment complex, that promised employment to go-go in its 12 ‘resorts’, six casinos, three golf courses and nine theaters, with an energy consumption equivalent to that of all of Zaragoza.
The latest temptation to throw in the towel and live the dad life is industrial hemp. “They are paying 30,000 euros in rent per year for a hectare, when we pay a thousand,” compares Germán. You have to carry the trade embedded in the marrow.
The extension of the Prat would mean that if a bird decides to rest, reproduce or feed on its land, they cannot touch a vegetable
Another ‘threat’ was –is it still?– the expansion of El Prat airport. And not because of the noise of the turbines, which is 12 kilometers away. The third runway would expand the Special Protection Area for Birds (ZEPA) by a thousand hectares, which today number 280, located on the shore of Prat beach. According to the law, if a bird decides to rest, reproduce or feed on your land, it is forbidden to touch a vegetable. “I wouldn’t be able to harvest, or do chemical treatments, or clean the irrigation outlets. I would have to seal off the field.”
Meanwhile, the rabbits, the parrots, the pigeons and the wild boars that sleep among the reedbeds of the Llobregat and enter to binge are already making a mess of it. “We planted 4,000 broccoli on a Friday and on Tuesday they were all chopped, a thousand euros in the trash and planting again.” But here they don’t shoot rabbits from a car, like in the movie. Here a federated hunter “stands at the foot of the fig tree and shoots everything that passes by.”
They invited Marc Gasol through networks to visit their fields, and the former NBA star presented himself with horticultural interest
New Times
Nor are there four marijuana bushes hidden among the crops to pay homage to each other, as in ‘Alcarràs’; but Germán likes to party. He had his fights with the ‘avi’ Baldiri because at 6 in the morning he was waiting for him to go out to the fields and he would come back from partying. The tension has subsided, the boy has a partner – “the first thing I told my girlfriend was what she was doing and what it meant” – and he complies, burns or the sky comes down.
And he has made deals with a Vic distributor who connects him with a ‘star’ chef, and he handles the social media, which glamorize farm life and are a great marketing tool. He even sent an invitation to the Samboiano Marc Gasol for him to come see his crops, and a few days ago, wow, the former NBA star showed up at the cabbage line with horticultural interest.
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“Now I am very proud, because I see that Germán works in a different way than my father, thank God! -says Mercè-. On Saturdays, my husband, Germán, my daughter, Laura, and I go to the bus stop with great enthusiasm “. And the ‘avi’ Baldiri, as cantankerous as the Quimet Solé in the film, doesn’t miss a day on the land, ready to clear the brush and do whatever it takes. “I don’t know how the ‘nano’ does it, but he has involved us all.”
This film, as you can see, has a ‘happy ending’. But if you go to the grocery store, don’t skimp on four dogs. It is not going to be that, like the Solé of ‘Alcarràs’, those of Cal Farinetes –and the rest of the peasants who feed us– have to live their last harvest.