“Celebrating Breeders: The Festival in Vinça and the Passion of Conflent’s Farmers”

Do you know the legend of Scheherazade who took a thousand and one nights to make herself loved by her king? Today in Fillols, Shéhérazade with black eyes hemmed with long eyelashes does not intend to wait so long to seduce a whole people.

It will be in Vinça, for the breeders’ festival, this weekend. Shéhérazade is a Gascon from the Pyrenees, already a bit of a cabaret in front of the photographer, who will make it a point to wear the colors of the brand new Gaec of Laurent and Galdric Montagne, father and son. Laurent settled in 2002 in Fillols. His father Martin and his brother David are also breeders in Vernet. Galdric takes over. It’s called a lineage.

Galdric, 21, has breeding in his blood and in his soul. “It’s not a job, it’s a passion, a state of mind”, he assures us, perpetuating the art of living of this old Conflentoise, Vernetoise and Filloloise family with 70 cows, 20 heifers and… Scheherazade!

The Award of Excellence

This year, the drought is delaying the projects because fodder has to be found. Since the explosion of urbanism in the 1980s, very fragmented land has limited harvests and it is not the mountainous moors that will solve the problem. Admittedly, the mountain pastures will soon begin but… It has to rain!

However, these questions do not call into question the quality and excellence of the production of the Catalan Cooperative of Breeders which collects, develops and distributes their products.

So it’s sure, the public is expected in large numbers in Vinça where the municipality and the Syndicate of breeders of Conflent organize this festival. And during the visit to Shéhérazade, it will be possible to discuss with all these passionate professionals, formerly simply peasants, but now necessarily managers, computer scientists, meteorologists, logisticians, accountants, etc. But who remain contemplative poets, in love with their “beasts” because they still know how to keep both feet anchored in their land! Just talk a little with them to read the passion in their eyes, and hear the love of the land, the mountains and the villages.

At the bend of a glance, the complicity and the happiness of a transmission between a father and his son is glaring. In the tenderness between a breeder and his Scheherazade is also pride in a job well done, even if it is difficult.

Speaking of a job well done, the “dew of the Pyrenees” campaign which will begin this May is the best opportunity for lovers of quality products to pay the best of tributes to all these deserving breeders.