Home » Health » The Spanish agricultural sector defends the well-being of the land, vital for its survival ~ Efeagro Agri-food information

The Spanish agricultural sector defends the well-being of the land, vital for its survival ~ Efeagro Agri-food information

The cultivated land in Spain reaches 17 million hectares in Spain -173 million in the European Union-, a vital area for the agricultural sector that takes advantage of today, World Soil Day, to remember that it is its fundamental element of production and that they work on their care and improvement.

5 december 2020

Laura Cristóbal EFEAGRO

With the motto “Let’s keep the soil alive, let’s protect the soil’s biodiversity ”, This Saturday is a day designated by FAO “to focus attention on the importance of healthy soil and advocate for the sustainable management” of its resources.

This year, the FAO focuses on the capacity of soil biodiversity as a “natural solution to many of the challenges facing Humanity, from food production to water storage”, an approach that is already taken by different administrations and agri-food organizations and entities .

Green policy in the CAP

In the case of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), its future programming is part of the strategy of the European Green Agreement, in which soils “play a fundamental role in achieving the objective of a climate-neutral European Union (EU) by 2050” and the strategy “From farm to table”.

A field of rapeseed in Castilla y León. Photo: Efeagro / Mariam A. Montesinos

This is assured by community sources, who also recall that their policies consider, for example, “the reduction of 50% in the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and 20% in that of fertilizers, return at least 10% of the agricultural area to the characteristics of landscapes of high diversity and that 25% of agricultural land in the EU is cultivated organically ”. According to your data, soil degradation – in addition to erosion, desertification or pollution – it is also produced by “unbalanced fertilization, the excessive use of groundwater for irrigation, the improper use of pesticides, the use of heavy machinery or excessive grazing.”

In this sense, conservation agriculture appears as one of the sector’s tools to combat soil loss and degradation and whose three principles are the suppression of tillage, the presence of a vegetal cover and the rotation of crops.

Soils and conservation agriculture

The Spanish Association of Living Soils Conservation Agriculture (AEAC-SV) and the agrarian organization UPA, both participants in the Mosoex Operational Group, work to “analyze and identify the best practices to improve the state of agricultural soils”, by increasing the content of organic matter.
There are countless projects from all agri-food sectors focused on this objective, such as the “WeLaser”, in which the agrarian organization participates COAG and looking to replace weed chemicals using a high powered laser source.

10A young farmer in Spain. Efeagro / Julián Martín
Or the one developed by Tebrio, a biotechnology company that has developed a organic fertilizers from insects, which they claim increases the yield of the crop and improves the land, by accelerating “the exchange of available nutrients.”
The agrarian organization Asaja He asked Efeagro “Can you imagine a world without water or air, or that they were contaminated? Nobody can imagine that our world worked with these natural resources compromised or in precarious conditions, that is why it is increasingly supported by governments and institutions ”.
And he responds that, for this reason, they defend “the same treatment for another natural resource no less important, the soil” and the need to “protect the soil to avoid its loss” and that it is in optimal conditions, because if not “its productivity will be it will be compromised and the diet of the population could be in danger ”.
As farmers and ranchers reiterate, without the land they would not exist, but without them the land and the territory would not stay alives.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.