Once again I must apologise for my absence from this medium for the last couple of weeks. I've been away in Spain leading a party of Farmers Weekly readers on a study tour of agriculture and horticulture. It's well over twenty years since I travelled through some of the same areas. Last time was as the country was joining the European Union in 1984 and both the national economy and the farming are noticeably more prosperous. EU membership has done Spain no harm at all.
But if my recent experience is any guide internet technology has not kept pace. We stayed in four different 4star hotels across the south of Spain from Murcia to Seville and I was unsuccessful at plugging into FWi in all of them. I know I'm not the sharpest tack in the box when it comes to computers but at one stage had three hotel technicians around me trying to get me hooked up and they failed. They eventually shrugged their shoulders in the characteristic way that Spaniards do and said "Sorry, we 'ave a problem with the system. Maybe it will work tomorrow or the next day". So, I lugged my laptop all round Spain and still couldn't contribute a blog or two. But I did try.
I'll write more detail on what we saw in FW but the lasting impression I gained was that Spain has used its free sunlight to develop and expand the production of fruit and vegetable crops that either can't be produced in northern Europe or cost much more in energy terms to do so. As in the UK they are employing huge numbers of immigrants, from Morocco as well as Poland, Romania and so on, to act as labourers.
On the rolling plains of Andalucia there also seem to be a lot more olive trees than there were, some of them planted within the last two to three years. Given that olives will produce for a hundred years the growers have rather committed themselves. And we wondered if they had planted these new trees because the price of wheat (the other dominant crop in the area) was low when they did so and might now be regretting it.
But the biggest problem Spanish farmers and horticulturalists appear to face is shortage of water. The upsurge in vegetable growing in particular, whether protected or in the open, demands frequent irrigation and there are clear tensions over water rights. De-salination, an energy hungry and expensive way to get water, is already being widely used to supplement supplies channeled from the northern half of Spain down to the south coast where much of the horticulture takes place.
Yet another illustration, the FW Party thought, of the danger of taking food supplies for granted. I will expand on some of these points in the magazine. Meanwhile, its good to be back on line.