The ReSEED Project’s research travels along a path that unfolds over several centuries, backwards but also forwards. What we see in the 21st century is its last stretch. We are facing the result of how historical processes, scientific advances, economic interests, among other factors, have configured agrobiodiversity and agrarian systems. So far.

It is a project that goes back centuries to better understand the present: the landscapes; what we cultivate; what we eat. It also aims, in a context where the genetic variety of what we eat is threatened, putting food sovereignty itself at risk, to understand what can still be recovered, and which seeds used in the past or still used locally can help us keep biodiversity.

When it comes to the recent past or present, there is a key source, a living one, indispensable due to the wisdom and experience they have: people. It is crucial to understand farmers’ practices and perceptions of changes over their lifetime. In the Iberian Peninsula, the memory of many elders can still provide useful knowledge of a time before the Green Revolution, when practices were very different from today. What they tell us is also a chronicle of how their parents or grandparents worked. We are dealing with intergenerational ancestral knowledge. In addition, oral testimonies are an excellent way to obtain information that, for a variety of reasons, has not been recorded in written documentation. For all these reasons, the priority of our last year of research has been fieldwork. After looking for past farmers in historical documents, we celebrate the 4th anniversary of the ReSEED Project highlighting our connection with the current ones.

Researcher Alberto G. Remuiñán interviews Begoña Troncoso, winegrower and farmer, in Arbo (Galicia, Spain). April, 2022.

Preparation

As the research progressed through the analysis of the various sources, it became clearer where case studies should be carried out, in other words, the fieldwork areas. The North of Portugal, specifically the region of Minho, and the Spanish province of Galicia formed one of these areas. The other one we started to explore is also a border zone, including the Tras-os-Montes Portuguese region and Castille-Leon in Spain.

Once determined the areas, we can find people to be interviewed through previous contacts to universities, farmers’ associations and local authorities, or by chatting directly in loco. It is important to do a previous effort of planning, although serendipity keeps being an important element in the fieldwork dynamics.  

We had to wait, though. In the original plan, we would have started the fieldwork in 2021. Due to the pandemic, the first kilometres were covered only in March 2022. Although we waited until the situation was considerably better in both countries, it is still a context where informants are opening their doors to strangers who might be carriers of the disease. In one or two cases this was an obstacle, but fortunately not in general.

Mr. Sebastião Martins, an old farmer, and his daughter, Lúcia Martins, also a part-time farmer, in a small village in Bragança (North of Portugal), talking about wheat and rye production since mid-twentieth century. April, 2022.

The border factor

Both case studies so far in progress involve the Portuguese-Spanish border. Are there remarkable differences in the fieldwork due to this factor?

The researchers did not find significant differences in the treatment, access or courtesy. At first glance, the similarities between both sides of the border prevail. Further dimensions require proximity, to get to the details. For this, it is essential to “go there” and be with the people “from there”. Being an Iberian project, the ReSEED team has members fluent in different national and regional languages, which proved to be very helpful. It is also important to better understand the meanings of specific local vocabulary.

People, a special source

Local agricultural knowledge is often ignored, although it is precisely the farmers who best know the agrarian systems thanks to their experience. This knowledge has allowed them to use the land sustainably for centuries. In the current situation, fieldwork is an important tool to try to collect it, learn about it and conserve it. We get knowledge about practices, times and ways in which specific seed varieties arrived in a certain region and the reasons why people whether preferred those varieties or not. 

There is also the meaningful possibility of dialogue. Researchers can ask for further details and adjust the next questions according to the answers obtained beforehand. In written documentation, there is no dynamic interaction and questions remain unanswered, at least until more data is found.

In Ungilde (Castilla-León, Spain), a group of retired farmers plows a piece of land. Here some of the practices of the last century in farming are still in use. May, 2022.

In those regions of the Iberian Peninsula, until the mid-twentieth century, traditional agricultural activities were predominant, being based on knowledge, objects and practices. They have been disappearing with the structural economic changes in the following decades. As farmers or rural workers, the women and men whom we met during the fieldwork express a kind of long memory built on ways of life prior to these changes.

In some cases, the experiences and knowledge captured during the fieldwork were linked with information collected in documents produced 200 or 300 years ago. Crossing data from different sources helps to frame the dynamics of agriculture and food in the long term, allowing us to understand the roots of the current challenges.