Small Farms in Portugal

Our pilgrimage to Compostella was just that - a pilgrimage, a long journey undertaken for spiritual reasons. Lots of other goods were layered into that goal, though. Deepened fellowship with close friends was one fruit. Turning our farm over to family for three weeks also produced extraordinary fruit! We’ll probably share about those. But what we’re really anxious to share right away is the kind of farming we observed from Mosteiro to Valenca, last stop before we entered Galicia. If you want to see grass management on a very small scale, this is it.

Tiny, stone-walled paddocks of less than half an acre, often much less, extend out from cobbled roads just wide enough for two people carrying backpacks to walk abreast (we saw few cars). Grapes are cultivated on ‘L’-shaped trellises alongside the paddocks; mostly leafless in December, the vines would obviously create a shaded border in the growing season. Where the land is cared for, the forage is a thick, almost knee-deep bed of orchard grass and some copiously abundant cruciferous weed I couldn’t identify, plus lots of familiar weeds. Where no care is taken, brambles, bracken, and gorse form a dense, impenetrable blanket that smothers everything else.

Few or no animals were to be seen, just a handful of sheep here and there - two or three ewes with lambs - mostly in vineyards, where presumably (but not obviously) they help keep the undergrowth in check. Cows exist but are seldom visible. We saw one confinement dairy with two groups of (we would estimate) about 40 cows each; otherwise, most bovine sightings consisted of one or two cows of an apparently dual-purpose breed. Here’s the really exciting part - the Portuguese subsistence farmers are ‘soiling’ their cows (bringing them fresh-cut forage on a daily basis). More of this to come.