Maria Costa (Berga, 1981) is proud to live and work in the countryside with her family. Her love for Berguedà, an extremely diverse and bountiful region that went through a deep crisis in the 1990s, has been a guiding force in her life. Having worked for a long time in museum-related projects around the world, she decided to return to her parents’ home in Cal Rosal, where, together with her partner Jordi Claramunt (Navàs, 1977), she started up L'Escairador. The seed of this business project was planted by Maria’s father, Josep Mestres, a determined former mining technician and farmer who had fond memories of the hulled grains that formed the basis of the most delicious dishes of his childhood. Josep’s desire to bring back recipes such as hulled corn stew, gruel with bacon rillettes, and forment (a variety of durum wheat) with rabbit and mushrooms became a 30-year hobby that involved resuscitating an old hulling mill and becoming an expert miller.

It wasn’t until 2017 that Maria and Jordi chose to turn Josep’s hobby into a profession, convinced of the need to prevent such a valuable heritage craft skill from being lost. However, if they were to embark on a project of this nature, they had to do it properly, and they had to ensure the sustainability of L’Escairador in every aspect of the business: economic, ecological and social. They currently cultivate around six hectares. Corn and forment wheat are the main crops, but some space is allocated for growing legumes that Maria’s father really likes, such as the Anoia chickpea. TThey’re committed to producing food with minimal processing, which they sell to the general public through their website. They also supply restaurants and small shops in Berguedà, Bages, Solsonès and Cerdanya. Despite covering many bases (producing, processing and selling their products), they still have time for some networking: Maria is a member of the Women of the Rural World Association.

A visit to Casa Ferrer is an opportunity to discover a classic self-sufficient farmhouse converted with great taste. Moreover, in order to reduce the visual impact of the construction, the couple removed polluting materials and undertook a renovation project to make the site energy efficient, as Maria explains on greeting us in the modern-style room that’s replaced the old hayloft. It’s decorated in different shades of grey and imbued with an aroma of wood and cereal grains. A Km0 Committed Producer plaque, awarded in 2019 by the Slow Food organisation, sits on a shelf. But this isn’t the only accolade received by L’Escairador, whose search for excellence in the primary sector has also been rewarded. Tradition, innovation and a love of the land have combined to create a truly distinctive project.

 

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Childhood experiences leave their mark. To what extent did they lead you to start up L’Escairador with Jordi a few decades later?

Growing up in the hamlet of Cal Rosal, in this very house, with my parents and grandparents, was an essential factor, because my childhood is full of the good memories you associate with living in a rural environment. Although my maternal grandparents, whom we lived with, weren’t professionally involved in farming, my paternal grandparents had a dairy farm and, before that, kept a flock of sheep. And my uncle and aunt managed a livestock farm. So the primary sector had a strong presence in my childhood.

 

«my childhood is full of the good memories you associate with living in a rural environment» Maria Costa

 

What images come to mind when you think about that time?
Living here was amazing, because our grandparents, who looked after us, always had us doing activities that allowed us to become familiar with the local environment, listen to the birds, daydream, play games... We might not have had many toys, but we had a wonderful time playing with stuff we had around the house. All of this has somehow stayed with me, even though life subsequently took me down other paths.

Mining was an extremely important activity in Berguedà in the 20th century and your family was directly involved in it.
Yes, my father was chief mechanic at the largest mine, Carbons de Berga, located in the village of Fígols. However, the region was hit by a severe economic crisis in the 1990s that led to the demise of the local textile industry, in which my mother worked, and to the closure of my father’s mine. He was made redundant at the age of 45. Although there was a redundancy package, I clearly remember both my parents losing their jobs when I was a child. But my father’s always been extremely active, so he carried on working as a mechanic, as well as coming up with inventions for farmers. What’s more, he decided to restore an old hulling mill, which became his hobby.

Tell us about the adventure of transporting the hulling mill to Casa Ferrer.
The ruined mill was located in Viver i Serrateix, the last village in the Baix Berguedà area. The millstones were all that remained of it, covered in mud from the stream, scrub and brambles. We bought the millstones and towed them here with a tractor. That’s a 20-kilometre journey, so it was a quite a spectacle! Once he’d brought the mill here, my father was able to develop the know-how he’d picked up from his father, who’d operated mills like this one.

Your father’s hobby would be turned into a professional farming project years later. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves… What were you doing at that time?
I decided to move away from home to study. The family farm was small and self-sustaining at that time, but thanks to the redundancy packages they received, my parents were able to adapt the farm to obtain regular additional income from their farming activity. Nevertheless, there were quite a few of us on the farm – three children, parents and grandparents – and the message drummed home by my parents was that the region was dead. “Go and study, and then earn a living wherever you can,” they’d tell us. So we children moved to Barcelona to study and ended up staying there! I decided to study communication and show production and then found a good job. But there was always something pulling me back home at the weekends, and my life ended up being split between two places. I then worked for a company devoted to cultural and museum-related projects, and there came a point when just coming home to sleep was no longer enough for me. Berguedà is a wonderful region, with a high quality of life: there’s plenty to do within a very small radius and you can live very well here. However, it’s one thing to live here but quite another to work and make a good living here. Since my dream was to stay here, I had to find a way to make it possible.

According to the 'Lands that Feed Us' report, of the 12 counties in the province of Barcelona, Berguedà is the one with the greatest capacity to feed its citizens with locally produced food. How did you and your partner decide to embark on a business project in the primary sector?
My father was obsessed with traditional varieties of grains and legumes, because he likes good food and admires the know-how and particularities he became familiar with as a child. Without realising it, he’s a super-environmentalist who’s always prioritised quality over quantity, and who wants to do things in the most environmentally friendly way. What’s more, he thinks we should take care of the food we grow, as we’ll end up eating it and we don’t want to poison ourselves! His approach to life and way of thinking influenced us a lot, and that’s how our project was born. It’s was more an unconscious and romantic decision than anything else…

When did you launch the business?
In 2017, several elements fell into place and the time was right for me and my partner Jordi to embark on a project that – importantly for us – had to be sustainable in every way, not only in environmental terms but also from an economic perspective: we couldn’t allow it to be a bottomless pit. We saw that my parents were getting older and that the self-sustaining activity of the farm had been reduced to the bare minimum. Although the farm is small, it was getting a bit too big for them. In addition, we wished to promote the healthiest grain varieties, along with the hulling technique, which is the hull removal method that best preserves the nutritional and organoleptic properties of Gramineae crops.

Urban consumers often have little information about the nutritional qualities of different grains and, for example, we don’t know how the bread we eat every day is made. What are the benefits of hulling grain the traditional way?
The advantage of this hulling method is that the grain is preserved intact. We remove the outer, indigestible husk and leave the germ – the potential future plant – and the entire endosperm, which surrounds the germ and holds carbohydrates, which are the sugars the plant needs in order to grow before it has roots through which to acquire nutrients from the soil. This hulling process removes the indigestible outer layer (excess chaff or bran) while preserving the grain in its entirety. Modern systems produce refined grain, milled so finely that the endosperm and bran are removed. What you’re left with are the white grains, which are purely carbohydrates.

So you had your goal in mind and you needed to put flesh on the bones of the project. Where did you start?
First we put together a business plan in which we vested a lot of hope, because it was clear that the numbers had to add up. And here we are. The numbers do add up for us, but we’ve realised that not everything is as romantic as we first thought. Perhaps it would have been better for us to lease a building on an industrial estate, rather than trying to refurbish various spaces of the house, which are small and where machinery doesn’t easily fit. But we wanted to implement the philosophy of giving the farm a second life, because this county is full of industrial corpses, with a great many industrial complexes in ruins. We didn’t want this to happen to our house and we thought we could contribute to turning the situation around, albeit on a small scale. So that’s why we decided to refurbish these agricultural storage buildings, the small farm, and carry out our activity here, at home.

Having made this decision, you decided to adopt sustainability criteria in the refurbishment of Casa Ferrer.
Yes, in 2017 we decided to fix everything and remove polluting materials, because fibre cement had been used. Our goal with the renovation was to create a more energy-efficient structure, reducing consumption to a minimum. To avoid visual impact, we used wood or grey plaster that blended in well with the rock behind the wall. What’s more, we created a green roof and installed solar panels. We also use wood pellets or biomass fuel pellets for heating and we have a heat pump. We’ve tried to be sustainable in every way.

Generational renewal in farming is one of the sector’s main concerns. What would you say to someone who wants to start an agricultural project involving the production and sale of grain?
We tend to idealise the primary sector but it’s far from rosy. We had one basic element in place when we started out (the land), but we had to make a significant investment to refurbish the house and the mill. Farming has been subsidised for years and it’s entered a vicious circle. The produce being pulled out of the earth is priced below its true cost, and consumers often choose to buy very low-quality products, either grown here or imported from the other side of the world. The point is that if someone wants to start a profitable grain business, they need to have hundreds of hectares available, because it’s a volume-based business and you get paid for grain in euro cents. Over the last year and a half, with the war in Ukraine, the price of grain has gone up, but the increase hasn’t been spectacular. What’s more, prices had been frozen for the preceding 20-odd years. In our case, we grow grain for human consumption, it’s our raw material, and we try to control the entire value chain.
 

«With the war in Ukraine, the price of grain has gone up, but the increase hasn’t been spectacular. What’s more, prices had been frozen for the preceding 20-odd years» Maria Costa

 

Public bodies are promoting initiatives such as land banks and agrarian testing spaces with the goal of facilitating access to land. Do you think they’re useful tools for fostering generational renewal in farming or for encouraging urbanites to embark on projects in the primary sector?

I coordinate projects as a member of the Women of the Rural World Association and we often focus on how best to repopulate the rural environment. I feel that perhaps we should start by attempting to prevent it from becoming even more depopulated! I think the first commitment should be to the people who already live here and wish to keep their farming activity going. With prices the way they are, I reckon it’s more feasible for generational renewal to occur from within the sector itself. Having said that, there are also families in which no one wants to take over the reins, so they obviously have to search for an alternative solution. Sometimes a farm is worthless, but it’s an expensive undertaking if you have to buy it. And when you start from scratch, where do you find that kind of capital? There won’t be any investors or business angels ready to pump money in. We have an agricultural system in which there’s little input from the people who do the actual farming. With L’Escairador, we felt that the only way to have any kind of future was to implement a project in which we had full control of the value chain.

 

«The first commitment should be to the people who already live here and wish to keep their farming activity going» Maria Costa

 

The agrifood industry doesn’t listen enough to the voice of farmers. How would you turn this situation around?
Well, campaigning for the system to change, but it’s so slow! When I first came into contact with members of Women of the Rural World, I believed that everything was possible, that changes were feasible. In my previous career, I’d had occasional dealings with the public authorities: doing my tax return, requesting a permit, etc. But in the primary sector everything goes through the public authorities and the system works extremely poorly: there’s nothing quick and easy about red tape. And one thing I detest is the funding system of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Some sort of system has to be in place, of course, but this funding doesn’t reach our project.

L’Escairador has been rewarded for its good work: in 2019 you were awarded the Km0 Committed Producer seal and in 2020 you picked up an Award for Innovation in Agrifood Technology (PITA).

The Slow Food organisation asks restaurant businesses that share a set of values to propose agrifood producers who they find interesting and who embrace the organisation’s “Good, Clean and Fair” philosophy. So it’s always really nice to receive these little accolades.

Your commitment to the production and preparation of fair, healthy and sustainable food is clear to see. But are you implementing any actions to influence the purchasing habits and diet of consumers in your area?

We’re striving to promote recipes with a modern twist for the restaurant sector and our end customers. People tend to associate grains and legumes with winter stews. Changing consumer habits is a huge challenge to take on, especially for small-scale producers like us. But we’re fortunate to have a good customer base in terms of restaurants and small local shops, and we also sell direct to consumers, so we’re happy with the balance we’ve achieved. We’re also very pleased to share the goals of the Slow Food organisation.

Do you feel proud of what you do at L’Escairador?
Yes, I’m really happy at this stage of my life. Although life was tough for several years, now I feel extremely proud of the professional and life path I’ve followed. If I could go back and start again, what I know for sure is that I wouldn’t suffer so much and I that I’d try to approach life differently, to enjoy it more.

What was the source of your labour strife before you changed your life and became a farmer?
In my previous career I always tried to do my job to the best of my ability, but I had a lot of responsibility and I often found myself far from central office and in very different cultural settings. In Saudi Arabia, for example, I had to be accompanied by an interpreter to some meetings, not because I couldn’t make myself understood in English, but rather because, as a woman, I wasn’t allowed to directly address the clients, who were men. I was able to handle this particular situation well because my company supported me and was clear that I had to lead that project. But I was responsible for these big projects with millions of euros at stake, and I did find that aspect stressful. I approached the job as if my life depended on it, until one day I said to myself: “Gosh! We’re hardly saving the planet here!” It wasn’t as if we were performing open-heart surgery and, moreover, the projects I was working on were extremely unsustainable...

How did you experience the transition from constantly travelling for work to a professional commitment so deeply rooted in your corner of the world?
Extremely well! Nowadays, working as a farmer, I have a lot of inner peace. I have to keep driving the project forward here, of course, because the business doesn’t run itself and I always have push myself a bit, setting myself goals and deadlines. But I manage stress very differently now.

Your previous job was in the field of cultural heritage, and in this new stage of your career you’ve chosen to promote traditional cultural knowledge. Are you aware of this continuity?
Of course! L’Escairador is contributing in its own small way to reviving agrifood heritage, which sometimes isn’t seen as culture but actually forms the basis of many things.

 

«L’Escairador is contributing in its own small way to reviving agrifood heritage, which sometimes isn’t seen as culture» Maria Costa

 

With the perspective that the years provide, what does living the good life mean for you?
It has to do with being able to enjoy my family in my corner of the world. Being able to live with my parents, so that they can grow old at home and still feel useful. I find it very cruel to be told you’re no longer fit to work at 65, the usual retirement age. In the case of my parents, it happened even earlier: my father was 45 and my mother a little younger. My mother left her job at the factory because they were already reducing staff and she saw the situation she had at home, with three children, her parents and all the work to be done on the farm... She chose to register as a self-employed farmer, in order to continue contributing to the social security system and be entitled to a pension in the future. They had a vegetable garden and the rabbit farm, but it was such as a small-scale operation that it only generated enough income to pay her social security contribution, with a little bit of cash left over for this and that. The experiences of my childhood and youth have taught me the crucial importance of the community.

 

— BCN Smart Rural Editorial —