La Junquera has been in quarantine for the last month but this has not stopped us from being active with our projects. Now more than ever it is important to diversify our farming practices as we see all over Europe that it is hard for farmers to keep their heads above water as supply chains are challenged, tourists have disappeared and education has come to a halt. On our farm we are lucky to be able to continue [...]
How to welcome the return of spring, the season of flowers, the days when nature is reborn and the days get longer, animals and insects come to life in their loving dances in the midst of this unprecedented era? When we are all asked to stay at home, not to go out, to not meet each other, as a gesture of social responsibility? The desire for authentic relationships knows no boundaries, we are rediscovering it between a streaming [...]
We didn’t get to see much sun in Belgium, these last few days. Days are gray and dark – the shortest days of the year. Therefore, it might be the quietest time of the year on our farm. However, it hasn’t really been cold yet... This means that actually we are working constantly: different types of cabbages can still be found on our fields (red ones, white ones, savoy, curled ones, Chinese cabbage and even cauliflowers). In the [...]
The multifunctional farm can take on an educational and social role by proposing a special pedagogy linked to human and nature relations in the various contexts of the rural territory. The Didactic Masseria thus becomes a school of outdoor ecology and active rural pedagogy, which offers experiences of agricultural life in a real traditional farm, with sowing, composting, hoeing, collecting vegetables and medicinal herbs, harvesting, threshing, in an embedded ecosystem-farm making use and working with animals. The Didactic [...]
I am Evi Van Camp from the eTOMATO partner GEBROEDERS VERCAMMEN. As a farmer, I visited a lot of places throughout the years. All of them shared one major concern: how does agriculture contribute to climate change? Opinions were often divided, so time for some fact-checking. Media has recently stated that the CO2 emission of the steel & mining company Arcelor Mittal is higher than the entire emissions from the agricultural sector. The ongoing discussion of mitigating livestock [...]
Part of multifunctional agriculture is didactical agriculture, sharing knowledge with others. At La Junquera we do that through the Regeneration Academy, which regularly hosts workshops on farming and rural entrepreneurship. In the second edition of the Rural Entrepreneurship Course we introduced one of the most interesting topics for the participants and in many cases more difficult for them to develop: marketing and sales. The objective of this session was that at the end the entrepreneurs would have an understanding [...]
The idea of Masseria Redenta within the eTOMATO project is to make encountering different worlds, i.e. the academic and the agricultural entrepreneurial. We want to link those with by providing, in the multi-factorial dimension in agriculture, the possibility of improving the management of it through dissemination and collaborative actions, so as to make agricultural realities more and more competitive and perform better. The goal for Masseria is to make known the primary activity and the cycle of cultures [...]
At the beginning of spring 2019 our farm farm started participating at the local and national farmers markets to distribute our production. We are part of an organisation for Bulgarian organic products and the foundation Bioselena. The foundation Bioselena has a special project for popularisation of Bulgarian products on the market and are organising regular farmers markets in the capital as well as regional famers markets throughout the country. The name of the project of the project is [...]
Unless you live on a remote island, or indeed on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you certainly have heard about the incredible boat journey the young activist Greta Thunberg undertook to cross the Atlantic and cover, in an very unusual and environmentally friendly way, the distance separating her house in Sweden from New York, the location where the UN Climate Action Summit has been held in September 2019. Last Monday, September 23rd, Greta has held [...]
One of the ways La Junquera farm is working on becoming more multifunctional and diverse is by attracting different agro-entrepreneurs. Together with these entrepreneurs we are trying to find ways to involve more business opportunities on our farm and beyond. One of these efforts is sustainable beekeeping which has much added value to the farm, the yields, natural areas, biodiversity and an ever-shrinking bee population in the area andon a global scale. We work together with Agrolavia, a [...]