Agriculture and its effects on the economy while staying in your Spanish Holiday Rentals

You have long been a student of agriculture and its effects on the economy; this year when booking your SPANISH HOLIDAY RENTALS, you have chosen to study Spain. This is a country with a long history of agriculture which involves crops such as wheat, vegetables, barley, tomatoes, olives, sugar beets, citrus fruit, grapes and cork. To give you some idea of the crops importance on the world stage, Spain is the world’s largest producer of olives while being the largest producer of lemons, oranges and strawberries in Europe. The meats come from Andalucia including cattle, pigs and chickens but agriculture, in a lot of places, is redundant due to a number of reasons such as lack of machinery, little or no irrigation and soil exhausted over the centuries. This is because it was not allowed to lay fallow for any length of time or has suffered from erosion.

Spain has the largest area under cultivation in Europe, consisting of more than 29 million acres. Six percent of Spain’s work force is accounted for in agriculture while producing three percent of the country’s GDP. When you break it down to individual farms it becomes apparent that there are a lot of small farmers. There are 1,210,000 farms of which only four percent cover more than one hundred hectares. Just imagine these farms only average 21 hectares each: a typical cereal farmer has 40 hectares while the typical vegetable farmer has only six. Included in this, to make earning a living even harder, there are some 27 percent of farmers that are tenant land owners.

Spain is one of the major countries in the world. It is rated eighth as dedicated to ecological crops with 80 percent of its crops being exported, but there is only a one percent spent on organic produce in the country. Of all the agriculture in Spain it accounted for only about 2.7 percent of the Spanish economy, where as ten years ago it was 4.2 percent and five percent of the work force as compared with ten percent the same ten years in the past. With the average age of 55 years for a Spanish farmer, there has to be something done or there won’t be a new breed of farmers to take their places. The future of agriculture is fast heading towards growing grains and oilseeds for bio-fuels which would require one million hectares.

When you stop and look at Spain’s total land area and how it is split up as in 38 percent for crop production, 14 percent for animal grazing and 32 percent forest. That leaves only 16 percent for all other uses. Where does it come from?

This year when booking your SPANISH HOLIDAY RENTALS stop and give some thought to the organic farmer. Today they are better suited to face the problems inherent in organic farming, more so that their past counterparts. Today there are people out there ready and waiting to provide support. It is only reasonable that organic farming is the best alternative to conventional farming.