‘Green gold’: Spanish farmers ditch olives for pistachios in bid to survive
They’re calling it green gold, the cash crop that could rescue one of Spain’s poorest regions from decline and depopulation as farmers plough up wheatfields and vineyards and replant them with pistachios.
With farmers earning between 65 and 85 cents for each kilo of olives they produce, and around 65 cents for grapes, pistachios, which fetch €6-8 a kilo, are in a different league.
“I used to farm cereals, olives and vines but I’ve abandoned them all in order to grow pistachios,” says Gustavo Adolfo Gálvez, who has a pistachio plantation near Toledo in Castilla-La Mancha in central Spain.
“[They are] a lot more profitable and cheap to produce, and it’s meant a lot more farmers can survive.”
In 1986, the Castilla-La Mancha regional government set up a research project to look for alternative crops its farmers could grow, says José Francisco Couceiro López of the regional institute for agricultural research and development.
“We spent the next 10 years researching alternative crops to the three or four that are already grown here,” Couceiro López says. “Once we moved from theory to practice, we discarded practically all the options aside from pistachio. The pistachio almost magically suits the climate in Castilla-La Mancha. It can withstand the heat and the cold, and it can thrive in poor, shallow soil.”
The next stage, he says, was to educate farmers through a series of courses and open days. In 2013, Couceiro Lópezco-wrote a book on pistachio growing that has become a bestseller in Spain and Latin America. “The biggest handicap is that farmers who plant pistachios have to wait at least seven years before their first decent harvest,” he says, though clearly many are convinced it’s worth the wait, especially as demand continues to
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