Fernanda Mateus, agroecological farmer and member of the BioEco association – Rabaças, Oleiros, Castelo Branco

Fernanda, the daughter of emigrants, was born in France and only had contact with agriculture when she moved to Portugal at the age of seven to live with her grandparents. Raised in a village where her grandmother was a farmer, she recalls that she had the opportunity to observe “all the agricultural work, still with a lot of ancestral knowledge. And, little by little, I fell in love with plants and animals, I fell in love with this country life, this rural life.”

After studying in the city of Castelo Branco, her passion for agriculture led her to opt for a degree in agronomy. She worked for many years as a technical adviser to farmers, focusing on integrated production and, later, organic farming. It was close to the age of 50, however, that she decided to change her life completely and become a farmer. She left the coast to reclaim her family’s land inland, more precisely in the village of Rabaças, in the municipality of Oleiros, between mountains.

She first moved to the outskirts of Castelo Branco, where her family lives, and it was there that she began to cultivate a small garden. However, her real dream was to move to the village. She cleared the land, planted trees and restored the existing house, facing challenges such as the great fire of 2020, which devastated part of the property. Today, she grows a wide variety of vegetables, has fruit trees and a traditional olive grove, all on small plots of land and on hilly terrain. She favours robust, local varieties.

Over the years, he has learnt about the various aspects of sustainable agriculture, such as organic, biodynamic, permaculture, natural farming and, more recently, syntropic farming. However, she has never been attached to any of them in particular. For Fernanda, sustainable agriculture is “agriculture that respects the land, respects the animals, respects the environment and, above all, respects people.” She is also in favour of recovering ancestral knowledge and local varieties, but regrets that “unfortunately, this is another issue that makes me very sad, because many varieties of plants from here have been lost, because new, more productive seeds have arrived and we’ve lost them.”

Regarding the difference between conventional and sustainable agriculture, Fernanda emphasises that the former is faster and requires less knowledge, while sustainable agriculture requires a search for balance, for example between pests and natural predators.”Respecting nature is fundamental,” she says. For Fernanda, sustainable agriculture is a form of love for the land, for the plants, for her ancestors and even for consumers, because “when I cultivate with quality, I’m respecting myself, the environment and those who are going to eat”.

Fernanda believes that agricultural work “is difficult, but for me it’s completely exciting.” She regrets the lack of appreciation for the work of small farmers and quality food. “As long as there is this mentality of quantity and beauty, sustainable agriculture will never really be valued,” she says, arguing that it is small-scale farming that really feeds the world.

She has never been prejudiced against as a woman, either as a technician or as a farmer. She highlights the spirit of mutual help she has found both in the city and in the village, where neighbours are always willing to help and share knowledge. She recognises that some jobs require physical strength, which can be a challenge for women.

Fernanda believes that much of the agricultural knowledge and traditional know-how has been forgotten, especially since the great migrations of the 1960s. “In the villages, it was mainly women who worked in the fields,” she says, adding that many of these women possessed not only agricultural knowledge, but also healing knowledge, like her grandmother, who “was the village midwife and healer.” However, she regrets that this knowledge has been lost over time, arguing that “our culture is not the culture of the city, of the big centre”, but rural culture, which is now in danger of disappearing.

With regard to agroecology and sustainable agriculture, Fernanda sees a stronger connection between women and this type of practice, explaining that “this type of agriculture is more emotional, it’s more sensitive and it’s more patient work that sometimes women, because of their history, end up being more attached to; and because men always have more chances to work outside, women don’t have as many chances. We’re talking about places where there aren’t that many jobs available, so it’s much easier for men to do something and not for women. Women often don’t find it so easy to work outside the home and so they dedicate themselves a little more to the small backyard they have and often look for this more ancestral knowledge.”

Her involvement in Bioeco, an association dedicated to agroecology and organic farming, has allowed her not only to sell her products through producers’ markets, but also to publicise and value this type of agriculture. “The association is able to have a broad voice, a greater voice of publicity,” she says. Bioeco also provides financial support to its members for certification. A few years ago, the association tried to commercialise its members’ products, but “it didn’t have any legs because we’re talking about voluntary work”. She argues that the success of local supply initiatives, such as school or hospital canteens with healthy food, requires funding and paid labour to support the grouping of small producers.

She criticises agricultural policy, questioning the need to pay for the certification of their products, while conventional agriculture doesn’t face this control. “I need to pay a certifier to certify my quality product and a farmer who applies chemicals indiscriminately, because they are not controlled, can sell without any control or without any certification. I can’t find any logic in this,” she says.

She believes that the subsidies favour large producers, ignoring small-scale farming and the differences between types of farming, especially on sloping land that is difficult to mechanise. “We’re talking about areas that should be valued in a different way and also value those who take old land and bring it back to life,” she concludes.