Part 2: 'Retinta' - Beef Production in Southern Spain

This blog post was inspired by an article in The Friedman Sprout titled ‘It's Not the Cow, it's the How’ which discussed sustainable beef production in the US. This article will explore beef production at a farm in southern Spain.

In the United States, beef is a controversial topic. From green-house gas emissions, to land use and loss of biodiversity, to water pollution and the use of antibiotics, the US has a lot more on its plate than just a hamburger when it comes to raising cattle.

Beef and meat in general are now commonly cited as major contributors to climate change. ‘Eat less meat’ not only promises a solution to heart disease, but also to greenhouse gas emissions.

But is there any way to sustainably produce beef in a way that won't contribute to climate change and cardiovascular disease? Or is the US struggling with a problem that Europe has already solved, or never created to begin with?

In the U.S, Juan's farm would likely be certified organic, and his beef labelled ‘grass-fed’ along with the added price tag that comes along with it. But in Spain, his way of raising cattle is not an anomaly but rather the norm, something far from the industrialized feedlots of the US.

I first met Juan outside of his house in a small town along the coast of Cádiz, Spain. Despite being well into his sixties, he stood on the roof of his house, laying down stalks of bamboo to cover his front porch. Various neighbors circled around, but made no objections to his actions, knowing that any attempt to convince him to come down would be futile. All they could do was standby and help in case of emergency. Juan’s rebellious attitude is rumored to have been even greater in his youth, the source of his nickname ‘Juan el Malo’ or Juan the bad. But today it serves as an ironic contrast to his good nature.

A local of the small beach town, Juan splits his time between the beach in the summer months and the neighboring town of Vejer during the winter. His family’s fields lie between the two, in an area that is rumored to have been a roman crossroads during the time Cádiz was known as ‘Gades’.

Within two minutes of arriving at his farm, Juan bent down to pick up a smooth square rock with various holes that ran through the center. He explained casually that it was once part of a roman loom, as if touching rocks the romans one held was a normal daily occurrence as I looked on in awe. Juan and his brother have a passion for the history of the area, likely due to the amount of artifacts they come across in their fields. Despite his vast archeological knowledge of the area, Juan studied geology before switching to a degree in agriculture.

Posed casually among their cows, Juan and his brother, chat leisurely in the great expanse of their fields. Both clad in white button downs, tan linen pants and straw sun hats and accompanied by knobby wooden walking sticks, they struck me as an image of farmers from another time.

Their tanned faces, a similar color to the coats of their 'retinta' cows (a breed of cows known for their red coats and superior beef quality), signaled the years they’ve both spent under the Andalusian sun maintaining the family business. Despite both being well into their sixties, neither brother showed signs of slowing down. The word ‘retirement’ seemed not to be in Juan’s vocabulary.

View of the 'rastrojo' or stubble left from the wheat harvest

Between the two of them, Juan and his brother manage fifty acres of fields and about sixty retinta cows. They cultivate a variety of crops, depending on the season and rotate the fields to ensure they are not stripped of nutrients. Having visited in August, I saw most of the fields full of sun-charred sunflower stalks or empty due to the recent wheat harvest. He explained that in the past, they cultivated wheat and sugar beet, but now they dedicate the summer harvest to wheat and sunflowers.

In the off season they allow the pasture to grow which the cows then graze in the fall and spring. depending on the status of the soil that year, they may also decide to plant a cover crop of fava beans to recuperate nutrients lost to the previous crop. This form of rotational planting ensures that the fields naturally recuperate nutrients and do not become depleted.

Not only does Juan rotate the crops in the fields but his cows are also ‘rotated’ After the wheat harvest, the cows comb the fields, eating the ends of the stalks and any pieces left in the field. When they still harvested sugar beet, the cows would do the same but with the tops of the beets left behind after harvest (although the round beet tops posed a choking hazard to the over-zealous cows).

If it is a dry year, the cows move to the low fields in the fall. In a normal year, they are moved to an olive-tree covered hill that lies on the eastern side of Juan’s fields. There they ‘clean’ the wild olive trees (locally known as acebuche) throughout the fall and winter. Juan prunes the trees and feeds the leafy branches to the cows.

The hill or ‘la muela’ as it is known provides the cows a covered area to pass the winter months, full of acebuche branches. In the spring the cows are moved again to the low fields and back to the main fields in the summer to eat the rastrojo or ‘stubble’ left over from the crops that year.

The day that I visited Juan’s farm, a calf had been born the night before. All the excitement had made the others anxious to move from the field they had been grazing to the one next door full of fresh, tall grass. Juan explained that they were down wind from the new field, and anxious to sample the new buffet. As he pulled the wooden stake out of the ground to open the gate, I was startled to find that the cows came running at us - we stood between them and breakfast. Juan took his walking stick and raised it above his head ‘¡ahhh, locas, estaís locas!’ he shouted between the fervent mooing. Despite being no taller than they were, seeing this, the cows diverted their path around us.

Juan's cows suffer very little sickness. He said that before Spain entered the European Union tuberculosis was a problem because there was no official register of infected cows and the selling of cattle between farms spread the disease. But now the most he has to worry about is a cow getting lost on 'la muela' during the winter or an eye infection caused by flies. But even this can be treated in just two days with antibiotics.

When asked his opinion on the industrialized model of cattle raising common in the United States, Juan shrugged and explained that in Spain, "this is what [they] have done for generations". Just as Juan and his brother invoke images of times past, so does the simplicity of the relationship between his cows and the land. The cows graze the fields, tilling and fertilizing the soil that will then feed them in the months to come. It is a sustainable system that relies only on itself. The quality of his retinta beef is a product not only of the cow's pedigree but also the way that they are raised in the fields of Andalusia.