Where oranges even grow on streets!

Valencia i / DPA

When winter descends on Europe, Valencia’s famous oranges appear in supermarkets everywhere.
While many are cheap, Spaniard Gonzalo Urculo advises orange-lovers to be on their guard.
“The really cheap ones don’t taste of anything, they’re neither sweet nor juicy,” he says.
Six years ago, together with his older brother Gabriel, the 30-year-old took over his grandfather’s orange plantation in Valencia, southeastern Spain, which had previously been left abandoned since 2000.
“The majority of oranges that you get in Germany (most of which come from Valencia) are treated with the plant hormone ethylene to ripen them, but that also accelerates the ageing process,” Urcolo, who studied economics, tells a German. But because of so many middlemen, they often don’t end up in the shops until a month after they’ve been picked.
As far as the eye can see in Betera, around 25 kilometres north-west of the city of Valencia, there are rows and rows of citrus fruit plants; oranges, clementines, lemons, grapefruit.
Whereas on many plantations the trees grow very closely together, on Urculo’s 25-hectare plantation they are up to six metres apart.
“That’s the only way they get enough sun,” he says proudly.
His considerably older neighbours however make so secret of the fact that they’re going for quantity rather than quality.
Valencia oranges have been served on the tables of Europe for centuries, but orchard-gate prices have been gradually sinking. Valencia’s agricultural association “Unio de Llauradors” says that prices have fallen a further 30 per cent this season. A long drought which has driven up production costs and the worst storm since 2007 at the end of November, which caused 15 million dollars worth of damage, has caused citrus farmers further headaches.
That’s why it’s even more upsetting for them when citrus fruits from South Africa and Morocco end up in the shops of Valencia – a region where oranges even grow on the streets.
EU free trade agreements make that possible and Unio recently announced a protest against the government in Madrid for not doing enough in Brussels to help protect Spanish farmers.
Most of Valencia’s ageing farmers only continue working their usually family-run plantations because they have no alternative. And, as Urcolo says, because they don’t count their working hours.
They keep going until they’re no longer able, and then the orchard is often left to its own devices. According to figures from the regional government, the amount of land in citrus cultivation shrank by 1,650 hectares in 2015, following previous decreases in the preceding years of up to 8 per cent.
Citrus fruits, which with a harvest of 3 million tons a year make up almost half of the region’s agricultural production, are only being grown on 95,000 hectares. The Unio has been warning for years about a “brown carpet” spreading over the autonomous region.
The aridity will have environmental consequences. The plantations helped prevent erosion and desertification as well as acting as a barrier to wildfires, which are on the increase.
But the farmers’ children often don’t want to work the punishing hours that their parents did for little money, and often they’ve already moved to the cities.
That was the case with the Urculo brothers. They were living in Madrid in 2010 when their grandfather died and their parents gave them an ultimatum: “If you don’t do anything with it, we’re selling your grandfather’s estate!”
The brothers, who have two more siblings, took on the farm “for sentimental and idealistic” reasons, but soon regretted it. Even by selling untreated oranges direct, they still made losses.
Finally, at the end of 2015, they hit on the idea of “crowd-farming.”
Around 2,000 customers from 15 countries across Europe have “adopted” one or several new plants. They pay 80 euros (85 dollars) the first year, and 60 euros from year two.
That gives them the right to the estimated crop of 80 kilograms for the year. They can also “adopt” a family of bees.
The oranges, clementines, honey and olive oil can be picked up or posted to their adoptive owners. Urculo’s elderly neighbours, who had predicted he would quickly go bankrupt, “are becoming more and more curious,” he says with a grin.