COMMUNITY
Organic farming past and future
BY TRACY BURTON
After four decades of neglect and decay, a dilapidated, ivy-smothered convent has been given a new lease of life. The transformation from ruin to Convent’bio – an ambitious organic farming project – is down to the passion and determination of a small team, led by agricultural engineer and bio enthusiast Fátima Baiona.
birds on it. The fruit is so fresh. If you export, you have to pick the blueberries earlier. Here, we pick them at the stage where they have more sugars in them and there’s a lot of juice.”
After losing her previous project to fire in 2016, she was encouraged to take a look at the decaying convent by local businessman José Vitorino Pina (who now owns it).
The back-breaking work is paying off and the fields once irrigated by the monks are again producing fresh fruit and vegetables for local people. There are two hectares each of asparagus and avocados and row after row of coriander, red cabbage, spring onions, kale, celery and onions. Strawberries and cherry tomatoes are grown undercover.
“He told me, ‘I have the perfect project for you. Come and see it'," she recalls. “So, I came and when I saw the old convent, I fell in love. Convents were usually built where the land was fertile, so our soil is naturally good. And the land had been left many years without being farmed so it was very green.” From the outset, she was determined everything grown at Convent’bio and sold in the shop would be 100% organic. But before anyone could plant or sell a single vegetable, there was a lot of hard work to do. The convent was founded just outside Lagoa in 1551 by the Carmelitas Calçados d 'Alagoa; however, it was abandoned after being seriously damaged in the 1722 and 1755 earthquakes. The long-neglected fields had not been farmed for over forty years, so while a construction team focused on the restoration of the buildings, Fátima set about clearing the land. An unexpected bonus was the discovery of a centuryold blueberry tree, which had all but vanished in the undergrowth. “Her beauty had disappeared, but we didn’t want to cut her down because she was in production and we don’t often see blueberry trees in Portugal. Now, when it has all the leaves and the berries, it’s really something. You can see so many
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Fátima is keen for people to learn more about the benefits of organic farming. One misconception, she explains, is that all bugs are bad and need to be eliminated. Pesticides might kill the insects you don’t want, she explains, but they also kill those which are beneficial to plants. “People think ‘oh there’s a bug, let’s spray it’ but many of them are helping us,” she says. “Ladybirds, for example, are angels sent for agriculture. I had a plague on the asparagus, but I had so many ladybirds I didn’t have to apply anything, they sorted it for me. Most of the time, nature does all the work, we don’t have to do anything. I used to say we don’t have three people working on the land we have millions because they are helping us.”
