Bureaucracy in the countryside: their business?

When I started, almost thirty years ago, the bureaucratic burden we were subjected to was smaller and allowed me to combine the work of the land and livestock with that of paperwork. Things went reasonably well for me and the company grew and diversified at a manageable pace. My parents and my partner joined, and with them, the possibility of processing and directly selling our products. We were still a small farm, of course, but there was work for everyone and, as we worked under the precepts of the motto that has governed all farmhouses for centuries, we managed to get by.If you don't know which slogan I'm referring to, it's because you have never enjoyed the privilege of being part of such a well-oiled production unit as the family structures of farmhouses. There is no specialization or a very strict division of tasks because where one doesn't reach, the other does, labor rights do not exist because they are not needed and schedules, leaves, or contracts are extemporaneous formalisms that do not quite fit with the dynamics of a job that is still done as it was done before laws and the regulation of economic activities entered our dining room.There is no sense of sacrifice because things are simply done when they need to be done. The one who sets the pace is not a wicked master who takes advantage of our effort, nor are we slaves to the castrating demands of a control chain designed to nullify individual freedoms in favor of their productivity. If the flock needs to eat, it is not the master's fault, nor is it the endless work of the garden, nor that it will rain the day after tomorrow and I have to spend three nights sowing to take advantage of the remaining moisture.The conditions are self-imposed by us due to a kind of ingrained responsibility inherited from those who worked this land before us. All of this has made us practically the only self-sufficient collective in the First World. We only go to the supermarket to buy what we are unable to produce; the builder, the plumber, or the mechanic only enter the house when the breakdown escapes the skills of the family handymen; we empty the pantry when we are hungry and drink from the well when we are thirsty; we burn the wood from our forests and in the summer, if it's too hot to work, we get up a little earlier and at the peak of the day we take a short nap. It could be said that we have managed to keep open one of the few loopholes that allow escape from the reins of a turbocapitalist system that muddles everything.And the motto? Well, the motto is: “Together we will do everything!” Sounds good, right? Well, it's a lie.Over-regulation has made us slaves to this system as much as or more than any factory or office worker. Let's accept it, we have kept the sacrifices that our work entails but we have lost our autonomy.Record, document, communicate, accredit. Do you have the tag for the certified oats you sowed three years ago? We have detected that one of your animals does not match our data. Do you already have permission to cut the plants on this margin? Keep the recipes, register them. The satellite photos of your fields do not match what you declared. Show me the papers. You have a notification. The deadline is the day after tomorrow. Do you have the well declared with the ACA? DIB validation denied. Have you already done the DUN? Consult the GTR. We have overturned the DAN for you. Pay! Connect! Prove it! Kneel! Fold!

The boss doesn't command us, no, the administration commands us, which is worse and more relentless. And here comes the other part of the lie. While it is true that in a family business everyone does a bit of everything, this bureaucratic part that no one wants to do, generally, continues to be done by the same people as always. Now they are part of the company, yes, perhaps they are even partners, but we must admit that we have not known how to avoid the mistakes made by the rest of society in the incorporation of women into the world of work. There are exceptions and each house is a world, yes, I know, but what I want to say, generally speaking, is that perhaps it was not about turning the company's office into an extension of the home kitchen.I have already told them that, when I started, I only saw myself capable of achieving a little bit of everything; now not, now everything has changed a lot and too much. The difference between production costs and the selling price means that you have to have a considerable volume. Furthermore, the amount of paperwork we have to do is immense and it doesn't stop growing with every twitch of the system and, if there is no one in the company who can take care of it in a somewhat exclusive way, then you've had it. If we add to this that one of the weakest points of these types of companies is the inability to replace family labor with conventional labor, then we have the perfect recipe for making a dish of Catalan smallholding pickled goods.In short, it would be very long to explain, but now it's my turn to close the tent, to strike camp, to furl sails, to take off my flock and sell my tools, and, although a little reluctantly, I admit it to you, I am leaving this world that for so many years has been my life. I think I still feel enough of a farmer to take my share of the blame for having contributed to turning undesirable bureaucracy into something of theirs, into another of those bad excuses of "she takes care of it because she's better at it." You understand.