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!

To make a good squirrel rice dish, the squirrel is caught and skinned, taking care to remove any hair embedded in the meat by the shotgun pellets. The tail can be used up to the second or third knot. The head, once skinned and cut into pieces, is added with the other pieces, and the liver is reserved to cushion the bite. Once skinned, the squirrel is opened along the belly, slid open, and washed under running water. It is then quartered and browned with the wood pigeon and the rib of the guinea fowl.

–Hello, my name is Jordi and I have a question.I saw that your hotel allows pets, right? Pet friendly, it says on the website.

I come from a family of small farmers, charbonniers and rabassaires. This activity, in fact, is what allowed my great-great-grandparents to buy this small property, rebuild a house from the four remaining stones, and make progress, or at least survive.

It's 5:30 in the morning, I make a coffee with milk, grab my backpack and walking stick, and open the corral gate to go graze before the sun and heat drive us out of the newly planted stubble.