Smart Fish And Dubious Rice

One of the reasons for my visit to Spain this summer was to see a fish farm called Veta La Palma for myself. I discovered it through one of my all-time favourite TED videos by Chef Dan Barber entitled How I Fell In Love With A Fish. (Time Magazine also wrote an excellent article about the operation a couple of years ago)

Without reiterating too much of Chef Barber's excellent account, Veta La Palma is a sustainable fish farm in the mouth of the Guadalquivir river south of Sevilla in the Andalusia region of southwest Spain. Truthfully, calling it a sustainable fish farm is selling it short. Their vision is not to simply sustain nature's balance but to slightly and gently improve upon it where they can - all while supplying restaurants and markets with fish at a profit. In the words of my host at Veta, chief biologist Miguel Medialdea, "The point isn't to make use and conservation compatible. The point is to use in order to conserve."

Excellent stuff! I would never heap anything but huge piles of praise upon those responsible for Veta La Palma, including the benefactors of the farm, Hisparroz - the very large Spanish food conglomerate and world's largest packeted rice producer. That a huge corporation can and did create this fish farming masterpiece at a profit should be a wake-up call to supporters of our environmentally disastrous fish farms here in Canada and elsewhere.

That said, before I arrived at Veta La Palma, I drove through a perfectly flat, immaculate, brilliantly green landscape of rice fields for about 30 kilometers. In the middle of all of these wet fields sits at little town called Isla Mayor which, aside from a paper factory plus a little tourism, is a town built for and by this major rice-producing area. The contrast and contradiction to what is happening just downstream of Isla Mayor struck me immediately.

Isla Mayor

En route to Isla Mayor, the sky was busy with crop-dusting airplanes. At one point I spotted five of them airborne, busily spraying the rice fields. As I approached the town, one of the planes was just ending a spraying run ahead of me. I quickly closed the car vents yet still inhaled some of the chemical cloud moments later. I wondered what it was that I was smelling and why the plane's spotter on the ground waving a long white flag was completely encased in a white chemical suit on a 37°C summer day.

Then I entered Isla Mayor. I immediately noticed loads of signage for something called Viper. 

Dodge doesn't sell cars in this part of the world. Calgary's semi-pro baseball team certainly wasn't playing here. Could it be a heavy metal band on a summer tour? Then I saw a clue.

Of course. When nature looks more perfect than nature normally does, agro-science companies are often nearby. It's hard to find Viper on a non-Spanish google search. It appears that in North America this herbicide goes by the name of Clincher. I found it interesting that such a synthetic-chemical-enhanced environment lived next door and upstream to the spectacular Veta La Palma. Happily, Veta doesn't take-in the runoff of the rice business from the Guadalquivir but rather introduces water to its canal system at the bottom end of the estuary in the form of tidal flooding from the Atlantic ocean.

If Veta La Palma can naturally and profitably produce something as environmentally complicated as their 1,200 tons of marketable fish each year, and improve life for dozens of bird species and countless less-visible creatures along the way, can't we do the same for rice or any other crop for that matter? The pros, cons and contradictory studies of man-made agricultural chemicals is being hotly debated everywhere. Hasn't Veta La Palma proven that there is another, more natural way with less inherent risk?

I think so. I hope so.

Storks in a rice field