WHEN it came time for Ainhoa álava to take over her family’s cattle business in Spain, she decided to go in a greener direction. In 2006, at age 30, she launched the country’s first environmentally friendly snail farm. The venture didn’t last long — álava quickly got tired of the long, quiet winters when the creatures would hide away in their shells — but her commitment to sustainable agriculture stuck. She began raising chickens for their eggs, giving them plenty of space to run around and keeping them off antibiotics. At the time, álava’s approach was relatively rare. People in the Basque city of Urdu?a, where she lives, were skeptical when her 3,000 chickens started laying expensive organic eggs. “There were distributors who would pat me on the back as if to say ‘Let’s see how long you last!’” she said. So álava took to marketing her produce directly to nearby businesses, pushing a shopping cart full of eggs from shop to shop until she found enough partners. “Today I have clients I can’t serve because I’ve sold out,” she said. Free-range eggs are no longer a novelty in Europe, but sustainable farming practices still haven’t been widely adopted. That’s why, as part of its plan to zero out planet-warming emissions by 2050, European Union policymakers have proposed Farm to Fork, a plan to halve the use of pesticides and antibiotics and make a quarter of all farming organic by the end of the decade. Reaching those targets will require grooming a new generation of farmers willing to put the health of their livestock — and the planet — first. álava’s success was possible in part because she had access to her parents’ land and state-of-the-art machinery. It’s much harder for young people with fewer resources to break into the business. In Europe, a direct payment program known as the Common Agricultural Policy has kept farmers afloat for decades. The problem, according to Alan Matthews, an economist at Trinity College Dublin, is that the subsidies have discouraged older farmers from retiring and slowed the reallocation of land to younger generations. “I’m not simply saying the only problem is too many older farmers, but that’s certainly the big elephant in the room,” he said. Farm to Fork strategy is a good first step, he said, but the real problem is the large companies. “If you want European agriculture to be more environmentally friendly, the trick is to get the big guys to change their practices.”(SD-Agencies) | 