When we talk about agriculture, we think of the product: the leaf, the flower, the vegetable that arrives intact on the plate of a demanding chef. We rarely think of who put their hands on it.

We do. Every day.

Farm work is done early, in the cold, in the heat, on your knees. It is physical, repetitive, demanding and, contrary to what many people imagine, increasingly technical: sowing, irrigation, pest control, harvesting at the right moment, packing, cold chain, logistics.

And the people doing it have changed. According to the CAP (Portuguese Farmers' Confederation), around 40% of employees in the sector are foreign. On the side of those who run the farms, the picture is different: the average age of producers is around 65 and fewer than 4% of managers are under 40.

Producers getting older, hands increasingly coming from abroad. This is not opinion, it's numbers.

And then there is the other question, perhaps the most uncomfortable one: how much is this work worth?

In 2023, Portuguese agriculture generated about 3.4 billion euros in added value. It feeds us, it exports and it keeps whole territories alive that, without it, would be just landscape without people. It is fundamental for the country, for the economy and for thousands of companies that depend every day on what happens in the fields.

But the value of something and what we are willing to pay for it are not always the same thing.

And for those who work there? The minimum wage is now 920 euros gross and the sector's average pay has risen by about 50% in a decade. It is real progress and it is fair to acknowledge it. But "average" is a soft word for hard things: seasonality, short contracts and the uncertainty of never quite knowing what comes next.

It is very easy to say that "there are no people to work". But perhaps the right question is: what kind of work are we offering?

There are fewer young people. The population is ageing. Those who are born study more and are right to want more from life. The work is seasonal, often far from cities, with housing and transport problems that nobody solves in two lines. And the land has been left with an unfair reputation: that of being what you do when there is nothing else. Yet nobody dreams of being someone's last resort.

The result is already visible: between 2019 and 2023, almost 29,000 farms disappeared, mostly the smallest ones. Each with its own story and many with nobody to pass it on to.

We don't have the solution. We are a small company and we know perfectly well how big the problem is. But we have a very simple conviction: THE PEOPLE WHO WORK WITH US ARE WORTH MORE THAN WHAT THEY PRODUCE. And we try to make that clear day to day: we reward those who stand out every month; we have annual bonuses because, if a year goes well, it should be shared; we have health insurance; we have lunch together; we do team activities throughout the year.

Those who care deserve to be cared for.

After all, without people, there is no production. Without production, there is no product. And without hands, there is no plate.