The cooperative Tierra y Libertad is made up of a group of food producers who strive every day to do things differently. It is not only about producing food, but also about nourishing. We want to nourish the people who consume our products, but we also want to nourish ourselves and our fields. At Tierra y Libertad, our mission is clear: to ensure that the farms and the people who live and work there can prosper in the long term, we must restore soil health, enhance biodiversity and establish fair prices.

Our beginnings as a group of farmers date back to 2013, although we didn’t officially become a cooperative until 2018. It all started when Rafa and Simon met in 2010 in the Sierra de Aracena y Picos de Aroche, in the province of Huelva, very close to Portugal. At that time, Rafa started selling his own olive oil, nuts and apples, and Simon produced and sold vegetables from an orchard in Fuenteheridos. They met at the Saturday markets, where they sold their produce.

Not long afterwards, Simon decided to travel to Belgium to start a new life and began to transport and sell Rafa and Begoña’s olive oil to Belgium and, soon after, Juan and César’s oranges. He started with a improvised shop in a garage. It was so successful that it gradually became a more stable business. Over time, as Simon got to know more and more producers in Belgium and also other projects such as Valdibella in Sicily, they developed a wholesale model for selling fruit and vegetables in Belgium and this whole process led to the creation of TheFoodHub cooperative in Leuven. Tierra y Libertad is part of TheFoodHub, which is still today the main client of our cooperative.

Since then, we have continued to meet new, exceptional people: both producers who want to contribute their knowledge and food to our organisation and consumers who are attracted to a model like ours and want to be part of it.

We are a very different cooperative to the traditional ones, as we are not tied to a specific geographical location. Cooperatives are usually based in a production area and sell what is brought to them by members in that area. Our group is made up of people and fields from almost all over Spain: we have cherries from Cáceres, oranges from Córdoba, olives from the Sierra de Aracena, kiwis from Santander, avocados and mangos from La Axarquía and Granada, lemons and grapefruit from the Guadalhorce Valley and nectarines and peaches from Zaragoza… to name but a few examples. What unites us is not the area in which we are based, but our way of understanding food production. This makes us even more diverse as a group, because we are many people from different origins, with different histories and rural environments, different climates and rainfall, different altitudes, different varieties, even soils from different origins.

We have two places where we collect food from our producers: Fuenteheridos (Huelva) and Valle del Guadalhorce (Málaga) and often, depending on the order and the client, we also deliver directly from other locations. In addition to our producers, without whom our cooperative would be meaningless, we have a fantastic team of workers who carry out our work from their office in Fuenteheridos: Martina, Rafa and Julia.

We want to make sure that the land we work on will be better in a few years’ time than it is today, and we also want to find the people who, by eating our food, demonstrate their willingness to take responsibility: to nurture our fields, improve our relationships and make all our lives healthier. And we hope that, together, we can make the world a better place. For the land and for the freedom, la tierra y la libertad.