La Finca del Medio was a family desire, to create a different way of life without depending on many things to live, to be able to produce our own food, a 20-year path not without difficulties, one of its members explained to Prensa Latina, Leydis Casimir.
When we moved to that settlement in 1993, he commented, one of the most pressing problems was the shortage of labor, since the family – currently with 11 members – at that time was made up of four people, two of them minors, being Casimiro the oldest and was only 12 years old.
That need, he said, raised the innovative and innate capacity of José Antonio Casimiro -father of the interviewee-, who designed a team for animal traction that replaces the work of 66 men in the field work and has the capacity to perform 28 tasks different farms.
This established a space to study and execute other empirical practices as a way to avoid losing more land on the farm, it is in this environment that the transformation process began.
THE CHANGE
It was 2005 when the Campesino a Campesino movement captured the members of La Finca del Medio as agroecological promoters, but they currently belong to other spaces such as Permaculture in Cuba, SlowFood International, the Biomas Cuba project, as well as various academic, national and international institutions. international, he listed.
Today, Finca del Medio stands out for the novelty of the tools it implements, including the hydraulic ram, the construction of barriers to protect the soil, the establishment of living fences, crop rotation and fallow areas.
To these are added the practices of production and use of natural fertilizers, reforestation with fruit trees, innovations in biodigesters, gravity irrigation mechanisms, bioconstructions and more, he continued.
An element of interest is the use of different renewable sources such as solar, wind and the biodigesters themselves, this allows the farm to supply itself with 95 percent of energy and free itself from the use of fossil fuels, which for the first time they enjoyed at seven years of living in the place, he recalled.
Along with the development of the farm, Casimiro studied at the university. She graduated from Economics and Law, she in both modalities she linked her personal experiences to research; but her studies go further, and she also holds the categories of Doctor in Agricultural Sciences in Cuba and Doctor in Agroecology awarded by a university in Colombia.
From 2001 to approximately 2018, he explained, Finca del Medio was the venue for a wide variety of events, congresses and trainings, however it is in that last year that they decided to incorporate rural tourism.
The idea was to add this modality as a complementary activity to generate income, from lodging and food and, in addition, radiate their knowledge, principles, values and ethics to other contexts.
Moreover, the essence of Finca del Medio underlies the initiative The idea of on the table, very well defined by José Antonio Casimiro.
“It is the root of a model of life where the family farm can boast the glory of leading to the maximum as a culture, the simplification of a set of small details that make the title of small farmers great,” he said.
“They can show the natural conception of food at the table, from the selection of the seed to its tasting. The idea on the table exposes new agricultural thinking that can be seen, smelled, touched and tasted like in an art gallery,” he added.
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