They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Like Spain’s agricultural farms, which are finding no favour with the local youth. But, migrants escaping wars and strife in their own homelands, are now emerging as saviours for these dying jobs, helping revive them from the embers while seeking to rebuild their own lives.
In the village of Los Cortijos in Spain, with a meagre population of about 850 people, Osam Abdulmumen, 25, a migrant from Sudan, wakes up at 5 am each morning to look over a flock of 400 animals. His day starts with a Muslim prayer before he heads to the farm, staying there past sundown until all the sheep have been herded sheep back from pasture at the centuries-old farm.
Abdulmumen lives alone in Los Cortijos, where he is one of three Africans. Having left Sudan at 18, where a civil war has been raging, Abdulmumen doesn’t mind his life amidst the bells and bleats of the animals.
“I always wanted to work in my country, but there are too many problems,” he said inside his tidy, bare one-bedroom apartment in town, speaking in his limited Spanish. He left his homeland because of the violence, he said, and his family can’t do much right now.
“That’s why I want to buy them things. A house, too,” he said.
Earning about 1,300 euros (USD 1,510) a month, slightly above Spain’s minimum wage, he sends some money home once every couple of months. Besides learning Spanish and watching television, Abdulmumen plays soccer on weekends with people around his age who visit from a nearby city, but the lack of young people in town is challenging.
Without help from migrants like Abdulmumen, many livestock farms in Spain’s rural villages and towns would be forced to close down in another decade. Like Los Cortijos in the plains of Castile-La Mancha, hundreds of rural villages are coping with depopulation since the 1950s as Spaniards move to urban areas, abandoning jobs that have existed since biblical times.
As against about 60 per cent of the Spaniards living in urban areas in 1950, today, there are about 81 per cent country residents dwelling away from their homes, according to the Bank of Spain.
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Álvaro Esteban, a fifth-generation proprietor of the farm that Abdulmumen works on, is one of those who left Los Cortijos. Gone for eight years, he studied history at a nearby university, and then went to Wales, where he worked odd jobs before returning home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I didn’t see my future here,” said Esteban, 32.
“But due to life circumstances, I decided to come back and … being here made me say, well, maybe there is a future,” he added.
Esteban took a shepherding course after returning home, the same that Abdulmumen took upon arriving in Spain. He has since modernised his family’s farm, working alongside his 61-year-old father and Abdulmumen, and using drones to monitor the animals and pastures. He also makes cheese that he later sells at markets and to restaurants.
Farmers and other agricultural laborers represent less than 4 per cent of Spain’s working population, even as the country is one of Europe’s leading agricultural producers.
To fill the widening gap in joblessness in the rural hinterlands, the government there has floated programmes to train arrivals like Abdulmumen, and many others from countries in Africa, and from Venezuela and Afghanistan.
The new shepherds begin their training in a bare classroom in a shepherding school in Toledo, just outside the fortressed medieval city of Toledo, where, on a recent morning, nearly two dozen migrants learned about coaxing flocks of sheep, handling them and guiding suction cups onto their teats.
To students speaking broken Spanish, the fundamentals are taught over five days – covering just enough basics that enables them to be matched with a farm through organisations including the International Red Cross, which connect them to programme coordinators.
Since 2022, about 460 students, most of them migrants, have gone through the training, which is funded by the regional government, according to programme coordinator, Pedro Luna. Besides the 51 graduates now employed as shepherds, another 15 work at slaughterhouses, he said, while others found jobs on olive and other fruit farms.
Sharifa Issah, a 27-year-old migrant from Ghana, said she wanted to train to work with sheep because she had tended to animals back home.
“I’m happy with animals,” Issah said.
Many students are asylum-seekers, like Abdulmumen, who is from the Sudanese region of Darfur, and travelled through Egypt, where he worked in construction, to then move between Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt again before finally crossing into Ceuta – the Spanish enclave on Morocco’s northern coast – where he applied for asylum.
But, life remains lonely for migrants like Abdulmumen. About once every month, sometimes two, he calls his family in Sudan, but cell service can be spotty in villages. He last saw them seven years ago.
“That’s the only difficult part,” he said, a small prayer mat beside him on the floor. He plans to look for another job, but not now.
“I like this job, it’s more calm and the town is, too. I like living here in the town,” he said.
Esteban, and other farm owners like him, depend heavily on help from migrants like Abdulmumen, whose work helps produce central Spain’s prized sheep’s milk cheese.
“Very few young people want to work rural jobs. Even fewer have the know-how,” said Esteban about the “hard-hit sector”.
“Most of the businesses that exist right now won’t have anyone to take over, because the children don’t want to follow in their parents’ footsteps,” he added.
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