A new landscape is repeated over and over again by the towns of Spain. Where before, perhaps forever, there were vineyards, olive groves or cereals, now there are often pistachio trees. One in every 700 square kilometers of the Spanish surface is already covered by this Asian tree, an exotic species with long branches with leaves that turn red in autumn. The agricultural engineer José Francisco Couceiro, 65, is the main person responsible for Spain being filled with pistachio trees. “This mess was started by me”, he thinks when he walks through the field. The writer Ramón María del Valle-Inclán said that the landscape gives rise to the tongue of its inhabitants and that language is the collective soul of peoples. If it is true, the Spanish soul is changing.
In the shade of a huge pistachio tree on the outskirts of Ciudad Real, Couceiro remembers the day in 1987 when a car full of agronomists stopped at this very spot. He was 29 years old and had just planted this tree, in an experimental farm of the El Chaparrillo Agro-environmental Research Center. The driver rolled down the window and asked, “What are you planting here?” Pistachios, another of the passengers answered from inside. “What a bullshit!” the driver snapped with laughter, before resuming the march. Couceiro recalls the anecdote with a triumphant smile. In two months he will retire, leaving, according to his calculations, some 70,000 hectares planted in Spain under his impulse, an area that would fit all of Singapore. It is more than a boom: the hectares have multiplied almost by 16 in the last decade.
Couceiro, at that time a young man recently hired in El Chaparrillo, was commissioned in 1986 to look for alternatives to the traditional crops of Castilla-La Mancha. “The first year I was sending letters everywhere,” he recalls. The researcher shows a folder with the unusual answers that he obtained. They are missives arriving in Ciudad Real from Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. Couceiro, in basic English, asked unknown colleagues from countries with similar climates for information on crops. Sometimes, in addition to friendly written replies, he received pistachio buds wrapped in wet paper. “When the grafts worked, we would have a party,” he recalls.
For a decade he worked “in solitude and in silence” in this wasteland of Ciudad Real. “He was totally quixotic. I was alone for ten years, absolutely alone, here with the pistachio”, he relates. The engineer and his small team, after many failed experiments, came up with a magic formula: use the trunk of a native tree, the cornicabra, to graft on it the most successful varieties from Iran. Those Spanish trunks with Iranian branches can produce up to a ton of pistachios per hectare of dry land per year, an amount valued at around 6,000 euros at the price of the last harvest. They are unheard of profit margins.
When Couceiro started promoting the pistachio, farmers were very skeptical. The winegrower Ladislao López started working in The Chaparrillo in 1993 and recalls his amazement at seeing the engineer’s crops: “I thought he was crazy. I had never seen a pistachio in my life. In those early years, this public center of the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha decided to give away buds of the Iranian varieties of pistachio trees to anyone who wanted them. Many of the brave who took the leap were made of gold. Now, Couceiro laments, the public institution is in the background and a handful of large companies have taken the reins of the sector.
Investment funds have landed in agriculture. In the town of Malpica de Tajo in Toledo, the Portuguese company Treemond Holding, advised by investment bank GBS Finance, bought 1,000 hectares of vineyards from the Osborne Group two years ago to uproot the vines and plant pistachio trees. “Many footballers,” says Couceiro, are investing in this nut. One of them, Gabi Fernández, a former Atlético de Madrid player, he said it publicly. The Castilian-Manchego bank Globalcaja has been proclaiming for years that the pistachio is “the new green gold”.
However, Couceiro predicts a disaster. He continues to recommend the native cornicabra tree—also called quemaculo or emborrachacabras—as a trunk on which to graft Iranian pistachio branches. However, the large investment fund farms are copying the ultra-intensive model of California, where a tree with a cold name is used as a base, the UCB-1, named after the acronym of the American institution that created it through hybridization: the University of California at Berkeley. They are trees that grow a lot and very fast but, in the shallow Spanish soils, their roots spread out to the sides and compete with each other. “It’s like if we have a lemon slushy and we suck 10 people out of it. Imagine how much we play”, illustrates Couceiro. “Ambition is good. Greed is bad”, he sentences.
The researcher predicts “a massive start” in the next five or ten years, of a third or even half of the current 70,000 hectares. Many trees, he argues, have been poorly chosen or planted in unsuitable regions. Couceiro stresses that pistachio trees need very hot summers, cold winters and a very dry environment, as occurs in Castilla-La Mancha and inland Andalusia. “Humidity is poison for pistachios, but farmers are being told that pistachios can be placed anywhere,” warns the engineer, attached to the Castilla-La Mancha Regional Institute for Research and Development of Agro-Food and Forestry. “There are pistachio plantations even in Galicia and in El Bierzo!” exclaims Couceiro, who was born in the Leonese municipality of Cacabelos.
Pistachio trees are slow, taking about six years to produce their first major harvest, so planting errors are identified when it is already too late. It’s a time bomb. “The UCB-1 and the cornicabra are like a dinosaur and a cow. Who is going to die first? The dinosaur or the cow? The dinosaur, because it needs five or ten times more than the cow”, reasons Couceiro. California, with deeper soils, an optimal climate and heavy use of fertilizers and phytosanitary products, can more easily maintain these plant dinosaurs. Without enough food, however, these very vigorous trees produce closed pistachios. If the farmer makes a mistake, he realizes when he has already lost 10 years.
There was a scientist in Spain who opted for the pistachio even before Couceiro: the agricultural engineer Francis Vargas, who is now 77 years old and retired. Vargas planted the first pistachio tree in 1975 on a farm in Tarragona del Agrifood Research and Technology Institute of Catalonia. Vargas now remembers by phone that the first plantations were “a disaster” and his bosses soon decided to bet on almonds, with great success. The varieties of almond trees created by Vargas have sold in the millions. “In Castilla-La Mancha, Couceiro and his colleagues went after pistachios and they are the ones who have expanded it enormously,” applauds Vargas.
Sitting between towers and towers of papers in his laboratory, Couceiro talks wearily, two months after his retirement. “For me, on December 1 the pistachio is over forever. And when I say forever, it means forever. I don’t want to know anything more about the pistachio. I see that this is going to hell, ”he laments. At the end of the working day, Couceiro goes by car to pick up his wife, also an agricultural engineer Marina Rodríguez de Francisco, when she leaves work. Together they elaborated the chapter dedicated to cooking recipes in the monumental work pistachio cultivation (Mundi-Prensa, 2013), coordinated by Couceiro. The book, of more than 700 pages, teaches how to prepare pistachio salads, pistachio croquettes, spaghetti with pistachios, squid stuffed with pistachios, lamb casserole with pistachios, pistachio ice cream. “We spent four months eating pistachios,” recalls the engineer with a laugh.
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