A couple of Spanish farmers visited the Midwest in December on a “solidarity tour” with stops in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
Javier Fatás, a dryland grain farmer, and Luis Portillo, a dairy farmer and cheesemaker, came to discuss the wave of farmer protests across Europe against unfair prices and trade policies and to promote international solidarity and the importance of food sovereignty, or local control over basic means of sustenance.
Portillo, thirty-three, runs a dairy farm with a brother in the north of Spain, near Bilbao. He studied cheesemaking in France, and showed pictures of his beautiful farm, where his small herd of Swiss dairy cows grazes on a mountainside along with his sheep and where he makes giant wheels of cheese in a beautiful rustic farm building.
Fatás, sixty, grows alfalfa and other forage crops on the farm where he grew up in Cadrete helping his parents harvest grapes, oats, fruits, and vegetables. He remembers the massive protests of his youth, after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Farmers protesting industrialization, globalization, and low prices played an important role in the democratization of Spanish society.
Fatás and Portillo are members of the Spanish Coordinator of Farmers and Ranchers Organizations, or COAG, a national grassroots coalition of more than 150,000 farmers and ranchers that is a European member of La Vía Campesina, the largest umbrella organization for farmers, fishers, herders, and Indigenous peoples in the world.
At a dinner hosted by the Wisconsin-based Family Farm Defenders, the two Spaniards exchanged stories with local farmers about the existential struggles of rural people. Wisconsin farmers wanted to know if farmers in Spain were under pressure to grow their operations to stay in business, as U.S. farmers are, under the “get big or get out” model of agriculture that has decimated small, family farms in this country for decades.
No, the Spanish farmers replied. In Portillo’s region, the average dairy farm is still very small—about forty-seven cows. While industrial agriculture is on the rise in both Europe and the United States, in Spain and France, small farms and slow food are still revered.
On the flip side, when the Spanish farmers asked if U.S. farmers had been conducting massive protests of the sort that made headlines across Europe last year—with tractors blocking major highways and hundreds of thousands of marchers descending on cities like Madrid and other European capitals—the Wisconsin farmers shook their heads. There have been no massive protests in rural America over the economic crisis here—unless you count the election of Donald Trump.
Despite these differences, farmers in the United States and Europe are, in many ways, in the same boat. The feeling of abandonment and indifference from the government and a majority of urban and suburban voters is similar. So is the terrible calculus of moving from growing food for local and regional consumers to producing commodities traded on the global market.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Spanish farmers began holding protests at major supermarket chains, where the price of milk, at thirty cents per liter, had dropped below the thirty-eight cents per liter it cost to produce. The farmers demanded that the government enforce the law guaranteeing that major wholesale supermarket buyers pay fair prices.
That’s something Wisconsin dairy farmers, who have experienced year after year of low prices, can relate to. Even as consumers have felt pinched by inflated food prices since 2020, those prices did not translate into better pay for farmers, who also had to grapple with rising input costs.
In Spain, the blossoming of “farmer consciousness” has created a surge of hope, Portillo and Fatás said. Protests grew throughout the pandemic, with farmers marching while holding signs that said “Somos esenciales,” or “We are essential.”
“Schools closed, hospitals closed, but people still had food. They realized the importance of farmers,” Portillo said. “If food had been in the hands of big companies, the problem would have been much worse. Small, local farmers kept food available.”
He flipped through a slideshow of the tractor brigades and marches demanding better pay and respect for farmers. “We went out in the streets to give dignity to farmers,” he added.
Dairy farmers in Spain continue to go out of business at an alarming rate. Portillo’s region of the country was home to 13,000 dairy farms in 2004. By 2024, that number had dropped to 750.
But after the supermarket protests, prices increased from thirty cents per liter to sixty cents per liter, he said. And the farmers who protested met with the European Union’s agriculture commissioner, Spain’s agriculture secretary, and local government officials.
The protests that were triggered by low prices moved on to objections to European Union environmental rules that, the Spanish farmers said, didn’t take into consideration regional variations. Across Europe, farmers have objected that they should not have to shoulder the costs of European climate policies.
“The painful impacts of the climate crisis and globalization have left farmers in Europe marginalized and vulnerable to populist politicians, warn antiracism campaigners and academics,” The Guardian reported last November.
The article quotes Nick Lowles, the chief executive of the U.K. antiracist group Hope Not Hate, who said, “What we have seen . . . should serve as a warning sign to the political classes—the necessary rapid transition to a low carbon, sustainable economy has to be properly funded, planned, and equitable, and not done at the expense of working people.”
Far-right, populist groups have made gains with rural voters in Europe, just as they have in the United States. But that political dynamic is not set in stone.
Rural voters helped put U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders over the top in Wisconsin’s open presidential primary in 2016; then those same rural voters in Wisconsin turned around and helped elect Trump to his first and second terms in the White House.
Trump’s aggressive criticism of global trade deals, his focus on the suffering of working-class voters and farmers, and his pitch that he will remember the “forgotten men and women” of America resonated with rural voters. But like the anti-environmentalist, anti-immigrant, anti-government European far right, Republicans in the United States who are peddling resentment are short on actual policies that will help farmers.
Together with the Family Farm Defenders and other food sovereignty groups, the COAG farmers from Spain are fighting for a political vision that values sustainable farming and a human-scale economy. Those things are not, in fact, at odds, despite the dismissive observations of mainstream journalists and economists who view Europe’s agricultural policies as protectionist, sentimental, and out of all proportion with farmers’ mere 1 percent contribution to Europe’s gross domestic product.
Farmers in the United States get similar treatment from hardheaded analysts who view them as somehow out of date and minor players in the vast U.S. economy—forgetting that, whatever its value on the global market, food, together with breathable air and drinkable water, is priceless. Devaluing farmers helped drive the Democrats’ sweeping defeat in 2024. For decades, the party has overvalued upscale, suburban voters and devalued rural people. In 2024, the chickens finally came home to roost.
Across the globe, if progressives don’t start to stick up for the interests of rural people, the far right will happily move into that space.
As Portillo and Fatás prepared to return to Spain, they said 2025 would be another year of big protests.
“We don’t want promises; we want justice,” Fatás said.
They will begin the new year protesting Big Tech in agriculture and Europe’s free trade agreements with South America and New Zealand.
“We want young people to come back to the farm,” Fatás added.
Lately, Portillo said, “you can smell the fear” of government officials, “because of farmers’ consciousness of their power as people who give everyone their food.”