Courses: Hunt, Rural development and Conservation of environment

Courses of hunt and conservation

Project on Rural development and Preservation of environment.

When I finished my Agricultural engineering studies in 1992, I decided to dedicate 2 years in developing an extense end of degree project. It consisted in an in depth bibliographic revision of all the literature on deer livestock farming written to that date. I consulted several bibliographies, magazines, abstracts and scientific articles written in English, French German and Italian. Finally, I performed an economic study with which I concluded that deer livestock in some areas was much more interesting and profitable than traditional livestock based in domestic species, as long as the price level of meat was over a certain amount that I established.

Trying to save livestock farming.

In spite of this, when I dedicated myself professionally to running “Los Claros” in 1992, I adopted a very conservative stance due to the economic situation (low price level of meat and low Common Agricultural Policy aid), and I chose to simply improve little by little what we had available. We selected the breeding races and uniformed our cow livestock, we eliminated the worst breeders and we kept the best “mothers and fathers”. We drained the livestock and finally, we adjusted it to the occupied surface and the rights of the breeding cows originating from the CAP aids that had been assigned to us. During 10 years, we tried everything; selling the lamb after being weaned, rebreed them up to 400kg and then selling them and fattening them until the end and them sell them. We even got to take them ourselves to the slaughterhouse and we sold living steers for other cattle ranches.
The price od meat remained stagnant and production costs continued to rise. At the same time, CAP aids were smaller every year and i was announced they would end in 2013. So, once 50% of aid was decoupled, in 2007 we decided to sell the whole cow cattle and dedicate the whole estate to game hunting.

Professionalizing a hunting preserve.

Until then, in the estate, we simultaneously worked in pig farming and hunting. But as of 1996, the estate was considered a place of industrial exploitation for the breeding and selling of living deer and mouflon, so we decided to decided to only perform this activity and dedicate the land previously used for cows to deer and mouflon breeding. In 2005, we directed a Bachelor´s thesis about mouflon livestock farming which established the premises for its development at “Los Claros”. Since then, we have continued working in order to make the estate self sustainable economically. Along these years, we have been able to contrast the pros and cons of the different administration methods, coming to some conclusions.

 

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