My childhood in the Canary Islands was spent in full connection with agriculture. At home, I have always grown papayas, strawberries, avocados, mangos, citrus fruits, and, of course, bananas from the Canary Islands. Farming was a fundamental income for the family and we all participated in it, either in the fields or preparing the boxes to take to the market. From a very young age, we learned quickly that we all had to work together for the common good. I remember that when it was time to harvest potatoes, we even missed school on some days. My family worked very hard so that my five sisters and I could have the education we wanted. I studied business in Madrid and extended my training with a specialized course in finance. I worked in several companies and finally got back into agriculture in 2009. At present, I am in charge of the financial part and I rely on my partner Paco Sánchez and his son (also Paco Sánchez) for the technical aspects of the cultivation. We form a good team as we have completely trust in each other. Paco has been working in the citrus fields all his life; as we say around here he was practically born under a lemon tree. The most beautiful thing is that he has managed to transmit his passion for agriculture to his son - the future is secured!

Doña Ana is a citrus project with the main farm of 174 hectares cultivated in the municipality of Pozo la Higuera on the border between Murcia and Almeria. We have other smaller plots but this is the flagship where the trees we offer for adoption will be. We are in a quite warm area but irrigated by the fresh sea breeze, as less than 20 km away we have the beaches of Águilas. This combination of high temperature and freshness allows us to make some progress in the ripening of the fruit without the tree suffering too much stress from excessive heat. The upper part of the farm, where the orange and tangerine trees are located, is a gently sloping hill. The main material of the substrate is slate and thanks to this there is not much growth of unwanted herbs. The trees are located in large ridges that allow the roots to have an optimal root development without being affected by excessive humidity. The lower part of the farm is a much sandier terrain where a lot of lettuce and vegetables used to be grown. Now we have different lemon trees planted with the aim of harvesting lemons in Doña Ana all year round, even in summer. We also have a small part dedicated to grapefruit which will soon start producing. The farm has been our property since 2017 and already in that year, we started the conversion to organic farming of the adult trees as well as the newly planted lemon trees. We always knew that we wanted to grow citrus fruit organically because we believe that technological development today makes it possible to greatly reduce the loss of yield that traditionally occurred when a crop was converted to organic. We had already been using biological control in other fields so the conversion to organic has been easier. We rely on a team of highly specialized agronomists and field personnel who are the key to making the project work. We work with the latest technology so that our trees do not lack anything and we use all the tools available to optimize the use of resources. We have irrigation sensors in all the farms that allow us to make optimal decisions about the irrigation of our plots. The water on our farm comes from three main sources: the Negratín reservoir, the Tajo-Segura water channel, and the Águilas desalination plant, a nearby site. We use mainly manure from nearby goat farms to fertilize the farm and we also allow the remains of pruning and residues from the cutting of the ground cover to be incorporated into the soil as organic matter.