Finca La Noria is a family farm located in Buñuel (Navarra, Spain), right on the banks of the River Ebro and about fifteen kilometres from Tudela. I don't know where the name La Noria comes from and I've researched it many times. It was my great-grandmother Euphrasia who, in 1914, began to give shape to the farm by growing almond trees (which we still have) and converting it into an irrigated farm with water from the Imperial Canal of Aragon.
This farm covers 120 hectares and we grow about eighty different products, including fruits, vegetables, cereals, legumes and nuts. All the land is organically farmed with areas dedicated to flowers, a spring water reservoir, and ornamental trees along some paths. The farm is limited by a road and by the Imperial Canal of Aragon, and on the other side there are fields belonging to other farmers outside our family.
We've created an ecosystem on the farm that helps us secure the natural balance that crops need. We have three pollination stations with beehives, we take care of birds of prey with posts and nesting boxes, and we have shelters for insects and almost two kilometres of flower beds for them. We're currently creating protected islands as reservoirs for beneficial wildlife, based on native herbs and plants.
Ducks and other aquatic species frequent our reservoir, which is filled with crystal-clear water from a natural spring. We also have chickens and sheep, which in addition to giving us eggs, provide us with fertilisers and cut our waste production to zero by feeding on weeds, crop remains, and any substandard crops from the packaging room. We love to observe and select the best seeds from our favourite plants that we keep in our own seed bank for later use in the seedbed for next year's plantings. With all these actions, we base our management on the circular economy.
Our trademark BioTrailla was created when we became an organic farming company to distribute our products to homes, restaurants, shops and markets. But it's not just a brand, it's our lifestyle and our way of protecting the environment and nature. We use biodegradable materials, we make our own compost with manure and any substandard crops, we control the use of water through drip irrigation, we plant trees to repopulate the land and, in short, we treat nature as a living being.
One of the biggest difficulties in terms of crop management is the control of unwanted weeds. We do this through stubble cultivation, crop rotation, the use of chickens, and the application of mulch with a black biodegradable material similar to potato plastic, which has three functions: (i) to prevent the evaporation of irrigation water; (ii) to increase the temperature of the soil with the sun so that the plants grow better; and (iii) to prevent the germination of weeds so that they don't compete with our plants.