On 31 May, the LIFE Maronesa team was invited to take part in the 10th Spring Meeting of the Galician Society of Pastures and Forages, in Pedrafita do Cebreiro, on the theme of “The Mountain Meadows: Life, Landscape and Culture”. Representing the project team was technician Marco Fernandes from AguiarFloresta.
Like the title and theme of the society’s meeting, the technician gave a presentation entitled “The mountain meadows of Northern Portugal: Challenges for their conservation”. The first part of the session was an introduction to the fertility and lithology of the mountain soils in the north of the country, how these lands were managed in the past, their current management and the main promoters of these changes, both in the marginal grazing areas and in the mountain meadows used to produce forage for the winter.
Some of the theoretical and empirical bases for the productivity and biological diversity of grazing lands, such as the Intermediate Disturbance and the Humpback Model, were introduced, as well as the main reasons for the decline in the use and conservation of mountain meadows, such as the Pinus pinaster plantations carried out during the dictatorship period. Some historical and current inventories assessing floristic quality were presented, as well as current trends towards impoverishment and loss of productivity.
At the end, the work carried out by the LIFE Maronesa Project on the private areas of the project’s farmers’ hay meadows was shared, along with the best practices resulting from almost 5 years of collaboration between the farmers and the 4 project partners, as well as the verifiable results of the increase in their protein quality, the covering of legumes and Holcus lanatus.
The mountain meadows are an impressive piece of ancient engineering, combining fertilisation techniques and hydraulic engineering, passed down from generation to generation through the culture of agricultural practices in the regions of Galicia and the mountains of northern Portugal.
